The Omniscient Bulletin · 2026-08-26
The Omniscient Bulletin — August 26, 2026
OpenAI publishes the first measured results from a chip it designed itself and says it beats Nvidia's on work per watt. Three major record groups take equity in one AI music company while two of them amend a lawsuit against another. Amazon closes Mechanical Turk.
Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, the twenty-one-year-old marketplace that paid people pennies to do the things software could not and that Jeff Bezos called artificial artificial intelligence. It closes on the same day Figure came out of stealth with a phone app that has already paid 15 million dollars to people filming themselves so a robot can learn from the footage. The major labels, meanwhile, spent the day on both sides of their own argument, taking equity in one AI music company and amending a lawsuit against another.
Compute
OpenAI says the chip it designed itself beats Nvidia's on work per watt, and it has not deployed one yet
OpenAI published the first measured results from Jalapeno, its own inference chip, claiming 1.5 to 1.9 times more AI work per watt and 1.7 to 3.6 times lower end-to-end latency than the comparison systems. Those systems are named only in an appendix: Nvidia's GB200 and GB300. The ratio normalizes on each part's published power rating, and OpenAI notes Jalapeno is rated at 700 watts while drawing at or below 550. It plans to begin deploying the chip by the end of the year. OpenAI ran the public benchmark itself.
Industry
Universal, Sony and Warner have all just taken equity in one AI music company
Stability AI has closed a 76 million dollar Series B whose new investors include Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group and Electronic Arts, alongside AMD Ventures and Pacific Alliance Ventures. That takes total funding to 232 million under Prem Akkaraju, chief executive since June 2024, and puts Coatue co-founder Thomas Laffont on the board. The pitch is Stable Audio 3.0, which the company calls a family of open-weight music models trained on fully licensed data. No valuation was disclosed.
Policy
Universal and Sony amended their case against Suno, and put the evidence on a thumb drive
UMG, Capitol and Sony's first amended complaint against Suno, filed August 25, adds a copyright-circumvention claim a judge cleared a week earlier, for four counts total: direct, contributory and vicarious infringement, plus DMCA anti-circumvention. To prove copying, the labels say they prompted Suno with a song's era, genre, instruments and artist, then compared outputs to early rock and roll tracks by Chuck Berry and Bill Haley. The disputed outputs are lodged as a physical exhibit, not filed to the public docket. Warner, a co-plaintiff in 2024, settled with Suno and exited in December.
U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts→
Labor
Amazon is closing the marketplace Jeff Bezos called artificial artificial intelligence
Amazon will shut Mechanical Turk on September 30. The notice on the site says only that following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk. Launched in 2005 and named for an 18th century chess automaton, it paid people cents a time to do the small jobs computers could not, and Bezos called it artificial artificial intelligence. Amazon says it once served more than 500,000 workers. It closes into a market where Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific now recruit the people who train the models.
Robotics
Figure has paid 15 million dollars to people filming themselves, and is committing a billion more
Figure came out of stealth with Index, a robot training dataset built by paying members of the public to film themselves doing physical tasks, through an app now on Google Play and the App Store. It reports 264,000 downloads across 108 countries, more than 44,000 weekly active users, over 16 million videos uploaded, and 15 million dollars paid to contributors so far. It has committed over a billion dollars in the next twelve months. It tried buying data first, and says vendors could not hit the bar.
Industry
DeepSeek is raising at 74 billion dollars and preparing to list in Shanghai
DeepSeek is close to completing a round that values it at about 500 billion yuan, or 74 billion dollars, before the new money goes in, and has begun preparing for a listing on Shanghai's Star Market, people familiar with the matter told the South China Morning Post. It was seeking about 50 billion yuan, expected to close before the end of August. New investors in talks include a semiconductor private equity firm linked to the chairman of ChangXin Memory. It could file for the listing by the end of the year.
Frontier
Anthropic is paying outsiders 5 million dollars to measure what its models do to the people using them
Anthropic is spending $5 million to fund outside researchers building open-source evaluations of how its models affect user wellbeing, and pledges grantees can publish their findings without company sign-off. The company's own pitch concedes the industry hasn't agreed on how a model should respond when someone leans on it for companionship or discloses a mental health crisis. It wants evaluations that catch both an overly compliant model and one that refuses to engage. Applications are due September 21, with finalists notified by October 5.