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No plan for AI: Bill Gates says the industry is crossing every danger threshold it once promised to stop at — bioweapons, cyberattacks, emotional dependence, mass job loss, losing control — and nobody wants to be first to hit the brakes. In a new essay and an interview with GeekWire, the Microsoft co-founder offers three ideas to start: new national and global institutions, jobs deliberately reserved for humans, and a tax on AI tokens and robots.
Not dead yet: An EV battery pulled from a car still has 80% or more of its life left, and startups including B.C.’s Moment Energy and Nevada’s Redwood Materials are racking them up to power off-grid lodges, airports and AI data centers. That’s the subject of a new episode of GeekWire’s Positive Charge podcast. Read more and listen here, and check out more episodes of Positive Charge on our show page.
AWS absorbs the DuckDB team: Amazon is acquiring Amsterdam-based DuckLabs, part of its push to turn S3 into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it. The DuckDB project itself stays free and open source under an independent foundation.
- Seattle’s MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, sees a familiar pattern from the tech giant: “wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service.”
Washington state’s cut of Meta settlement: The landmark $17.1 billion agreement between the tech giant and multiple states — under which Washington will receive up to $339 million — resolves allegations that Meta intentionally designed Facebook and Instagram with addictive features that harmed youth mental health.
TerraClear’s new Weed Maps helps farmers identify individual weeds as small as a quarter inch. (TerraClear Image)
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Seattle’s AI weed wars: Issaquah’s TerraClear now maps individual weeds down to a quarter-inch so a farmer’s existing sprayer hits only what it needs to, while Seattle’s Carbon Robotics zaps them with lasers. Both cut chemical use, and both are building enormous datasets of what’s growing in American fields.
Flipboard acquires Graze: In a strategic play for the open social web, the news aggregator has acquired the Portland-based startup. The acquisition pairs Flipboard’s Surf browser with Graze’s engine, giving creators and users the power to build, tune, and monetize custom feeds across Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads — no coding required.
Free again: Compulsion Games, one of five studios Microsoft spun out or shut down in July’s Xbox cuts, bought itself back — keeping its staff and the rights to South of Midnight, with no layoffs in the transition.
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Microsoft is letting Xbox owners turn their game discs into digital copies, adding cloud streaming and Play Anywhere to thousands of titles they already own, with Insider testing starting Aug. 31. (Xbox Wire)
A new D&D game: Renton-based Wizards of the Coast revealed the first trailer for Warlock, an open-world action video game due in 2027, at Gamescom. It’s the debut from Invoke Studios, which survived two leadership shakeups and several rounds of cuts at Wizards to get here.
Jeff Bezos remembers Dolly Parton: The Amazon founder said the entertainment icon “spent her whole life showing us what it means to lead with love.” Parton, who died Tuesday at age 80, was a dedicated philanthropist and 2022 recipient of Bezos’ $100 million “Courage and Civility” award.
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