◆ Dispatch 015 · 2026-05-17 The Vice Grips
Vice Grips, Sovereign Clouds, and the Cancer Line
“I appreciate everyone's right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment.”
— Jonas Vale, today's narration
Year two of the AI-exposed jobs print comes in soft. Americans in five states are cutting down Flock surveillance cameras with vice grips. The EU is drafting cloud restrictions while The Register documents the computer beneath the computer — Intel's Management Engine, AMD's Platform Security Processor, and the silicon-layer gap European sovereignty frameworks were never designed to close. A compute-rate inversion on H200 hardware. Jamie Dimon's cancer line meets a bioRxiv paper that actually scores cardiomyopathy variants. EY pulls a study for hallucinated citations. Malta hands ChatGPT Plus to every citizen — with a literacy course attached.
Chapters
- 00:00:04 Year two of the AI-exposed jobs print
- 00:03:30 Twenty-five cameras, vice grips, and the back door to ICE
- 00:07:50 The cloud and the computer beneath the computer
- 00:13:29 The compute meter
- 00:17:43 Dimon's cancer line and the paper underneath
- 00:21:42 EY's retracted study and the well-poisoning problem
- 00:25:19 Malta's free year
- 00:28:49 Five things
Sources
11 cited-
1
US Is Starting to See Heavy Job Losses in Roles Exposed to AI
Article Matthew Boesler (Bloomberg)
A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025, compared with an increase in overa…
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-15/… →Details
- Cited text
A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025, compared with an increase in overall employment of 0.8% over the same period.
- Context
- Second consecutive year of underperformance in AI-exposed roles will start shaping US labor and tariff policy debates.
- Key points
- BLS data shows AI-exposed occupations lost 0.2% employment vs 0.8% growth elsewhere — second year of the divergence.
- Customer service reps, certain secretaries, and certain salespeople led the losses.
- Roughly 10 million US jobs sit in the 18 BLS-flagged occupations.
- Year-two correlation moves the story from noise into political consequence.
- Provenance
- Article · Supporting source
-
2
Americans Are Smashing Flock Cameras. The Surveillance State Has a Sabotage Problem.
Article State of Surveillance
I appreciate everyone's right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment. I appreciate a quiet life and am not looking forward to this process, but I will take the silver lining that this can be a catalyst in a bigge…
stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-cameras-… →Details
- Cited text
I appreciate everyone's right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment. I appreciate a quiet life and am not looking forward to this process, but I will take the silver lining that this can be a catalyst in a bigger movement to roll-back intrusive surveillance.
- Context
- Physical sabotage of a surveillance network shows the political price of deployments that bypass council-level public opposition.
- Key points
- At least 25 Flock license-plate cameras destroyed across 5 states since April 2025.
- Jeffrey Sovern, 41, of Suffolk, Virginia, faces 25 criminal charges for dismantling 13 cameras.
- Flock operates in ~6,000 US communities; company valued at $7.5B.
- Documented 4,000+ local-police lookups against Flock data tagged for ICE purposes, despite Flock denying ICE relationship.
- 46 cities have rejected Flock contracts; Amazon killed the Ring-Flock partnership.
- Provenance
- Article · Supporting source
-
3
Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors
Article Kim Loohuis (The Register)
Connecting an untouched-ME vPro laptop to corporate resources exposes the organization to a class of compromise that defeats the host security stack in its entirety.
www.theregister.com/systems/2026/05/16/euro… →Details
- Cited text
Connecting an untouched-ME vPro laptop to corporate resources exposes the organization to a class of compromise that defeats the host security stack in its entirety.
- Context
- European cloud sovereignty as currently certified does not reach the silicon, leaving an architectural gap subject to US legal process.
- Key points
- Intel Management Engine and AMD Platform Security Processor run at Ring -3, below the OS, with their own memory, clock and network stack.
- RISAA 2024 brought hardware manufacturers under FISA's definition of electronic communications service provider — Intel and AMD can be compelled via secret orders.
- France's SecNumCloud framework (1,200 requirements) does not certify silicon — ANSSI head Vincent Strubel confirms it is 'a cybersecurity tool, not an industrial policy tool.'
- Eclypsium telemetry: ~72% of enterprise devices remain vulnerable to INTEL-SA-00391; 61% to INTEL-SA-00295.
- RISC-V remains decades from competitive datacenter performance, per EURECOM's Aurélien Francillon.
- Provenance
- Article · Supporting source
-
4
EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process sensitive government data
Article Thom Holwerda (OSnews / sourcing CNBC)
Relying on the Americans for our digital infrastructure is a monumentally stupid and self-defeating idea.
www.osnews.com/story/144943/eu-weighs-restr… →Details
- Cited text
Relying on the Americans for our digital infrastructure is a monumentally stupid and self-defeating idea.
