Intel is laying off more than 5,000 employees across four states, according to updated Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings. From a report: Most of the cuts are happening in California and Oregon. Intel more than doubled its layoff estimates for Santa Clara and Folsom to a total of 1,935 affected employees, according to California WARN filings. The cuts began taking place in Folsom on July 11, and in Santa Clara on July 15.

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The abstract of a paper featured on NBER: Most U.S. innovation output originates from firms that operate R&D facilities across multiple local markets. We study how this geographic structure influences aggregate innovation and growth, and whether it is socially optimal. First, we develop an endogenous growth model featuring multi-market innovative firms that generate knowledge spillovers to geographically proximate firms. In equilibrium, firms may operate in too few or too many local markets, depending on how sensitive are the local spillovers they generate to their local size. Second, to quantify these effects, we link the model to data on firms' R&D locations, patents, and citation networks. Using an event-study design, we show that firms' spatial expansion increases spillovers to other firms and estimate how these spillovers depend on a firm's local footprint. Our estimates imply that U.S. innovative firms operate in too few markets relative to the social optimum. Third, using quantitative counterfactuals, we find that policies promoting broader spatial scope yield larger welfare gains than standard R&D subsidies. Moreover, unlike R&D subsidies, such policies can also reduce regional inequality.

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VMware has notified partners that its current channel program will end, replacing it with an invitation-only system that significantly reduces the number of authorized partners. Partners not invited to the new VMware Cloud Service Provider program would have received non-renewal notices on July 15, 2025, and can continue transactions only until October 31, 2025, after which they may service existing contracts through their current terms. The company is also ending its White Label program on October 31, 2025. The changes mark the second major partner program overhaul in 18 months, following Broadcom's January 2024 decision to terminate partners operating VMware-powered clouds with fewer than 3,500 processor cores.

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BrianFagioli writes: Meta has partnered with Amrize and the University of Illinois to develop an "AI-optimized" concrete mix that cuts carbon by 35% for its new data center.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google will now let everyone in the US call local businesses using AI. The feature, which is now available in Search, allows you to use AI for pricing or availability information without having to talk on the phone. Google first started testing this feature in January, and it's still only available for certain kinds of businesses, like pet groomers, dry cleaners, and auto shops. When you search for one of these services, like a pet groomer, Google will display a new "have AI check pricing" prompt beneath the business listing.

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Amazon.com marked its 30th anniversary Wednesday, three decades after Jeff Bezos launched the company as an online bookstore promising "one million titles" from Seattle. The e-commerce giant began in 1995 with Bezos, his then-wife MacKenzie Scott, and seven employees. The company now employs 1.5 million people and carries a market capitalization exceeding $2 trillion. Amazon has expanded from books into groceries through its $13.7 billion Whole Foods acquisition, cloud computing via Amazon Web Services, and entertainment with Prime Video.

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WeTransfer has reversed controversial terms of service changes after users protested language suggesting uploaded files could be used to "improve machine learning models." The file-sharing service, popular among creative professionals and used by 80 million users across 190 countries, clarified that user content had never been used to train AI models and removed all references to machine learning from its updated terms. Creative users including voice actors, filmmakers, and journalists had threatened to cancel subscriptions over the changes.

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Digital tokens designed to track popular stocks have suffered extreme price deviations since launching two weeks ago, with an Amazon-tracking token briefly spiking to more than 100 times the underlying stock's closing price. The token AMZNX hit $23,781.22 on crypto trading platform Jupiter on July 3, while Amazon shares had closed the previous day around $200. A similar Apple-tracking token jumped to $236.72 on July 3, representing a 12% premium to the actual stock price. Companies including Robinhood, Kraken, Gemini and Bybit launched these blockchain-based versions of U.S. stocks in late June for non-U.S. customers. Robinhood is facing scrutiny from Lithuania's central bank after launching tokens tied to OpenAI and SpaceX without permission from either company, prompting OpenAI to disavow the tokens on social media.

