The raging demand for computers to run AI models has only accelerated, but there are two major obstacles that anyone in the business needs to overcome: getting the right chips, and getting them into data centers where they can start generating revenue.

General Compute, a new inference neocloud — a company that rents out AI processing power, specializing in the phase when models are running and responding to users rather than being trained — has answers to those questions that illuminate where the AI ecosystem is headed. Those answers helped it raise a $15 million seed round at a $60 million post-money valuation, led by FUSE VC with participation from Carya Venture Partners and Village Global Ventures.

First, what is the right chip? The demand for GPUs has gone through the roof, but it’s becoming conventional wisdom that they aren’t the best-suited chips for running AI models once they have been trained. The phase of AI where a model is actively generating responses has different computational requirements than training, and a new class of chips is being designed specifically for it. Nvidia’s $20 billion Groq transaction in December and Cerebras’ $57 billion IPO last week point the way.

With capacity strained at both those companies, the co-founders of General Compute, CEO Finn Puklowski and CTO Jason Goodison, found another option. They’re turning to specialized chips built by SambaNova, an Intel-backed chipmaker focused on inference that has fallen a bit out of the Silicon Valley conversation.

That may change when SambaNova releases its new chips this year. The architecture is more flexible and uses more memory to store context during inference calculations, and SambaNova claims that it outperforms not just GPUs but also other specialized chips built by the likes of Groq or Cerebras. Puklowski says the new chips will generate 600 to 700 tokens per second, versus about 250 tokens per second for GPUs.

General Compute has $300 million of the company’s SN50 chips on order and says it will be the first neocloud deploying them.

These chips also help solve the second big problem — where to put them — for General Compute: They are air-cooled, not water-cooled, and consume less power, so they can be installed in existing data center facilities without new infrastructure investments.

Puklowski is pursuing colocation deals — arrangements where General Compute installs its hardware in someone else’s facility — not just with data center providers, but also with crypto miners looking to repurpose their infrastructure as the cost of producing a bitcoin has often exceeded its price.

General Compute launched its cloud offering last week, claiming it is already the fastest at running MiniMax 2.7, a powerful open-source LLM.

Joe Hasselmann is a venture investor who got in on the ground floor of the inference boom when he invested in Groq in 2021. This year, he launched a new fund, Evercrest Capital Partners, focused on the AI space, and made General Compute his first investment. Hassleman sees in SambaNova’s partnership with General Compute parallels to Coreweave’s relationship with Nvidia — and to the pairing of Groq’s chip-making with its former cloud offering.

“They do need a healthy mix of customers that are going to put their chips in environments that are going to have high growth to them,” Hassleman said. “As much as General Compute is making a bet on SambaNova, SambaNova is making a bet on General Compute.”

The question is what kind of computer architecture will capture the most value in the AI future. Inference clouds are implicit bets on a world of multiple models and agents, one where no single provider dominates and speed and cost of inference become the key competitive variables. Consider the $113 million Series B raised for OpenRouter this week, reflecting the company’s ability to offer customers access to multiple models in order to optimize their token spend.

Speed matters in that calculation, for price, and for capability. Puklowski wants to turn hour-long workloads for coding agents into five- or ten-minute tasks, and make audio agents for customer service, which require faster inference to converse effectively, more economical.

“If you use ChatGPT and it gives you 50 tokens per second, that’s still a heck of a lot faster than we can read,” Puklowski told TechCrunch, “Now that things have moved to agent-to-agent, where agents are out there reading on our behalf or pinging databases, they need to go faster.”

Evidence suggests that the 50-million-solar-mass black hole predates its host galaxy.

Researchers, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected clear evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without a stellar collapse phase and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.

The research team observed images of Abell2744-QSO1 (QSO1), which is a prototypical Little Red Dot that existed some 700 million years after the Big Bang. Little Red Dots were discovered by the James Webb Telescope and are the subject of significant research within the wider space exploration eco-system. 

Using the Webb Telescope’s imaging and spectroscopic features, such as integral field unit (IFU) and NIRSpec (Near Infrared Spectrograph) tech, the team of researchers mapped the motion and composition of gas orbiting a black hole in the centre of QSO1. What was discovered is that the gas has Keplerian motion, that means it orbits a central point in the same way that the planets in our solar system orbit the Sun.

“This is important because it tells us that most of the mass of QSO1 is concentrated in the black hole at the centre,” said Cambridge graduate student Ignas Juodžbalis, who is a lead author on one of the studies. He added, “If the mass were more distributed, as it would be if there were a lot of stars, the gas would not have this perfect Keplerian rotation.”