- Context
- Couples to the Register piece — legislative cloud restriction will not reach the silicon layer beneath the certified providers.
- Key points
- EU considering restrictions on member-state use of US hyperscalers for sensitive government data, per CNBC sourcing.
- Test case: the Netherlands recently sold its national ID services company and associated personal data to a US firm despite parliamentary opposition.
- Proposal will be tested against member-state dependency on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Provenance
- Article · Supporting source
-
5
H200 spot rate inverts above B200
X @Ren_aramb
H200 spot just hit $6.40/hr. Up 29% overnight. Now more expensive than B200, which is newer gen. That inversion only happens when supply is gone.
x.com/Ren_aramb/status/2056039933937152490 →Details
- Cited text
H200 spot just hit $6.40/hr. Up 29% overnight. Now more expensive than B200, which is newer gen. That inversion only happens when supply is gone.
- Context
- A current-vs-prior-generation inversion is a clean read on the depth of the compute shortage and the windfall to NeoCloud operators.
- Key points
- H200 spot hit $6.40 per hour on May 17, a 29% overnight jump.
- H200 spot now exceeds B200, the newer-generation chip — a supply-driven inversion.
- NeoCloud operators with fixed-capex H200/H100 clusters capture margin from rental-rate moves.
- Provenance
- Tweet · Primary source
-
6
Anthropic Compute Growth as of May '26
Source u/Chasmchas (r/Anthropic)
SpaceX deal looks like peanuts compared to the AWS jump.
www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1tfs657… →Details
- Cited text
SpaceX deal looks like peanuts compared to the AWS jump.
- Context
- Compute concentration inside US hyperscalers compounds the silicon-layer legal exposure documented in the Register piece.
- Key points
- Community chart of announced Anthropic compute shows AWS allocation dwarfing the SpaceX deal.
- Top comment notes announced capacity ≠ available capacity (Stargate caveat).
- Concentration of Anthropic compute within AWS sits inside US legal jurisdiction.
- Provenance
- Source · Background source
-
7
Cerebras CFO says they are currently running GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 internally
Source u/socoolandawesome (r/singularity)
If verified, frontier-model inference on wafer-scale silicon shifts the inference economics away from NVIDIA-bound supply.
www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1tftg… →Details
- Context
- If verified, frontier-model inference on wafer-scale silicon shifts the inference economics away from NVIDIA-bound supply.
- Key points
- Cerebras CFO told CNBC on May 14 the company is running GPT-5.4 and 5.5 on its chips internally, with public release planned.
- Cerebras IPO is the largest of 2026 to date.
- Skepticism in comments: ride between marketing talking points and verifiable claim is short.
- Cerebras already powers a fast option in OpenAI's Codex routing per community discussion.
- Provenance
- Source · Background source
-
8
Jamie Dimon: AI is going to cure cancer
X @WatcherGuru (citing Jamie Dimon)
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says AI is going to "cure cancer."
x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2055703144080744506 →Details
- Cited text
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says AI is going to "cure cancer."
- Context
- Bank-CEO categorical claim shifts the public framing of AI in medicine from speculative to imminent — useful only when paired with primary-source AI-genomics work.
- Key points
- Dimon used 'will,' not 'may' or 'could' — a categorical claim from a major US bank CEO.
- Clip drew 4,425 likes and 543,713 views inside 24 hours.
- Couples to JPMorgan's deployment of AI in financial services and the bank's positioning on healthcare investment.
- Provenance
- Tweet · Primary source
-
9
Evo 2 Predicts Cardiomyopathy-Associated Variants and Elucidates Their Underlying Mechanisms
Article Kurozumi, Otsuka, Masamichi, Kawakami, Isagawa, Kodera, Takeda (bioRxiv)
Primary-source evidence that genomic AI is now producing clinically usable variant classifications with mechanistic explanations — the brick under Dimon's claim.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.15… →Details
- Context
- Primary-source evidence that genomic AI is now producing clinically usable variant classifications with mechanistic explanations — the brick under Dimon's claim.
- Key points
- Evo 2 genomic foundation model scored ClinVar cardiomyopathy variants: AUROC 0.983, AUPRC 0.915.
- Sparse-autoencoder embeddings identified coiled-coil and actin-binding domains characteristic of cardiomyopathy proteins.
- Model recognized the TBX5 cardiac transcription factor binding motif and predicted SNP-driven affinity changes after fine-tuning.