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Seagate has released its first heat-assisted magnetic recording hard drives for individual buyers, marking the commercial debut of technology the company has developed for more than two decades. The 30TB IronWolf Pro and Exos M drives cost $600, while 28TB models are priced at $570. The drives use HAMR technology, which uses tiny lasers to heat and expand drive platter sections within nanoseconds to write data at higher densities. Seagate announced delivery of HAMR drives up to 36TB to datacenter customers in late 2024. The consumer models use conventional magnetic recording technology and are built on Seagate's Mosaic 3+ platform, achieving areal densities of 3TB per disk. Western Digital plans to release its first HAMR drives in 2027, though it has reached 32TB capacity using shingled magnetic recording. Toshiba will sample HAMR drives for testing in 2025 but has not announced public availability dates.

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Airbus's Silicon Valley innovation center Acubed and Google spinout SandboxAQ have successfully tested a quantum-sensing navigation device as an alternative to GPS during 150 hours of flights across the continental United States. The toaster-sized MagNav device uses quantum physics to measure unique magnetic signatures in Earth's crust [non-paywalled, syndicated link], with an AI algorithm matching those signatures to exact locations. The technology achieved Federal Aviation Administration requirements by pinpointing aircraft location within two nautical miles 100% of the time and within 550 meters 64% of the time. SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary called it "the first novel absolute navigation system to our knowledge in the last 50 years." The analog system cannot be jammed or spoofed like GPS, which faces increasing tampering in the Middle East and around Ukraine and Russia.

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America's largest corporations are increasingly listing AI among the major risks they must disclose in formal financial filings, despite bullish statements in public about the potential business opportunities it offers. The Register: According to a report from research firm The Autonomy Institute, three-quarters of companies listed in the S&P 500 stock market index have updated their official risk disclosures to detail or expand upon mentions of AI-related risk factors during the past year. The organization drew its findings from an analysis of Form 10-K filings that the top 500 companies submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in which they are required to outline any material risks that could negatively affect their business and its financial health.

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Many trains in the U.S. are vulnerable to a hack that can remotely lock a train's brakes, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the researcher who discovered the vulnerability. From a report:The railroad industry has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade but only recently began to fix it. Independent researcher Neil Smith first discovered the vulnerability, which can be exploited over radio frequencies, in 2012. "All of the knowledge to generate the exploit already exists on the internet. AI could even build it for you," Smith told 404 Media. "The physical aspect really only means that you could not exploit this over the internet from another country, you would need to be some physical distance from the train [so] that your signal is still received."

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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas warned young entrepreneurs that tech giants will "copy anything that's good" during a talk at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, telling founders they must "live with that fear." Srinivas said that companies raising tens of billions need to justify capital expenditures and search for new revenue streams. Perplexity pioneered web-crawling chatbots when it launched its answer engine in December 2022, but Google's Bard added internet-crawling three months later, followed by ChatGPT in May 2023 and Anthropic's Claude in March 2025. The competition has extended to browsers, with Perplexity launching its Comet browser on July 9 and Reuters reporting that OpenAI is developing a web browser to challenge Google Chrome. Perplexity's communications head Jesse Dwyer said larger companies will "drown your voice."

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NIST: There's a new record holder for the most accurate clock in the world. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have improved their atomic clock based on a trapped aluminum ion. Part of the latest wave of optical atomic clocks, it can perform timekeeping with 19 decimal places of accuracy. Optical clocks are typically evaluated on two levels -- accuracy (how close a clock comes to measuring the ideal "true" time, also known as systematic uncertainty) and stability (how efficiently a clock can measure time, related to statistical uncertainty). This new record in accuracy comes out of 20 years of continuous improvement of the aluminum ion clock. Beyond its world-best accuracy, 41% greater than the previous record, this new clock is also 2.6 times more stable than any other ion clock. Reaching these levels has meant carefully improving every aspect of the clock, from the laser to the trap and the vacuum chamber. The team published its results in Physical Review Letters. "It's exciting to work on the most accurate clock ever," said Mason Marshall, NIST researcher and first author on the paper. "At NIST we get to carry out these long-term plans in precision measurement that can push the field of physics and our understanding of the world around us."

