An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: VMware by Broadcom will deliver a significant update to its flagship Cloud Foundation bundle in the middle of this year and follow it up with a major update early in 2025. Both releases will show off Broadcom's plan to make the package easier to implement and operate, and hopefully assuage customer concerns about price rises. More on that later. First, the updates. One release is currently scheduled to debut in July, according to Paul Turner, vice-president of product management and the leader of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) team. The release will allow use of a single license key for all the components of Cloud Foundation, improve OAuth support as a step towards single sign-on across the VMware range, and add an NSX overlay that will allow implementation of software-defined networks without requiring IP address changes. Turner explained those features as exemplifying the sort of simplification VMware by Broadcom thinks is needed to make Cloud Foundation easier to implement. A bigger release Turner hopes will debut in early 2025 -- though he would commit to only a H1 launch -- will be a "unified" release in which more of VCF is better integrated. Today, Turner admitted, VMware customers may have implemented vSphere and the Aria management suite, but might still need or choose discrete storage for each. Future VCF releases will increasingly unify the products so that silos aren't needed. Prashanth Shenoy, vice president for VMware by Broadcom's cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions marketing, told The Register the release will be called VCF 9 and will represent "the fullest expression of Broadcom's vision for product integration." "When customers deploy VCF there are seams -- when they deploy networking and storage, they feel like they do not have a unified developer or operator experience," Shenoy admitted. VCF 9 will tidy that sort of thing up and make the process "seamless." Buyers can also expect improved log file analysis, the ability to acquire templates from a marketplace and adopt them as PaaS, and plenty more. Turner and Shenoy told The Register that the two releases are hoped to make VCF adoption easier, and by doing so demonstrate the value of the bundle. Today, they argue, would-be hybrid cloud adopters using VCF are in reality integrating siloed products -- which doesn't prove the value of the vStack well. VCF 9's planned integrations, they argue, should demonstrate the power of the stack and the wisdom of Broadcom's decision to create a VMware unit dedicated to VCF. That team, they explained, means developers for each of the bundle's components work together on a unified experience, rather than to create their own product. It may also demonstrate the value of VMware by Broadcom's new licenses – which some users have complained are considerably more expensive now that subscriptions are required, and products are only sold in bundles. Sylvain Cazard, president of Broadcom Software for Asia-Pacific, told The Register that complaints about higher prices are unwarranted since customers using at least two components of VMware's flagship Cloud Foundation will end up paying less. He also noted that the new pricing includes support, which VMware didn't include previously.

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Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Firmware security firm Binarly has released a free online scanner to detect Linux executables impacted by the XZ Utils supply chain attack, tracked as CVE-2024-3094. CVE-2024-3094 is a supply chain compromise in XZ Utils, a set of data compression tools and libraries used in many major Linux distributions. Late last month, Microsoft engineer Andres Freud discovered the backdoor in the latest version of the XZ Utils package while investigating unusually slow SSH logins on Debian Sid, a rolling release of the Linux distribution. The backdoor was introduced by a pseudonymous contributor to XZ version 5.6.0, which remained present in 5.6.1. However, only a few Linux distributions and versions following a "bleeding edge" upgrading approach were impacted, with most using an earlier, safe library version. Following the discovery of the backdoor, a detection and remediation effort was started, with CISA proposing downgrading the XZ Utils 5.4.6 Stable and hunting for and reporting any malicious activity. Binarly says the approach taken so far in the threat mitigation efforts relies on simple checks such as byte string matching, file hash blocklisting, and YARA rules, which could lead to false positives. This approach can trigger significant alert fatigue and doesn't help detect similar backdoors on other projects. To address this problem, Binarly developed a dedicated scanner that would work for the particular library and any file carrying the same backdoor. [...] Binarly's scanner increases detection as it scans for various supply chain points beyond just the XZ Utils project, and the results are of much higher confidence. Binarly has made a free API available to accomodate bulk scans, too.