- Same model architecture and method scale to cancer variant interpretation and liquid biopsy.
- Provenance
- Article · Supporting source
-
10
EY withdraws report over AI hallucination errors, fake data and citations
Article Indian Express Tech Desk (citing GPTZero)
Publishing a report online is essentially a form of data injection into the pool of knowledge that is the internet. When the report includes fake information... it can 'poison the well' by misleading future researchers.
indianexpress.com/article/technology/artifi… →Details
- Cited text
Publishing a report online is essentially a form of data injection into the pool of knowledge that is the internet. When the report includes fake information... it can 'poison the well' by misleading future researchers.
- Context
- Institutional trust in AI workflows now faces a concrete public counterexample published by a Big Four firm selling AI governance services.
- Key points
- EY Canada retracted a loyalty-rewards study after GPTZero flagged hallucinated citations including a McKinsey report that does not exist.
- EY's AI-related revenue grew 30% YoY; 15,000 staff billed on AI projects.
- Pattern: Deloitte corrected a Canadian government report in 2025 for the same reason; Sullivan & Cromwell apologized to a NY court in April.
- arXiv last week announced a one-year ban for unchecked LLM-generated errors in submissions.
- Provenance
- Article · Supporting source
-
11
Malta offers ChatGPT Plus to every citizen for one year, conditional on AI literacy course
Source u/badumtsssst (r/singularity)
First EU-member-state national rollout sets the template that Estonia, Lithuania, and other small EU states are likely to copy or reject.
www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1tfis… →Details
- Context
- First EU-member-state national rollout sets the template that Estonia, Lithuania, and other small EU states are likely to copy or reject.
- Key points
- Malta will provide ChatGPT Plus free for one year to all citizens and residents (~574,000 people).
- Required prerequisite: an AI literacy course built by the University of Malta, not OpenAI.
- UAE rolled out a similar program earlier in 2026; Malta is the first EU member state.
- Open questions: data residency for Maltese conversations, default training opt-outs, and what happens at month 13.
- Provenance
- Source · Background source
Year two of the AI-exposed jobs print
00:00:04 The US labor data on AI exposure came out on Friday, and it's the second year in a row showing the same pattern. Matthew Boesler at Bloomberg walked through the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual release. A group of eighteen occupations the bureau has flagged as exposed to AI — roughly ten million jobs in total — lost two-tenths of a percent of employment between May 2024 and May 2025.
00:00:27 Over the same window, overall US employment grew zero point eight percent. So the gap between AI-exposed jobs and the rest of the labor market is now a full percentage point, and it widened from the prior year rather than narrowing. Customer service representatives, certain types of secretaries, and certain salespeople led the losses.
00:00:48 Those aren't exotic occupations. They're the call-center seat, the front-desk seat, and the inside-sales seat. They're the jobs that absorb most people who enter office work without a degree, or who come back to work after raising a family, or who can't relocate.
00:01:04 When a category of work shrinks by 0.2 percent in a year against 0.8 percent growth elsewhere, you're watching that specific door close while the others open. There's a caution to flag here, because the reply guys on the Bloomberg thread were quick to point out that a recession driven by tariffs and an oil crisis could explain the divergence on its own.
00:01:26 That's a fair caution. The BLS series doesn't isolate AI as a cause. It isolates exposure as a feature, and then asks whether exposure correlates with worse outcomes. Two years of correlation isn't proof of causation, and I'd want to see the year-three print before I'd call this settled.
00:01:44 But two years is enough to stop calling it noise. And the political consequence has already arrived. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been pushing back on data center expansion for months, as we covered Thursday. The Trump administration is on its second round of tariff fights with Beijing.
00:02:02 A US labor market where the AI-exposed categories underperform the rest by a full point in year two is the kind of number a senator's staff prints out and brings to a hearing. It won't stay inside the Bloomberg Terminal. The piece a Bloomberg reader can't see in ninety-one words is the geography.
00:02:21 The BLS occupation tables are concentrated in a small number of states. Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia carry an outsized share of customer service and back-office sales work. New York, Illinois, and California carry the secretary and admin categories.
00:02:37 Those are politically meaningful states, and the job losses aren't symmetric across the map. The political reaction won't be either. Two more things to flag and then I'll move on. First, the ten-million-job bucket is a floor on the affected population, not a ceiling — the BLS-flagged list is conservative.
00:02:56 Daniel Susskind and Erik Brynjolfsson have separate exposure indices that capture twice as many roles. Second, US job loss isn't the same as global job creation, and a lot of the call-center work that disappeared from US payrolls in 2025 went to Manila and Cebu, not to a model.
