The shark-attack movie Thrash feels like a brainstorming session for sequels to the superior Crawl, but at least it moves quickly and efficiently.

In short: Matei Zaharia, the Berkeley computer science professor and Databricks co-founder who created Apache Spark, has won the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing for his foundational contributions to distributed data systems and AI infrastructure. The $250,000 prize, funded by an Infosys endowment, is one of computer science’s most prestigious mid-career honours. Zaharia is donating the […]

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Maxwell Zeff / Wired:
OpenAI backs an Illinois bill shielding AI labs from liability, even for “critical harms” like 100+ deaths or $1B+ in damage, if they published safety reports  —  The ChatGPT-maker testified in favor of an Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable …

Financial Times:
Sources: Alibaba appointed Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren to lead its AI unit after a pivot from open source to monetizable MaaS models led to Qwen executive departures  —  Move may affect a global developer community that relies on Qwen models from the Chinese company

Anna Tong / Forbes:
AfterQuery, which sells coding and finance training data to AI labs, says it raised a $30M Series A at a $300M valuation, and has hit a $100M+ annual run rate  —  AfterQuery, which raised $30 million several months ago, competes with data labeling companies like Mercor to sell training data …