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Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the AI news app from Instagram's co-founders that failed to make it big on its own. The Verge reports: The two sides declined to share the cost of the acquisition, but both made clear Yahoo is acquiring Artifact's tech rather than its team. Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, Artifact's co-founders, will be "special advisors" for Yahoo but won't be joining the company. Artifact's remaining five employees have either gotten other jobs or are planning to take some time off. The acquisition comes a bit more than a year after Artifact's launch and about three months after Systrom and Krieger announced its death. [...] Artifact, the app, will go away once the acquisition is complete. But Artifact's underlying tech for categorizing, curating, and personalizing content will soon start to show up on Yahoo News -- and eventually on other Yahoo platforms, too. "You'll see that stuff flowing into our products in the coming months," says Downs Mulder. It sounds like there's also a good chance that Yahoo's apps might get a bit of Artifact's speed and polish over time, too. Both Systrom and Downs Mulder say the integration will take time, that you can't just drop an Artifact algorithm into Yahoo News and call it a day. But they see a possibility to get everybody into the future a little faster. Yahoo can develop a personalized content ecosystem, the "TikTok for text" that was so alluring to Artifact users. And Artifact can power a news service of the future.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will vote to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules and assume new regulatory oversight of broadband internet that was rescinded under former President Donald Trump, the agency's chair said. The FCC told advocates on Tuesday of the plan to vote on the final rule at its April 25 meeting. The commission voted 3-2 in October on the proposal to reinstate open internet rules adopted in 2015 and re-establish the commission's authority over broadband internet. Net neutrality refers to the principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites. FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel confirmed the planned commission vote in an interview with Reuters. "The pandemic made clear that broadband is an essential service, that every one of us -- no matter who we are or where we live -- needs it to have a fair shot at success in the digital age," she said. "An essential service requires oversight and in this case we are just putting back in place the rules that have already been court-approved that ensures that broadband access is fast, open and fair."

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President Joe Biden has become the first sitting U.S. president to post on a decentralized networking protocol. As reported by The Verge, President Biden's Threads account "has begun using Meta's ActivityPub integration," which allows for content, data, and followers to be ported between networks -- the basis that makes up the "fediverse." From the report: The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan. Biden may not be able to see replies and follows as they pour in from the fediverse -- and with some servers blocking connections to Meta, not everyone there will be able to see his posts -- as those features weren't part of Threads' integration when it opened up beta testing last month. But his posts are available, and he'll see likes coming in from there. Or whoever is running the Presidential Threads account will, anyway.

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Bitcoin fell more than 4.76% on Tuesday to $66,134 amid rising Treasury yields and strength in the U.S. dollar. CNBC reports: On Monday morning, it was trading at about $70,000 before data came out showing growth in the manufacturing sector for the first time since September 2022 and investor bets on June rate cuts began to cool. Bitcoin is now off its all-time high, reached on March 14, by about 11%. Ether went down with it, losing 5.6% to trade at $3,240.27. Meanwhile, the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield hit its highest level of the year and the dollar, which has an inverse relationship with bitcoin, hit a five-month high. Bitcoin's move may have been exacerbated by a large bitcoin holder, or "whale," who transferred more than 4,000 bitcoin to the Bitfinex exchange late Monday night. Data from CryptoQuant shows a spike in that exchange's reserves -- which typically signals a boost in selling activity -- that coincides with the sudden drop in bitcoin price late Monday night. Stocks tied to the performance of bitcoin were dragged down but traded off their lows to end the day.

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Sara Fischer reports via Axios: Jon Stewart on Monday told Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan that Apple wouldn't let him interview her for a podcast. "I wanted to have you on a podcast and Apple asked us not to do it," "The Daily Show" host said to Khan, in reference to his former podcast that was an extension of his Apple TV+ comedy show "The Problem With Jon Stewart." "They literally said 'please don't talk to her,' having nothing to do with what you do for a living. I think they just... I didn't think they cared for you is what happened," he added during his conversation with Khan. "They wouldn't let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act on AI. Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?" Stewart returned to "The Daily Show" in February after leaving in 2015 as its executive producer and host on Monday evenings through the 2024 election cycle. Stewart's Apple TV+ show ended late last year after Stewart and Apple executives parted ways over creative differences, including the comedian's desire to cover topics such as China and AI, the New York Times reported.