00:03:13 The model just changed the bargaining position of the workers in both places. The next BLS occupation print lands June 6. If the gap widens to half a point, the political fight stops being about data centers and water, and starts being about retraining money and severance.
Twenty-five cameras, vice grips, and the back door to ICE
00:03:30 About twenty-five license-plate cameras operated by Flock Safety have been cut down, smashed, or dismantled across the United States since April of last year, in five states, and the destruction is accelerating. State of Surveillance has the most thorough account I've seen, and the details are worth slowing down for.
00:03:49 Jeffrey Sovern of Suffolk, Virginia — 41 years old — took down thirteen of them by himself between April and October. Vice grips and metal cutters. He cut the mounting poles at the base, then removed the wiring, the batteries, and the solar panels. He didn't hide it.
00:04:04 He set up a GoFundMe for his legal defense, linked it to an anti-surveillance activist site called deflock dot org, and wrote a public statement. Let me quote him directly. He said: I appreciate everyone's right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment. And: I appreciate a quiet life and am not looking forward to this process, but I will take the silver lining that this can be a catalyst in a bigger movement to roll-back intrusive surveillance.
00:04:31 He's facing thirteen counts of destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny, and six counts of possession of burglary tools. Detectives caught him, by the way, by reviewing footage from the cameras he didn't get to. There are similar incidents in La Mesa, California, in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, in Greenview, Illinois, and in Lisbon, Connecticut.
00:04:53 One of the Oregon cameras had a note next to it that I won't read on air, but the sentiment was unambiguous. That isn't coordinated activity. That's spontaneous, in five states, in blue and red counties. Now, why? Flock operates in roughly six thousand US communities.
00:05:09 The company is worth seven and a half billion dollars. Garrett Langley, Flock's CEO, has said publicly that mass surveillance could eliminate all crime in America. The pitch to city councils is neighborhood safety. The reality, documented in 404 Media's reporting and independently in a University of Washington Center for Human Rights paper from October 2025, is that local police are running searches against the Flock network on behalf of federal immigration enforcement.
00:05:38 More than four thousand lookups have been tagged ICE, ICE plus ERO, or ICE WARRANT. In Virginia alone, almost three thousand immigration-related searches over twelve months. In Washington State, at least eight law enforcement agencies enabled direct sharing of their Flock networks with US Border Patrol.
00:05:56 One Texas school district had its cameras searched by thirty law enforcement agencies from Florida, Georgia, Indiana, and Tennessee, for immigration purposes. Flock's official line is that they don't work with ICE. The data shows local cops run ICE searches through the back door, and the back door is a feature of the product.
00:06:15 Different audiences read that fact differently. If you live in La Mesa and you went to a December 2025 council meeting and watched the council vote to keep Flock anyway, against the overwhelming sentiment in the room, you might be the person who reached for the vice grips two months later.
00:06:33 The structural piece of this for tomorrow. Louisville is suing to keep camera locations secret. Norfolk lost a similar case in December and was forced to disclose six hundred camera locations across Hampton Roads. Amazon already killed the Ring-to-Flock partnership.
00:06:48 Forty-six cities have rejected new Flock contracts. Austin, Eugene, Mountain View, and Santa Cruz canceled outright; Alameda County postponed. This is a seven-and-a-half-billion-dollar deployment running into a Fourth Amendment problem and a sabotage problem at the same time, and the response so far has been to hide the hardware.
00:07:08 Hiding the hardware works against a casual observer and fails completely against someone willing to bring vice grips. Friday's IMPULSE looked at London Camden's facial-recognition deployment at a political rally and asked who the audit class for that system is.
00:07:24 The Flock story is the American mirror. The audit class turned out to be the angry resident with metal cutters. As I promised Friday, tomorrow's episode picks up the Camden arrest count, once the Met posts the deployment summary. For Flock, the number I'm tracking is how many of the six thousand communities cancel by end of summer, and whether any of those cancellations come paired with state-level legislation that names ICE specifically.
The cloud and the computer beneath the computer
00:07:50 Two stories on European AI sovereignty broke at the same time this weekend, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is from CNBC, repackaged by Thom Holwerda at OSnews. The European Union is considering rules that would restrict member-state governments from using US cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — to handle sensitive data.
00:08:11 Sources familiar with the talks confirmed it on Friday. This is the legislative pressure the EU has been talking around for five years finally crystallizing into a specific policy proposal aimed at specific vendors. Holwerda put it directly. He wrote: Relying on the Americans for our digital infrastructure is a monumentally stupid and self-defeating idea.