“This is a remarkable finding,” said Roberto Maiolino of Cambridge University, a co-author of the recently published studies. He said, “It’s a paradigm shift, a total revisiting of the classical scenarios of how black holes form and grow.”

Using the laws of gravity that govern Keplerian motion, for the first time the team was able to use gas velocity measurements to calculate the black hole mass directly. 

Research indicated that, not only is the black hole massive in size, around 50m solar masses, but it also makes up at least two-thirds of QSO1’s total mass. Thousands of times greater than in nearby galaxies, where supermassive black holes make up a small fraction of the host galaxy’s total mass.

“It seems that we have found a black hole that does not have a substantial host galaxy and that has predated stellar processes,” said Juodžbalis. “This is very exciting because it is evidence for primordial black holes or direct collapse black holes, which have been theorized but not confirmed.”

QSO1 is believed to be around 1,300 light-years across, but its light has been traveling for more than 13 billion years and it is easier to study than most other Little Red Dots primarily because it is gravitationally lensed by galaxy cluster Abell 2744, also known as Pandora’s Cluster. QSO1 is magnified and triply imaged, appearing in three different locations in the sky.

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from the cheap-crap,-very-on-brand dept

The Trump Organization still hasn’t shipped their promised Trump phone to most customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But rubes patriots who signed up did get something else instead: their private data leaked to the public. According to Techcrunch, the Trump Mobile website openly shared customer emails, addresses, phone numbers, and other sensitive data.

Trump Mobile has subsequently confirmed the leak, which they’re blaming on somebody else:

“Phone provider Trump Mobile has confirmed that it was exposing customers’ names, email addresses, mailing addresses, cell numbers, and order identifiers to the open internet…[a spokesperson] said that the exposure was linked to a third-party platform provider that supports “certain Trump Mobile operations.” He did not name the provider.”

Whoops.

Even calling Trump Mobile an actual company is generous. As we noted when it was “launched” last year, the company is really just a lazy rebrand of an existing MAGA-friendly MVNO provider, Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service.

A cornerstone of the venture was a “made in America” gold “Trump phone” named the T1 that was supposed to launch last August. Though shortly after launch the Trump Organization eliminated all the “made in America” claims. And the actual phone still hasn’t arrived in the hands of most customers, despite people paying $100 as early as June last year to reserve one. So very on brand, really.

Some of the Chinese-made phones have started showing up with reviewers, and it’s not going great. The screen is smaller than promised, the gold is more of a sickly yellow, the American flag is missing two stripes, and the phone, despite promises that it was “made with American values in mind,” appears to just be a lazy rebrand of an existing two-year-old Chinese-made Android phone (the 2024 HTC U24 Pro).

So it’s a dated Chinese phone, slathered with Trump’s name, gold paint, and an incorrect depiction of the U.S. flag — that’s a year late, not particularly secure, and pre-loaded with propaganda (Truth Social). Again, very on brand. Though curiously in stark contrast to all of the Trump bravado about how he’d personally ensure most smartphones would now be made in the States.

Still, Trump Mobile execs are trying to put on a brave face and pretend this is going well:

“The technology business is more difficult than some may realize, as parts must be tested for quality assurances,” Trump Mobile CEO Pat O’Brien said in a statement to CNET earlier this month. “We have experienced delays during a variety of steps in getting the T1 to completion, but those delays were worth it in our minds as we are delivering an amazing product.”

Except there’s no real indication that last bit is true. Like most Trump efforts to make money off his name, it’s clear this entire thing was aggressively half-assed.

Filed Under: hardware, mobile, mvno, smartphone, telecom, trump mobile phone, trump organization, wireless

Companies: trump mobile

There are hundreds of home security cameras on the market, ranging drastically in price, functionality and quality. With all the options, it can be hard to not become overwhelmed fast, especially when you’re considering something as important as your home’s safety. After CNET’s years of testing home security cameras, I have some tips if you’re on the hunt for a new one. Here are a few parameters to consider:

Privacy

This is a big one. You don’t want anyone peeping on your property or hacking into your camera. Wireless home security cameras can be more susceptible to hacking due to their connectivity to Wi-Fi networks and remote access, especially if you have poor router security. Wired home security cameras that don’t use Wi-Fi at all are generally more secure. (Read more about the pros and cons of wired vs. wireless systems here.) As I mentioned above, data breaches and security vulnerabilities can also be dangerous for your privacy, so it’s important to consider a company’s recent reputation.