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Intel on Tuesday disclosed $7 billion in operating losses for its foundry business in 2023, "a steeper loss than the $5.2 billion in operating losses the year before," reports Reuters. "The unit had revenue of $18.9 billion for 2023, down 31% from $63.05 billion the year before." From the report: Intel shares were down 4.3% after the documents were filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). During a presentation for investors, Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said that 2024 would be the year of worst operating losses for the company's chipmaking business and that it expects to break even on an operating basis by about 2027. Gelsinger said the foundry business was weighed down by bad decisions, including one years ago against using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines from Dutch firm ASML. While those machines can cost more than $150 million, they are more cost-effective than earlier chip making tools. Partially as a result of the missteps, Intel has outsourced about 30% of the total number of wafers to external contract manufacturers such as TSMC, Gelsinger said. It aims to bring that number down to roughly 20%. Intel has now switched over to using EUV tools, which will cover more and more production needs as older machines are phased out. "In the post EUV era, we see that we're very competitive now on price, performance (and) back to leadership," Gelsinger said. "And in the pre-EUV era we carried a lot of costs and (were) uncompetitive."

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An anonymous reader quotes an opinion piece from the Washington Post, published by the Editorial Board: A just-published investigation by Russian, American and German journalists has unearthed startling new information about the so-called Havana syndrome, or "Anomalous Health Incidents," as the government calls the unexplained bouts of painful disorientation that U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers have suffered in recent years. The new information suggests but does not prove that Russia's military intelligence agency is responsible. Earlier, agencies in the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that "it is very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible." They need to look again. [...] [T]he new investigation by the Insider, a Russian investigative news outlet, in collaboration with CBS's "60 Minutes" and Germany's Der Spiegel, paints a different picture. It identifies the possible culprit as Unit 29155, a "notorious assassination and sabotage squad" of the GRU, Moscow's military intelligence service. Senior members of the unit received "awards and political promotions for work related to the development of 'non-lethal acoustic weapons'" -- a term used in the Russian military-scientific literature to describe both sound- and radiofrequency-based directed energy devices. The investigation found documentary evidence that Unit 29155 "has been experimenting with exactly the kind of weaponized technology" experts suggest is a plausible cause. Moreover, the Insider reported, geolocation data shows that operators attached to Unit 29155, traveling undercover, were present in places where Havana syndrome struck, just before the incidents took place. Even more concerning, the investigation found that a commonality among the Americans targeted was their work history on Russia issues. This included CIA officers who were helping Ukraine build up its intelligence capabilities in the years before Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. One veteran of the CIA Kyiv station was named the new chief of station in Vietnam and was hit there. A second veteran of the CIA in Ukraine was hit in his apartment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Both these intelligence officers had to be medevaced and were treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The wife of a third CIA officer who had served in Kyiv was hit in London. "Of all the cases" examined by the news organizations, they said, "the most well-documented involve U.S. intelligence and diplomatic personnel with subject matter expertise in Russia or operational experience in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine," both of which were the scene of popular pro-Western uprisings in the past two decades. The news organizations point out that Russian President Vladimir Putin has often blamed these "color revolutions" on the CIA and the State Department. They conclude, "Putin would have every interest in neutralizing scores of U.S. intelligence officers he deemed responsible for his loss of the former satellites." The Editorial Board is advocating for a thorough and aggressive investigation by the U.S. intelligence community that "takes into account all aspects of the incidents." "If the incidents are a deliberate attack, the perpetrator must be identified and held to account. Along with sending a message to those who might harm American personnel, the United States needs to show all those who might join the diplomatic and intelligence services that the government will protect them abroad and at home from foreign adversaries, no matter what."