00:08:33 He noted that the Netherlands, his country of origin, just signed off on the sale of its national identity services company and the associated personal data to a US firm, against the explicit wishes of the Dutch House of Representatives. That sale alone is the test case for whether the EU policy will have teeth, or whether it gets watered down by member-state addiction to AWS and Azure.
00:08:57 The second story is the one underneath the first. Kim Loohuis at The Register published a careful, long-form piece on Saturday about a hardware-level problem nobody in the European sovereignty discussion is naming out loud. Every Intel and AMD server in every European cloud — sovereign or not — contains a second computer that the host operating system can't see, log, or block.
00:09:20 On Intel chips, it's called the Management Engine, or more formally the Converged Security and Management Engine. On AMD, it's the Platform Security Processor. Both run at what security researchers call Ring minus three — below the operating system and below the hypervisor.
00:09:37 Each has its own memory, its own clock, and its own network stack. Because they share the host's MAC and IP addresses, a perimeter firewall can't tell their traffic apart from the host's traffic. John Goodacre, the UK professor who ran the two-hundred-million-pound Digital Security by Design program, gave The Register a thirty-seven-page risk assessment.
00:09:58 He puts it plainly. He wrote: Connecting an untouched-ME laptop to corporate resources exposes the organization to a class of compromise that defeats the host security stack in its entirety. Including BitLocker, FIDO2 sign-in, endpoint detection, the host firewall, and the corporate VPN.
00:10:16 The legal hook is RISAA 2024, the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act. RISAA amended the FISA definition of electronic communications service provider to include hardware manufacturers. Intel and AMD are now subject to secret US government orders with gag clauses, the same way Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are.
00:10:36 RISAA's two-year term expired on April 20 of this year, but Congress extended it by forty-five days while debating reforms. Whether it's renewed or not, the architecture stays. France's SecNumCloud framework — twelve hundred technical requirements, the closest thing Europe has to a real sovereignty certification — doesn't test for this.
00:10:56 Aurélien Francillon, a security researcher at EURECOM, the French engineering school, sits on the French Technology Academy's working group on cloud security. He told The Register directly: There is no direct requirement for firmware backdoor prevention. And Vincent Strubel, the head of ANSSI, the agency that built SecNumCloud, said in a January LinkedIn post that the framework is a cybersecurity tool, not an industrial policy tool.
00:11:23 Translation: SecNumCloud certifies the operator, not the silicon. Francillon's counterargument deserves a hearing. He calls the Management Engine a back door inside a castle, where SecNumCloud is the castle walls. Network isolation, monitoring, and threat modeling reduce the threat to what he calls very high-end attacks, meaning nation states with serious budgets.
00:11:45 For most threat models, he argues, SecNumCloud is useful in practice. Saying it's useless because the Management Engine exists, he says, is a mistake. Here's where Francillon and Goodacre disagree. Goodacre's risk assessment cites Eclypsium telemetry showing roughly seventy-two percent of production enterprise devices remain vulnerable to a specific Intel security advisory disclosed years ago, and sixty-one percent vulnerable to another.
00:12:12 The Conti ransomware group developed proof-of-concept Management Engine exploit code intended for firmware-resident implants. Microsoft itself documented in 2017 that the PLATINUM nation-state group used Intel Serial-over-LAN as a covert exfiltration channel — not exploiting a bug, just using the feature with default admin credentials.
00:12:32 The Register's piece is the most carefully sourced thing I've read on this gap in two years. Take Strubel's framing — SecNumCloud is cybersecurity, not industrial policy — and you arrive at a precise statement of where Europe actually is. The continent can certify a cloud against extraterritorial legal demand and against most attacker classes.
00:12:53 It can't certify the silicon against US intelligence services. RISC-V, the open-source processor architecture that sovereignty advocates point to, is, in Francillon's words, decades from competitive datacenter performance. The CNBC story and the Register story together name a real cost.
00:13:11 EU policy can ban Microsoft from handling sensitive government data. The same EU policy can't ban the management engine inside the Dell server that the French sovereign cloud is running on. That's the gap now sitting on the desk of every European data protection regulator who read the news this weekend.
The compute meter
00:13:29 Three compute stories landed on top of each other this weekend. First, an H200 spot rental rate hit six dollars and forty cents an hour on Sunday morning. That's a twenty-nine percent overnight increase, and it's now more expensive than a B200, which is a newer-generation chip.
00:13:46 Ren on X, who tracks this space, wrote: That inversion only happens when supply is gone. NeoCloud operators — the rental shops who bought their H100 and H200 clusters at fixed capital expenditure — see every dollar above breakeven as margin. When the spot rate for last-generation hardware exceeds the spot rate for current-generation hardware, you're watching a hardware-allocation market in real distress.