Indoor vs. outdoor

One of the first things you’ll need to consider is where you want to place your home security cameras. If you want your camera to be located outside, recording your porch or yard, you’ll likely want an outdoor camera that’s also weather-resistant or features night vision. 

While many cameras can be used interchangeably for indoor or outdoor purposes, some cameras are solely made for indoor usage, so make sure you’re buying cameras that can handle the outdoor elements. 

Video resolution

Video quality should be a major consideration when buying a home security camera. In simplest terms, your camera won’t be effective if the only footage being recorded is grainy and unreadable. 

The higher the resolution, the better the video quality. Most home security cameras on the market now have 1,080p resolution, but others have 2K resolution (like the Arlo Pro 4) or 1,536×1,536-pixel resolution (like the Arlo Video Doorbell), and a growing number have embraced 4K. Just remember, the higher the video quality, the more bandwidth it takes up and the more likely your camera is to experience lag times or glitches. 

Field of view

Field of view (usually provided diagonally) refers to how broad the camera’s view is. Broader is generally better because it captures more space and makes it easier to spot activity. The average security camera tends to top out around 130 degrees, although some go beyond that. Pan and tilt features make the field of view less important since the camera can move around.

I find a broad field of view is great if you want to survey multiple corners of a backyard — less important if you just want to keep eyes on packages and guests right in front of your door.

Battery or wired power

Battery and wireless cameras versus wired options are a matter of taste since both types have pros and cons. 

Wireless options are usually easier to install and operate, and often use cloud storage, so you can access your footage from anywhere. Wireless security cameras have their own power supply, so even during an internet or power outage, they can still record and save footage. One of the biggest disadvantages is that you’ll need to manually change the batteries or charge them every so often unless you get a solar-powered home security camera.

Wired cameras are hardwired to a steady connection, so they don’t need to be recharged and can often boost a high-quality video resolution. They tend to be more reliable, secure and consistent in video quality while not requiring monthly cloud storage fees. However, not all owners will feel comfortable wiring in a camera without a pro’s help, and they’re not great options for renters and people living in apartments.

Local vs. cloud storage

Not all video storage is equal. You have two main options and picking one is up to your personal preference. There’s cloud storage, which sends your video footage to a remote server to be saved, and local storage, which relies on a separate accessory or piece of hardware, usually a microSD card, to hold any footage you’d like to save. Usually, cloud storage requires a monthly fee of around $5 to $10.

Wi-Fi quality and range

When you’re installing wireless home security cameras, keep in mind that the smart home camera you buy (and your security system as a whole) will only be as good as the quality of your Wi-Fi connection at the location where you plan to install it. So check your Wi-Fi speed before you drill holes in the walls or otherwise mess up your door frame, brick or siding for your home security camera. If the connection is spotty on your wireless security camera, you’ll notice significant lag times, pixelation in the live feed and other Wi-Fi delays. These make the video quality poor and home security cameras a pain to use.

With a good Wi-Fi connection, you should be in good shape to use your indoor home security camera or outdoor home security camera without any major camera system issues and get clear footage every time. Still have questions? Take a look at my home security camera buying guide and the below FAQs. 

More Information

A stable frequency source is a fundamental requirement in virtually every RF and wireless system, yet all real-world oscillators exhibit some degree of short-term frequency instability known as phase noise. This instability manifests as unwanted sidebands around the carrier in the frequency domain and as timing jitter in the time domain. When phase noise is excessive, it causes spectral regrowth that leaks energy into adjacent channels, reduces receiver sensitivity through reciprocal mixing, and rotates digital modulation constellations to the point where bit errors multiply. Understanding these effects is essential for engineers designing transmitters, receivers, and frequency synthesizers for modern communications standards. This guide walks through the physics of phase noise, its practical consequences for system performance, and the two principal measurement approaches — the traditional spectrum analyzer method and the more sensitive cross-correlation technique used in dedicated phase noise analyzers — giving engineers the knowledge they need to specify, measure, and minimize phase noise in their designs.

Ahead of the closure of the unionized Apple Towson Town Center in Maryland, protesting workers have called out Apple for allegedly treating them worse than workers from other closing stores.

Towson was the first Apple Store to unionize, and that may or may not have been a factor in Apple including it in a trio of stores to be closed down. But what is certain is that Apple is treating this store’s employees differently from the others, and that is why there was a public rally on May 27, 2026.

According to Baltimore NBC affiliate WBAL, employees, local elected officials, and leaders of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Union, led the protest outside the County Courthouse.

In all, Apple is closing three stores, citing declining retail conditions in the malls they are in. As well as Towson, the stores are Apple North County, in Escondido, California, and Apple Trumbull in Trumbull, Connecticut. Employees at the two non-union locations are automatically being offered transfers to other stores.