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artmancc writes: The White House has directed NASA and other federal agencies to get to work on a plan to implement precision timekeeping and dissemination on the moon and elsewhere in space. Reuters cited a memo from the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that "instructed the space agency to work with other parts of the U.S. government to devise a plan by the end of 2026 for setting what it called a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC). The name of the proposed time standard is similar to the terrestrial time standard known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). "OSTP chief Arati Prabhakar's memo said that for a person on the moon, an Earth-based clock would appear to lose on average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day and come with other periodic variations that would further drift moon time from Earth time," Reuters reported. An unidentified OSTP official said the lunar time standard is needed for secure and synchronized communication between astronauts, satellites orbiting the moon, and Earth.

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The UK and US have signed a landmark deal to work together on testing advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and develop "robust" safety methods for AI tools and their underlying systems. "It is the first bilateral agreement of its kind," reports the BBC. From the report: UK tech minister Michelle Donelan said it is "the defining technology challenge of our generation." "We have always been clear that ensuring the safe development of AI is a shared global issue," she said. "Only by working together can we address the technology's risks head on and harness its enormous potential to help us all live easier and healthier lives." The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology added that the agreement builds upon commitments made at the AI Safety Summit held in Bletchley Park in November 2023. The event, attended by AI bosses including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and tech billionaire Elon Musk, saw both the UK and US create AI Safety Institutes which aim to evaluate open and closed-source AI systems. [...] Gina Raimondo, the US commerce secretary, said the agreement will give the governments a better understanding of AI systems, which will allow them to give better guidance. "It will accelerate both of our Institutes' work across the full spectrum of risks, whether to our national security or to our broader society," she said. "Our partnership makes clear that we aren't running away from these concerns - we're running at them."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Jackson County, Missouri, has declared a state of emergency and closed key offices indefinitely as it responds to what officials believe is a ransomware attack that has made some of its IT systems inoperable. "Jackson County has identified significant disruptions within its IT systems, potentially attributable to a ransomware attack," officials wrote Tuesday. "Early indications suggest operational inconsistencies across its digital infrastructure and certain systems have been rendered inoperative while others continue to function as normal." The systems confirmed inoperable include tax and online property payments, issuance of marriage licenses, and inmate searches. In response, the Assessment, Collection and Recorder of Deeds offices at all county locations are closed until further notice. The closure occurred the same day that the county was holding a special election to vote on a proposed sales tax to fund a stadium for MLB's Kansas City Royals and the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs. Neither the Jackson County Board of Elections nor the Kansas City Board of Elections have been affected by the attack; both remain open. The Jackson County website says there are 654,000 residents in the 607-square-mile county, which includes most of Kansas City, the biggest city in Missouri. The response to the attack and the investigation into it have just begun, but so far, officials said they had no evidence that data had been compromised. Jackson County Executive Frank White, Jr. has issued (PDF) an executive order declaring a state of emergency. The County has notified law enforcement and retained IT security contractors to help investigate and remediate the attack. "The potential significant budgetary impact of this incident may require appropriations from the County's emergency fund and, if these funds are found to be insufficient, the enactment of additional budgetary adjustments or cuts," White wrote. "It is directed that all county staff are to take whatever steps are necessary to protect resident data, county assets, and continue essential services, thereby mitigating the impact of this potential ransomware attack."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The George Carlin estate has settled its lawsuit with Dudesy, the podcast that purportedly used a "comedy AI" to produce an hour-long stand-up special in the style and voice of the late comedian. Dudesy's "George Carlin: Dead and Loving It" special, which was first uploaded in early January, gained hundreds of thousands of views and plenty of media attention for its presentation as a creation of an AI that had "listened to all of George Carlin's material... to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today." But even before the Carlin estate lawsuit was filed, there were numerous signs that the special was not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail in a feature report. Shortly after the Carlin estate filed its lawsuit against Dudesy in late January, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso told The New York Times that the special had actually been "completely written by [Dudesy co-host] Chad Kultgen." Regardless of the special's actual authorship, though, the lawsuit also took Dudesy to task for "capitaliz[ing] on the name, reputation, and likeness of George Carlin in creating, promoting, and distributing the Dudesy Special and using generated images of Carlin, Carlin's voice, and images designed to evoke Carlin's presence on a stage." The resulting "association" between the real Carlin and this ersatz version put Dudesy in potential legal jeopardy, even if the contentious and unsettled copyright issues regarding AI training and authorship weren't in play. Court documents note that shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Dudesy had already "taken reasonable steps" to remove the special and any mention of Carlin from all of Dudesy's online accounts. The settlement restrains the Dudesy podcast (and those associated with it) from re-uploading the special anywhere and from "using George Carlin's image, voice, or likeness" in any content posted anywhere on the Internet. Archived copies of the special are still available on the Internet if you know where to look. While the settlement notes that those reposts are also in "violat[ion] of this order," Dudesy will not be held liable for any reuploads made by unrelated third parties.