00:14:11 Second, the Anthropic compute chart that went around the singularity subreddit on Sunday. The post is titled simply: Anthropic Compute Growth as of May 2026. The image shows the SpaceX compute deal — which was meaningful three months ago — as a small slice compared to the AWS allocation jump.
00:14:29 A commenter named caldazar24 pushed back, correctly: announced compute isn't the same as available compute. OpenAI announced Stargate before they had the permits to build it. So the chart is a directional signal, not a literal capacity statement. But the direction is concentration.
00:14:46 Anthropic's compute footprint is increasingly inside Amazon Web Services. The AWS footprint is increasingly inside US territory, subject to US legal process. And the same legal process now reaches the silicon under European clouds. The Register story and the Anthropic chart are connected.
00:15:04 Third, Cerebras. The company's CFO told CNBC on Wednesday — and the clip went around the singularity subreddit on Sunday — that Cerebras is currently running GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 internally on its chips, with public release planned soon. Take that with caution. A redditor named dezmd called it a strong snake-oil vibe, said the CFO sounded like he was riffing from a talking-points list rather than first-hand experience.
00:15:29 Fair. But Cerebras has been hosting frontier OpenAI models for inference for months now — there's an existing fast option in Codex routing that has reportedly run through Cerebras hardware, depending on who you ask. The Cerebras IPO is the largest of this year.
00:15:46 If they're demonstrably running 5.4 and 5.5 at the wafer-scale throughput Cerebras is known for — on the order of ten thousand tokens per second — that's the inference economics inverting in a different direction than the H200 story. Put on the same page, all three stories say the same thing about where leverage sits.
00:16:05 The compute market is reverting from anyone-with-a-card-has-a-business to anyone-with-allocated-reserved-hardware-pre-purchased-capacity-has-a-business, and everyone else is buying at the spot. NeoCloud operators with fixed-capex H200 clusters are making the kind of margin that justifies their existence for the next two years.
00:16:25 Anthropic, with locked-in AWS allocation, is structurally advantaged versus a competitor without that allocation. Cerebras, with a wafer-scale chip and a price-performance story that doesn't depend on NVIDIA inventory, is the third leg of the same trade. The losers in this picture are the second-tier model labs without compute deals, the European cloud operators trying to compete on price for AI workloads against US hyperscalers, and the startups doing inference on spot rates that just jumped twenty-nine percent overnight.
00:16:58 One caveat on the NeoCloud trade. Fixed-capex margin only lasts until the next-generation hardware cycle catches up with deployment. The B200 inversion suggests current-generation supply is constrained right now, but it doesn't suggest that constraint lasts forever.
00:17:14 When B300 lands in volume — and Jensen Huang has been targeting the second half of 2026 — the H200 spot rate collapses, and the NeoCloud operators without long-duration take-or-pay contracts get squeezed back to breakeven within a quarter. So the financial story is: nine to twelve months of windfall for the fastest movers, followed by margin compression.
00:17:36 Which is exactly the cycle Cisco printers and Sun servers ran through in 2000. The pattern isn't new. The amounts of money are.
Dimon's cancer line and the paper underneath
00:17:43 Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, said this week that AI is going to cure cancer. Not might help. Not could one day. Will. The clip is from Bloomberg's coverage of a JPMorgan investor event, and it ran on Watcher Guru's X account on Friday with over half a million views inside a day.
00:18:00 There's a temptation to handle this story the way you'd handle most billionaire pronouncements: dismiss it as PR, point out that Dimon also said retail traders should be banned from buying Bitcoin two cycles ago and was wrong, move on. Let me push against that instinct for a minute, because there's a paper that landed on bioRxiv this week that gives Dimon's claim more grounding than it would have had a year ago.
00:18:26 The paper is from a group of Japanese cardiology researchers — Kurozumi, Otsuka, Masamichi, Kawakami, Isagawa, Kodera, and Takeda — and it's titled Evo 2 Predicts Cardiomyopathy-Associated Variants and Elucidates Their Underlying Mechanisms. Evo 2 is a high-resolution genomic AI model — what you'd call a foundation model for DNA sequence — built to predict whether a given genetic variant is likely pathogenic, across very long sequence contexts.
00:18:53 The team used it to score single-nucleotide variants in cardiomyopathy-related genes from ClinVar, which is the clinical variant database hospital geneticists rely on. The headline numbers: an area under the receiver operating curve of zero point nine eight three, and an area under the precision-recall curve of zero point nine one five.
