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Amazon Web Services is facing an uncomfortable admission this week: customer data stored in its Iranian data centers has been permanently lost following military strikes on the facilities. AWS never designed those buildings to survive warfare, and the company now says recovery simply isn't possible. It's a stark reminder that cloud infrastructure exists in the physical world, with all the vulnerabilities that entails.
Shifting to the frontier of artificial intelligence, a notable mood change is settling over some of the industry's biggest players. After a summer marked by rogue AI agents and renewed warnings from researchers about existential risk, several leading American AI companies are now openly calling for a slower pace of development. The phrase circulating in boardrooms is "pace the frontier" — a significant rhetorical shift from the move-fast culture that defined the last decade.
And OpenAI is making waves in the mathematics community again. Days after a disputed claim involving the Navier-Stokes equations, the company says it has made substantial progress on a second Millennium Prize problem — though it's declining to name which one. Each of these problems has stood unsolved for decades, so the claims are extraordinary, and scrutiny from the broader math world will be intense.
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