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A new ChromeOS update (M123) is rolling out that brings keyboard shortcuts and mouse buttons and enables hotspot connections on cellular Chromebooks. The Verge reports: The keyboard shortcut feature will work like it does in other operating systems, in which you can assign specific actions to specific key combinations. Google uses the examples of tweaking shortcuts to be easier to carry out one-handed or making them resemble those you're used to in, say, macOS. The same goes for mouse button customizing -- if your mouse has extra buttons besides just left and right clicks, and you want to turn that weird side button into a mute button, you can do that in ChromeOS with this update. The company also added per-app language preferences for Android apps that you're running in ChromeOS, and it says it has made its offline text-to-speech voices more natural-sounding. As is Google's way, these updates will be rolling out over the next few days.

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As reported by Bloomberg (paywalled), Apple is exploring the development of personal home robots following the shut down of its electric vehicle project. CNBC reports: Engineers at Apple have been looking into a robot that can follow users around their homes and a tabletop device that uses robotics to adjust a display screen, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the research team. [...] Apple's hardware engineering division and its artificial intelligence and machine learning group are overseeing the work on personal robotics, Bloomberg reported. The home robot project is still in the early research and development phase, according to the report.

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An anonymous reader writes: The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI's popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque's downfall -- because he couldn't find a way to pay for them. According to an extensive expose citing company documents and dozens of persons familiar with the matter, it's indicated that the British model builder's extreme infrastructure costs drained its coffers, leaving the biz with just $4 million in reserve by last October. Stability rented its infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and GPU-centric cloud operator CoreWeave, at a reported cost of around $99 million a year. That's on top of the $54 million in wages and operating expenses required to keep the AI upstart afloat. What's more, it appears that a sizable portion of the cloudy resources Stability AI paid for were being given away to anyone outside the startup interested in experimenting with Stability's models. One external researcher cited in the report estimated that a now-cancelled project was provided with at least $2.5 million worth of compute over the span of four months. Stability AI's infrastructure spending was not matched by revenue or fresh funding. The startup was projected to make just $11 million in sales for the 2023 calendar year. Its financials were apparently so bad that it allegedly underpaid its July 2023 bills to AWS by $1 million and had no intention of paying its August bill for $7 million. Google Cloud and CoreWeave were also not paid in full, with debts to the pair reaching $1.6 million as of October, it's reported. It's not clear whether those bills were ultimately paid, but it's reported that the company -- once valued at a billion dollars -- weighed delaying tax payments to the UK government rather than skimping on its American payroll and risking legal penalties. The failing was pinned on Mostaque's inability to devise and execute a viable business plan. The company also failed to land deals with clients including Canva, NightCafe, Tome, and the Singaporean government, which contemplated a custom model, the report asserts. Stability's financial predicament spiraled, eroding trust among investors, making it difficult for the generative AI darling to raise additional capital, it is claimed. According to the report, Mostaque hoped to bring in a $95 million lifeline at the end of last year, but only managed to bring in $50 million from Intel. Only $20 million of that sum was disbursed, a significant shortfall given that the processor titan has a vested interest in Stability, with the AI biz slated to be a key customer for a supercomputer powered by 4,000 of its Gaudi2 accelerators. The report goes on to mention further fundraising challenges, issues retaining employees, and copyright infringement lawsuits challenging the company's future prospects. The full expose can be read via Forbes (paywalled).