Towson staff, however, are not, and must apply for positions in other Apple Stores. Apple says that this is down to the terms of the contract negotiated with unions, which mandates severance on the closure of a store.

“Apple offers severance to all of their employees, not just what we negotiate,” Apple store worker Eric Brown told reporters. “So to say that it’s based on the severance is just false.”

Brown was the main employee who spoke at the rally, but he was joined by council members, and also representatives of the union. “[This] is retaliation plain and simple,” said IAM International President Brian Bryant. “Shame on you, Apple.”

Apple’s union-busting record

Apple has previously been accused of illegal anti-union practices, and head of retail Deirdre O’Brien has spoken out against unionization. She’s said that the relation between Apple and its store staff could be “fundamentally changed” if they unionize.

“And I worry about what it would mean to put another organization in the middle of our relationship,” she continued. “An organization that doesn’t have a deep understanding of Apple or our business, and most importantly, one that I do not believe shares our commitment to you.”

O’Brien took over as head of retail and people for Apple in 2019. “Deirdre deeply understands Apple’s unique culture and that people join Apple to do the best work of their lives,” said Tim Cook at the time. “She is a superb leader and I’m thrilled she will be bringing her experience and talent to this critical role.”

Yet for all that the role is critical, and especially all that O’Brien says about Apple’s commitment to its staff, in practice employees have been driven to unionize.

In 2022, it was the same Eric Brown who now spoke at the rally, who summarized the real relationship between Apple and its staff. “It’s like writing a letter to Santa,” he said. “Pretty much just like an empty slot that leads to a fire pit.”

Apple has said that “we strongly disagree” with the claims of discrimination. However, Apple has reportedly not responded to an open letter from local elected officials.

Fewer firms gave salary increases amid geopolitical uncertainty and easing inflation

Nominal wages of full-time resident employees grew by 4.9% at a slower pace in 2025 than 2024’s 5.6%, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) reported on Thursday.

This comes amid Singapore’s overall inflation dropping sharply from 2.8% in 2024 to 0.7% in 2025, which MOM said could have contributed to reduced upward pressure on firms to raise nominal wages.

After adjusting for inflation, real wages actually grew by 4%, up from 3.2% in 2024, indicating that workers’ purchasing power went up.

Some 6,236 firms in the private sector with at least 10 employees were polled by MOM for this report.

More firms were profitable in 2025

In 2025, 83.1% of business establishments were profitable, up from 80.8% in 2024.

More firms reported stable or improved profitability in 2025 at 64%, an increase from 2024’s 62.6%.

Meanwhile, fewer firms reported a loss in 2025, at 16.9%, compared to 19.2% the year before.

Fewer firms gave salary raises

72.4% of firms raised their staff’s salaries in 2025, down from 78.3% in 2024. Those that did averaged a 5.8% wage increase, mostly to retain staff.

Nearly 1 in 4 firms kept wages unchanged, up from 18.5% in 2024, which MOM saw as “signs of greater prudence in terms of wages.”

Wage gains also broadened in 2025, with gaps in wage growth across employee groups narrowing.

Firms that cut wages remained around 3%, with reductions averaging 3.7%.

Sectors that saw the highest wage growth

Administrative and support services led wage growth at 7.5% in 2025 (though lower than 8.7% in 2024).

Accommodation saw the sharpest moderation in wage growth, from 5.5% in 2024 to 3.9% in 2025, as the post-pandemic hiring surge stabilised.

Insurance services and wholesale trade bucked the trend of overall slowing wage growth, with the former jumping from 4.9% in 2024 to 6.6% in 2025, as firms competed to hold onto staff.

Looking ahead, MOM expects real wage growth to stay positive but moderate.

Director of MOM’s Manpower Research and Statistics department, Ang Boon Heng told Channel News Asia that employers might be more cautious amid geopolitical uncertainty and inflationary pressures.

Ang added that wage growth could diverge more across sectors in 2026, with export-facing sectors under greater pressure from global tariffs.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s current affairs here.

Featured Image Credit: Shadow of light via Shutterstock

In hot summer afternoons like these, the speaker you bring to your friend’s barbeque either makes the mood or kills it. The Bose SoundLinkFlex 2 does the former – its compact enough to carry, with the sound quality to back it up, and IP67 waterproofing for whatever the afternoon throws at it.

Right now it’s 35% off, down from £149.95 to £98, saving you £51.95. That’s a great price for one of the best outdoor speakers you can buy right now.