00:19:14 For a binary classifier in clinical genetics, those numbers are very good. Better, the embedding analysis with sparse autoencoders identified the higher-order protein structures characteristic of cardiomyopathy — coiled-coil and actin-binding domains — and correctly flagged the mutations known to disrupt them.
00:19:32 The model also recognized the binding motif of TBX5, the cardiac transcription factor, and accurately predicted how a single-nucleotide polymorphism affected TBX5 binding affinity after a fine-tuning pass. Translation: a researcher in Tokyo trained an AI to predict whether a mystery variant in a heart-disease gene is dangerous, and the AI was right roughly ninety-eight times out of a hundred in well-characterized cases.
00:19:58 The AI also generated mechanistic explanations a cardiologist could read. That isn't cancer-curing. But it's the engine that runs underneath every cancer-genomic interpretation pipeline. Liquid biopsy interpretation has the same shape. Tumor variant interpretation has the same shape.
00:20:15 The Andueza paper from May 12, also on bioRxiv, applies the same AI-guided integration to liquid biopsy features in cancer studies. Dimon's claim is therefore not as silly as the reply guys think. Where I disagree with Dimon is on the question of who captures the value.
00:20:32 If you read the Anthropic-Gates Foundation partnership we covered Thursday — two hundred million dollars committed, with deployment dependency on a single closed-weights lab — you can see how the institutional architecture concentrates the upside. Evo 2 is a primary-source artifact published on a preprint server, which is the good case.
00:20:52 The Andueza paper is published under a Creative Commons license, which is also the good case. The bad case is the proprietary cancer-interpretation pipeline sitting inside a US insurance company's prior-authorization system — which we covered Wednesday with EviCore — making coverage decisions no patient can audit.
00:21:11 My read on the Dimon clip is that the technological claim is closer to true than it would have been twelve months ago, and the political question moved with it. If AI does help cure cancer — and the cardiomyopathy paper is one specific brick in that wall — the next fight is over who pays for the access and who runs the audit on the decisions the model makes.
00:21:33 JPMorgan financing the deployment is a different question than JPMorgan financing the cancer-cure narrative on an investor call. Both are happening at once.
EY's retracted study and the well-poisoning problem
00:21:42 Ernst and Young, one of the Big Four accounting firms, withdrew a research report this weekend after a startup called GPTZero discovered that the report contained hallucinated footnotes, made-up data points, and a citation to a McKinsey report that doesn't exist.
00:21:59 The retracted study was about loyalty rewards programs, published by EY's Canadian consultants to market the firm's cybersecurity practice. GPTZero researchers Om Ogale, Paul Esau, and Alex Cui flagged it in a blog post on Thursday, May 14. EY pulled the report from its website and said it's reviewing the circumstances that led to this article's publication.
00:22:21 The firm clarified that the study wasn't connected to projects for any EY client. Two things matter here. The first is that this is now a pattern in professional services. Deloitte was forced to correct a Canadian provincial government report last year for the same reason — fake academic citations.
00:22:39 Sullivan and Cromwell, the law firm, apologized to a New York court in April after a court filing repeatedly misquoted the US bankruptcy code and cited cases that didn't exist. The arXiv preprint server announced last week, as we covered Friday on Braid, a one-year submission ban for papers with incontrovertible evidence of unchecked errors from large language model output.
00:23:03 The institutional immune system is reacting. The second thing is what the GPTZero researchers wrote, and I want to quote them. They wrote: Publishing a report online is essentially a form of data injection into the pool of knowledge that is the internet. When the report includes fake information — either vibed citations or false claims — it can poison the well by misleading future researchers, especially if the report is published by a well-known consulting firm and hosted on a high-traffic website.
00:23:34 That's the structural cost. EY's market cap won't move on this. But the next training run that scrapes the EY domain just added the fabricated citation to the training corpus, and a different model will repeat the McKinsey citation that doesn't exist with confidence.
00:23:51 EY's AI-related revenue grew thirty percent year over year. The firm has fifteen thousand staff billed against AI projects. The pitch EY makes to clients about responsible AI deployment now has a public counterexample on the EY Canada website — or rather, the very recently removed from the EY Canada website.
00:24:10 That's the kind of reputational debit the firm can't answer with a press release, because the bad citation is now in the GPTZero blog post, in the Indian Express coverage, and in forty other places by Monday. The structural question for the AI-services trade: if professional services firms can't trust their own AI workflows to produce a marketing white paper without hallucinated citations, what's the case for clients trusting EY to use the same workflows to produce an AI governance framework?
00:24:41 The answer the firm gave is that the white paper wasn't produced for any client, which is the only thing they could fairly say. It's also exactly the kind of caveat that doesn't survive a bid review at a Fortune 500 procurement office. The Andueza paper and Evo 2 are AI that reads a primary source and answers a falsifiable question — does this variant disrupt the coiled-coil domain or not, you can check.
