New York freezes new data-center construction; Apple's rebuilt Siri opens to everyone

Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order barring new permits for data centers that draw 50 megawatts or more, making New York the first state to pause the AI build-out. The freeze holds until the state finishes an environmental review of energy demand, water use, and noise — a process expected to take about a year. Projects that already hold permits are exempt, and a proposed Grid Acceleration Fund would make operators help pay to upgrade the aging power grid.

Apple released the iOS 27 public beta, letting anyone try the long-delayed Siri overhaul built on its new on-device Apple Intelligence models. The assistant can now hold a conversation, read what is on screen, search across your email, messages, and photos, and take actions inside apps — and it runs as a standalone app for the first time. It works in English only for now and skips the European Union at launch, with a full release expected in September.

DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis called for an independent standards body to test frontier AI models before they ship, modeled on Wall Street's self-regulator, FINRA. Under his plan, labs would voluntarily submit models for review up to 30 days before launch, then shift to mandatory checks as a condition of access to the United States market. The group would be backed by government but funded and run by the industry, staffed with technical and open-source experts.

Twenty-six former Meta employees sued the company in federal court, alleging it used internal AI tools — activity monitoring, token-usage dashboards, and algorithmic performance scores — to rank and select staff during May's layoffs of roughly 8,000 people. The suit claims the system disproportionately hit workers on medical or family leave, whose scores could not keep pace while they were out. Meta says the claims lack merit and that people, not AI, made the decisions.

Reflection, the American open-weight AI lab founded by two former DeepMind researchers, agreed to spend $1 billion for access to Nvidia's latest GB300 chips through 2029, hosted by European infrastructure provider Nebius. The deal follows a similar compute pact with SpaceX weeks earlier, as Reflection, valued at $8 billion, races to train open alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic. Backers of the startup include Nvidia, Sequoia, and Lightspeed.

PrismML, a team of Caltech researchers, released Bonsai, a 27-billion-parameter multimodal model compressed enough to run entirely on a phone — its most aggressive version fits in under four gigabytes of memory. Using extreme quantization that stores each weight in little more than a single bit, the model keeps roughly 90 to 95 percent of the full-precision version's benchmark scores. It ships free under an open Apache 2.0 license, pointing toward offline assistants that reason over private data directly on the device.

Bloomberg reports that OpenAI's debut hardware product is a screenless smart speaker with motorized parts that let it move, designed to feel like a physical companion for ChatGPT. Built with help from former Apple engineers, it would learn about its owner over time, tap into their email and digital life, and act on its own with a distinct personality. No price or launch date has surfaced, and the project lands while OpenAI fights a trade-secret lawsuit from Apple.