Boom Supersonic's plans to launch its Overture passenger jet by 2029 are facing growing doubts as the company pivots toward manufacturing natural gas turbines for AI data centers. Ars Technica reports: One of the company's first customers, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, has expressed doubts about Boom's original plan to deliver the first Overture supersonic airliner in 2029. Kirby's latest frank assessment came during an interview with the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast that appeared on October 28, 2026. "'29 is their official timeline," Kirby told podcast host Monica Langley. "It's not going to happen in '29 -- it's going to take longer."

[...] Much of Boom's recent focus has been on developing natural gas turbines to power AI data centers as an additional revenue stream. On October 22, the company unveiled another factory in Centennial, Colorado, dedicated to producing a 42-megawatt natural gas turbine called Superpower for data centers. [...] Boom described its new Superpower factory as making turbine parts while still undergoing construction. It aims to deliver the first gas turbines to AI data center customers in mid-2027 while ramping up annual production to 25 turbines in 2028 and 50 turbines by 2029.

[...] Still, Boom has characterized the development of a gas turbine for data centers as being synergistic with its design of the Symphony engine for the Overture airliner. During the October announcement, it also described having completed a prototype turbine core, called Sprint Core, that is intended to eventually power both the Superpower gas turbine and Symphony engine for the airliner. That turbine core is set to undergo testing at the Colorado Air & Space Port, with Boom planning to fire the turbine for the first time before Thanksgiving. That would be a concrete development milestone, but the company still has much to do in proving it can get both its AI data center and supersonic airliner ventures off the ground.

Google's first experimental space-based data center is operational after launching earlier this month, successfully running its Gemma 4 AI model aboard a satellite and generating a haiku about being in orbit. TechCrunch reports: The satellite, which carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and generates up to 1 kW of electricity, is intended to pave the way for future networks of close-flying satellites performing large inference workloads in orbit. However, the power demands of the TPU mean it can only turn one on for about 20 minutes at a time, complicating the already tricky business of space-to-ground communications.

After a commissioning process that tested out the satellite's subsystems over about three weeks, the spacecraft was ready to work. When engineers on the ground sent their first prompt this week, they asked the model pre-loaded onto the satellite, Google DeepMind's Gemma 4, to write a haiku about being in space. And thus:

Blue marble below
Data streams in silent grace
Starlight feeds my core.

The ongoing test campaign will examine how the chips perform under thermal stress and in the space radiation environment. [...] If the TPUs onboard this spacecraft prove capable, the next step will be launching two more satellites equipped with the advanced chips in 2027. Those spacecraft will support higher power generation and demonstrate inter-satellite optical links.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Gen Z can't catch a break. Entry-level jobs are vanishing; some 40% of bosses say they plan to hire fewer grads because AI can do the job cheaper, and young workers are routinely slammed for showing up late and refusing to put in overtime for free. Cisco's president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel isn't buying it -- he's just handed one of the company's biggest jobs to a 27-year-old he found hidden in the org chart "five levels" below him. "I've given him unlimited tokens because he's going to refactor code," Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner. "So I'm like, you can go, you can go nuts."

The "him" is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, or "Paddy," as Patel affectionately calls him. He joined Cisco in 2025 after the $429 billion tech giant acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup Krishnamurthy cofounded in 2023. And despite coming in as a former founder with CEO experience, he was, in Patel's words, "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic." That changed when Patel dropped into Cisco's San Francisco office, and the pair got talking.

Krishnamurthy reckoned he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code with a two-person team. Patel says even the most AI-forward people on his own team weren't thinking that way. So he has given himself four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months. Now, he's on the hunt for more Paddys: young hires who will "challenge the system and the status quo," or, as he puts it, be "an energizer bunny that just goes out and kind of revs everyone up." "The only way for us to keep accelerating is to make sure we're surrounded by people with a broad range of experience," said Patel. "Roughly one-third of my team is experienced, scaled operators who understand how the Cisco engine works. The second third are systems thinkers from the market who bring the outside-in perspective. And the final third is made of entrepreneurial founders, CEOs, and engineers who are AI-native who operate in founder mode."