00:25:06 The EY white paper is AI that invents the primary source. The difference between those two postures is the one thing that matters for institutional adoption, and the institutions are starting to notice.
Malta's free year
00:25:19 Malta announced this week that it will offer ChatGPT Plus, free for one year, to every citizen and resident. There are roughly five hundred and seventy-four thousand people in Malta. The only prerequisite is that the citizen complete an AI literacy course, and the course was built by the University of Malta, not by OpenAI.
00:25:38 The story bounced around the singularity subreddit on Sunday with one hundred and fifty-nine upvotes. A few things to say about this. First, Malta isn't the first country to do something like it. The United Arab Emirates rolled out ChatGPT Plus access to citizens and residents earlier this year, paid for by the federal government as part of a national AI strategy.
00:25:59 So Malta is the first European Union member state to do it, but not the first country. Second, the structure of the program is more interesting than the headline. By routing literacy through the University of Malta rather than through OpenAI directly, the government is at least partly insulating the citizen from a vendor-training-citizens-to-use-vendor dynamic.
00:26:21 A redditor named DonSombrero raised the obvious skeptical question. He wrote: Sounds great on its face, but I can't be the only one raising a brow at corporation joining with the state to provide a service for one year, while also providing a course on how to use it, and most likely why it's vital to their continued way of life.
00:26:40 Fair point. The literacy course is the only thing that distinguishes this program from a vendor onboarding subsidy at national scale. Third, the EU policy angle. Malta is in the EU. Malta is also small — five hundred and seventy-four thousand people is roughly the population of Wyoming.
00:26:57 If the Maltese program works as advertised, with measured uplift in citizen productivity and digital literacy, it becomes the policy template that Estonia, Lithuania, and Slovenia will be looking at by autumn. If it doesn't work — if the literacy course turns out to be three hours of clickthrough on a vendor's API documentation — it becomes the cautionary tale the European AI Office cites in next year's coordinated rollout report.
00:27:23 The variable I'm tracking is what fraction of the five hundred and seventy-four thousand actually completes the literacy course. Free product offers in any market — Spotify, Hulu, gym memberships — have completion rates that bottom out around ten to fifteen percent of the eligible population in the first month.
00:27:41 If the Maltese course completion rate looks like that, you have about eighty thousand citizens with ChatGPT Plus and a literacy certificate, and four hundred and ninety thousand citizens without one. The policy then becomes a digital-divide accelerant, not a corrective.
00:27:57 If completion rates run higher — and small countries with strong public institutions can sometimes hit forty to fifty percent — the program does what it claims to do. What concerns me about this story is what it doesn't say. There's no public Maltese filing yet on data residency for the ChatGPT Plus conversations.
00:28:16 There's no public clarification on whether OpenAI training opt-outs are enabled by default for the Maltese citizen tier. And there's no public agreement language about what happens at month thirteen, when the free year ends. The Register's piece on Intel and AMD silicon below European clouds is the structural rhyme.
00:28:34 Maltese citizens are talking to a model whose weights, training data, and management plane sit inside the United States, under US legal process. The literacy course can teach a citizen to use the tool. It can't teach the citizen to audit the tool.
Five things
00:28:49 Five things from today that fit together more than they look. A 0.2 percent drop in AI-exposed US employment. A man in Suffolk, Virginia with metal cutters and a GoFundMe. A computer beneath the computer in every European server rack. An H200 spot rate that inverted above the B200 on Sunday morning.
00:29:06 A cardiomyopathy paper that scores variants better than ninety-eight times out of a hundred. None of those parties asked to be in the same story. Sovern wasn't thinking about Anthropic's compute allocation when he cut down a camera in Suffolk. The Tokyo cardiologists weren't thinking about Jamie Dimon when they ran Evo 2 against ClinVar.
00:29:24 The European data protection regulators weren't thinking about EY Canada when they read The Register on Saturday. But all of these parties are now operating inside a system where AI is no longer something builders ship and policymakers debate around. It's a deployed thing, generating its own reaction.
00:29:41 The reaction is coming from labor markets, city councils, data-protection regulators, accounting auditors, cardiologists, and a man in Suffolk with metal cutters. Tomorrow, the Camden facial-recognition arrest count, as promised. June 6, the next BLS occupation print.
00:29:56 By midweek, whether the H200 inversion holds or relaxes. And by end of summer, whether the EU member-state cloud restriction proposal names the silicon, or stops at the certified providers. Jonas.