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Paid ChatGPT users can now edit AI-generated images using text prompts from within ChatGPT. Axios reports: In a demo shared on X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI showed off the new capability, using it to add bows to a poodle's ears in an image created by DALL-E. DALL-E will also begin letting people choose the aspect ratio of the desired image as well as to add styles, such as "motion blur" or "solarpunk."

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Jessica Lyons reports via The Register: The FCC appears to finally be stepping up efforts to secure decades-old flaws in American telephone networks that are allegedly being used by foreign governments and surveillance outfits to remotely spy on and monitor wireless devices. At issue are the Signaling System Number 7 (SS7) and Diameter protocols, which are used by fixed and mobile network operators to enable interconnection between networks. They are part of the glue that holds today's telecommunications together. According to the US watchdog and some lawmakers, both protocols include security weaknesses that leave folks vulnerable to unwanted snooping. SS7's problems have been known about for years and years, as far back as at least 2008, and we wrote about them in 2010 and 2014, for instance. Little has been done to address these exploitable shortcomings. SS7, which was developed in the mid-1970s, can be potentially abused to track people's phones' locations; redirect calls and text messages so that info can be intercepted; and spy on users. The Diameter protocol was developed in the late-1990s and includes support for network access and IP mobility in local and roaming calls and messages. It does not, however, encrypt originating IP addresses during transport, which makes it easier for miscreants to carry out network spoofing attacks. "As coverage expands, and more networks and participants are introduced, the opportunity for a bad actor to exploit SS7 and Diameter has increased," according to the FCC [PDF]. On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from being misused to track consumers' locations. The FCC has also asked carriers to detail any exploits of the protocols since 2018. The regulator wants to know the date(s) of the incident(s), what happened, which vulnerabilities were exploited and with which techniques, where the location tracking occurred, and -- if known -- the attacker's identity. This time frame is significant because in 2018, the Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council (CSRIC), a federal advisory committee to the FCC, issued several security best practices to prevent network intrusions and unauthorized location tracking. Interested parties have until April 26 to submit comments, and then the FCC has a month to respond.

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An anonymous reader writes: The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI's popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque's downfall -- because he couldn't find a way to pay for them. According to an extensive expose citing company documents and dozens of persons familiar with the matter, it's indicated that the British model builder's extreme infrastructure costs drained its coffers, leaving the biz with just $4 million in reserve by last October. Stability rented its infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and GPU-centric cloud operator CoreWeave, at a reported cost of around $99 million a year. That's on top of the $54 million in wages and operating expenses required to keep the AI upstart afloat. What's more, it appears that a sizable portion of the cloudy resources Stability AI paid for were being given away to anyone outside the startup interested in experimenting with Stability's models. One external researcher cited in the report estimated that a now-cancelled project was provided with at least $2.5 million worth of compute over the span of four months. Stability AI's infrastructure spending was not matched by revenue or fresh funding. The startup was projected to make just $11 million in sales for the 2023 calendar year. Its financials were apparently so bad that it allegedly underpaid its July 2023 bills to AWS by $1 million and had no intention of paying its August bill for $7 million. Google Cloud and CoreWeave were also not paid in full, with debts to the pair reaching $1.6 million as of October, it's reported. It's not clear whether those bills were ultimately paid, but it's reported that the company -- once valued at a billion dollars -- weighed delaying tax payments to the UK government rather than skimping on its American payroll and risking legal penalties. The failing was pinned on Mostaque's inability to devise and execute a viable business plan. The company also failed to land deals with clients including Canva, NightCafe, Tome, and the Singaporean government, which contemplated a custom model, the report asserts. Stability's financial predicament spiraled, eroding trust among investors, making it difficult for the generative AI darling to raise additional capital, it is claimed. According to the report, Mostaque hoped to bring in a $95 million lifeline at the end of last year, but only managed to bring in $50 million from Intel. Only $20 million of that sum was disbursed, a significant shortfall given that the processor titan has a vested interest in Stability, with the AI biz slated to be a key customer for a supercomputer powered by 4,000 of its Gaudi2 accelerators. The report goes on to mention further fundraising challenges, issues retaining employees, and copyright infringement lawsuits challenging the company's future prospects. The full expose can be read via Forbes (paywalled).

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