The Register Kettle

Anthropic's IPO prospectus leaked this week, and boy was it filled with interesting details.

For starters there's the fact a third of it is all about existential AI risks, then there's the fact that, despite some impressive revenue growth the company still has yet to turn a profit. Combine that with massive capex predictions, and you have an IPO with massive valuation, yet a long, hard road toward anything resembling earnings. 

Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, El Reg editor in chief Matt Rosoff, and enterprise IT reporter Lindsay Clark on this week's episode of The Kettle where they discuss the revelations, what they mean for the state of the AI industry, and just how much distraction from its actual problems Anthropic can eke out by keeping that doomsday narrative front and center. 

As AI has reshaped the tech world, so it in turn waits for something greater to come along and reshape it, and that unstoppable force might just be TypeSafe AI's new model, Jev. 

Jev's not chatty, it doesn't want to tell you a story, and it won't really do much besides answering multiple choice, ranking, and binary yes/no questions to a degree of probability, but in lots of cases that's probably all you need from an AI. 

Jev is also dirt cheap to run and ultra fast, and has proven to have a lot of use cases in just a week on the scene. 

This week on The Kettle, join host Brandon Vigliarolo, senior reporter Tom Claburn, and contributor Joab Jackson to chat about how Jev is reshaping the AI landscape and what it might do to the future of the AI industry. 

Just when you thought concerns over datacenter power generation in the US couldn't get any worse, the Trump administration goes ahead and gets rid of emissions restrictions on power plants. 

If that wasn't bad enough, the EPA is also considering getting rid of reporting requirements on small-scale polluters (e.g., datacenters with on-site power generation), meaning all those unrestricted emissions at new bit barns might not even be mentioned to the public. 

But hey, at least Nvidia is riding to the rescue with some datacenter energy efficiency improvements, as self-serving as they may be for the company's bottom line. 

Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, Systems Editor Tobias Mann, and Reporter Dan Robinson to talk all about these developments, and why we're not so sure coal will come roaring back as a datacenter energy choice any time soon. 

Hey, did you hear? AI is going to kill us all and no one is trying to do anything to stop it. 

That's what industry insiders are saying now, anyways. Whether you believe we just have to sit back and let Skynet end civilization is another matter altogether. We at The Register's Kettle desk don't think so, and that's what we're talking over this week. 

Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, systems editor Tobias Mann, and senior reporter Tom Claburn to hear our thoughts on how we could stop the impending AI meteor hurtling toward us by, for starters, arresting the tech bros who keep letting it do bad stuff. Someone had better do something - all those industry insiders sounding the alarm are going to be exhibit A if and when we take action after it's already too late. 

AI repository Hugging Face will soon be an Nvidia property, and while everyone's promising things will remain the same we at The Register's Kettle desk aren't so sure the status quo is going to stay the status quo at the AI industry's leading open model host. 

Joining host Brandon Vigliarolo this week is reporter Dan Robinson, who broke the news of Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition for El Reg yesterday, weighs in on what he heard on the announcement call, while senior reporter Tom Claburn opines on what he sees coming. 

Windows XP is turning 25, and with AI still causing a memory crunch we're really missing the days of low-overhead OSes from Microsoft that just worked. 

This week on The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by FOSS reporter Liam Proven and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to talk about why XP might have been peak Windows, but that's not the only retro thing we're chatting about in this episode. 

Along with reminiscing about Windows of days gone by, we're also looking at Casio's remake of its classic digital watch to add some basic smart capabilities without losing a two-year battery life, and we're reexamining the long-held belief that putting passwords on paper is a bad idea.

After all, you can't hack a paper notebook. 

This week, we learned a lot more about what’s going on inside the datacenter. GPUs may still be king but their exclusive reign on the rack is over. The taskbar's reign at the bottom of the desktop may be coming to an end too.

Register Systems Editor Tobias Mann joins us to talk about why so many vendors are turning to alternate silicon from the likes of Cerebras and Marvell to help power their inference. He also explains why Waymo is designing its own custom chips in robotaxis rather than continuing to use off-the-shelf silicon from Intel.

As new AI silicon moves forward, Microsoft goes back to the future by finally, after only five years of waiting, allowing users to move the taskbar in Windows 11. It also has belatedly started giving users more control over context menus and given them a closer look at what their neural processing units (NPUs) are doing in task manager. Register Microsoft Ecosystem Reporter Richard Speed weighs in.

Our cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons spent a week in Las Vegas for Black Hat and DEF CON last week, and there was only one thing on everyone's mind: AI agents and their growing threat to cybersecurity defenders.

As Jess wrote this week, pretty much every discussion she had centered around AI and its potential effects on critical infrastructure, with multiple current and former government leaders expressing worry over recent events and what they mean for the future of infosec. 

Join Jess and host Brandon Vigliarolo for this week's episode of The Kettle, where they break down the hacker summer camp scuttlebutt and what the security world is doing to protect critical infrastructure from the emerging AI threat. 

OpenAI's invasion of Hugging Face keeps getting worse somehow, Chinese open-weight models are nigh on to reaching parity with their closed-off American cousins,  and AI crawlers are getting their own LLM-poisoning ads.

Were there anything world-shaking events in AI land we missed this week? 

Join Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo as he chats with systems editor Tobias Mann and senior reporter Tom Claburn about this trio of exciting AI stories from the week.

Worried that a rogue hivemind of AI agents could come for your secrets? Want reassurance that a Chinese open-weight takeover wouldn't be that bad? Curious how LLMs are being advertised to when you're not watching? That's all on tap for the latest episode. 

Between eye-watering capex expenses, shrinking free cash flow, and worries about chip availability, things are starting to look tight. El Reg Editor-in-Chief Matt Rosoff and Systems Editor Tobias Mann join host Brandon Vigliarolo for this episode of The Kettle to discuss what the numbers mean and how things pan out.