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A survey of 500 IT asset managers in organizations that use Oracle Java has found that 73% have been audited in the last three years. From a report: At the same time, nearly eight out of 10 Oracle Java users said they had migrated, or planned to shift, to open source Java to try to avoid the risk and high costs of the dominant vendor's development and runtime environments. Oracle introduced a paid subscription for Java in September 2018, and in January 2023, it decided to switch its pricing model to per employee rather than per user, creating a steep price hike for many users. In July 2023, Gartner recorded users experiencing price increases of between two and five times when they switched to the new licensing model. Two years later, the survey conducted by market research firm Dimensional Research showed only 14% of Oracle Java users intended to stick with the vendor's subscription model.

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Nearly half of young Americans feel unprepared for future jobs as AI reshapes the workforce faster than career guidance can adapt, according to a new study from the Schultz Family Foundation and HarrisX. The survey of thousands of workers aged 16-24, along with parents, counselors and employers, revealed differences between generations about job availability and requirements. While 71% of employers say sufficient opportunities exist, only 43% of young people agree. Parents rely on outdated personal experiences when advising children, with 79% drawing from their own career paths despite 66% believing their children should pursue different directions. Employers require at least one year of experience for 77% of entry-level positions while offering internships for just 38% of roles.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Hugging Face, a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation and one of the most commonly used platforms for sharing AI tools and resources, is hosting over 5,000 AI image generation models that are designed to recreate the likeness of real people. These models were all previously hosted on Civitai, an AI model sharing platform 404 Media reporting has shown was used for creating nonconsensual pornography, until Civitai banned them due to pressure from payment processors. Users downloaded the models from Civitai and reuploaded them to Hugging Face as part of a concerted community effort to archive the models after Civitai announced in May it will ban them. In that announcement, Civitai said it will give the people who originally uploaded them "a short period of time" before they were removed. Civitai users began organizing an archiving effort on Discord earlier in May after Civitai indicated it had to make content policy changes due to pressure from payment processors, and the effort kicked into high gear when Civitai announced the new "real people" model policy.

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Candy Crush-maker King is cutting approximately 200 employees, with many positions filled by AI tools the departing workers helped develop, according to multiple sources who spoke anonymously to industry publication MobileGamer.biz. The layoffs heavily target level designers, user research staff, and UX and narrative writers across King's London, Barcelona, Stockholm, and Berlin studios. The London-based Farm Heroes Saga team faces cuts of roughly 50 people, including key leadership positions. "Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they've spent months building tools to craft levels quicker," one staffer said. "Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams."

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Microsoft employs engineers in China to help maintain Defense Department computer systems, with U.S. citizens serving as "digital escorts" to oversee the foreign workers, according to a ProPublica investigation. The escorts often lack advanced technical expertise to police engineers with far more sophisticated skills, and some are former military personnel paid barely above minimum wage. "We're trusting that what they're doing isn't malicious, but we really can't tell," one current escort told the publication. The arrangement, critical to Microsoft winning federal cloud computing contracts a decade ago, handles sensitive but unclassified government data including materials that directly support military operations. Former CIA and NSA executive Harry Coker called the system a natural opportunity for spies, saying "If I were an operative, I would look at that as an avenue for extremely valuable access."

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Apple is facing pressure to shake up its corporate playbook to invigorate its struggling artificial intelligence efforts. From a report: Alarmed by a share slump that's erased more than $640 billion in market value this year and frustrated with delays in rolling out AI features, investors are calling for Apple to break with long-standing traditions to make a big acquisition and more aggressively pursue talent. "Historically Apple does not do big mergers and acquisitions," said Citigroup Inc. analyst Atif Malik, noting that the last major deal was its takeover of Beats in 2014. But, he argues, "investors would turn more positive if Apple could acquire or invest a meaningful stake in an established AI provider." Apple shares have fallen 16% this year while traders bid up the shares of peers like Meta, which is spending lavishly on AI. While Apple faces other problems, including its exposure to tariffs and regulatory issues, disappointment in bringing compelling AI features to its vast ecosystem of devices has become top of mind for investors.

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