"Either of these groups by themselves aren't nearly as potent as when all three work together. It's what creates magic."

In an opinion piece for 404 Media, Matthew Gault argues that Apple has entered its "slop era," abandoning its reputation for innovative hardware in favor of recycled ideas and questionable design choices. Here's an excerpt: My ears perked up when I heard Apple's new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it's releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Now it's borrowing tired ideas from its competitors and launching hardware its previous leaders rejected.

The once dominant company is struggling to find its feet in an AI-driven post-Tim Cook world. John Ternus is the new CEO -- a 25 year veteran of the company with a track record of pushing harebrained hardware schemes like the much reviled Touch Bar and lawsuit inducing butterfly keyboard.

With Ternus at the helm, I feel there's a good chance Apple's best days are behind it, that it will have to make do with less, that it's declasse. Apple, blindsided by AI and relying on crowdpleasing hardware gimmicks, is downwardly mobile. It's in its slop era. The company that once asked consumers to "Think Different" is now releasing hardware that's just like everything else on the market.

Meta has reached an undisclosed settlement in another social media addiction lawsuit, avoiding a trial scheduled for next month and leaving Snap as the sole remaining defendant. Engadget reports: The lawsuit was brought by an 18-year-old woman from Mississippi known as K.D.B who, according to Reuters, has "described staying awake for hours scrolling social media, losing focus in class and engaging in self-harm using methods shown in social media videos." Jury selection kicked off earlier this week in Los Angeles.

On Friday, K.D.B's lawyer announced that she had reached a settlement with Meta after previously settling with TikTok and YouTube. "We remain committed to improving safety for kids on social media apps and holding tech companies accountable, and we are pleased to have brought this matter to a just resolution on behalf of our client," attorney Emily Jeffcott said in a statement.

Now, Snap is the only remaining defendant in the case. CEO Evan Spiegel is expected to testify in the trial that could last several weeks. If he does take the stand, it will be the first time the Snap founder has appeared in a social media addiction trial. Snap previously settled in another high-profile case involving similar claims. A jury later ruled against Meta and YouTube in the trial and the two were ordered to pay $6 million in damages.

"Looks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to own all the computing resources and rent out terminals to the world as a way of propping up his business plan, now that debt-ridden AI companies are teetering on the edge," writes ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure. Tom's Hardware reports: In an interview over beers with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman said that local inference, and, by extension, people having DRAM in computers at home, is "quite terrible." When discussing local inference on home computers with open-source models, Altman discussed the assumption that people will be able to run local AI on their own computers, the ones they may already own or want to build.

Then he explained why that's a bad idea (at the 29-minute mark): "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time," Altman said. "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

While OpenAI does have some open-source models, its primary business is in closed-source models that run in data centers, so he's really defending the company's business model. OpenAI isn't exactly threatened by some laptops and gaming rigs just yet, but local AI could mean people one day paying less for subscriptions to models like GPT-6 Luna if they have the power to run them at home. Altman's talk suggests that the company would prefer that more RAM go to OpenAI's data centers rather than home computers, which also sparks enthusiast fears of not being able to own your own hardware or software, but rather rent an agent and a computer in the cloud.

The Justice Department has charged five people in a crackdown on "ghost student" fraud, in which scammers allegedly use stolen identities and AI to enroll fake students in colleges, complete coursework, and collect federal student loan funds. Ars Technica reports: In a press release Thursday, the Department of Justice said it had uncovered a large-scale scheme relying partly on AI. The DOJ seized more than $750,000 in cryptocurrency from "a network associated with Kenyan nationals" after data analysis helped flag likely fraudsters. Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the DOJ's National Fraud Enforcement Division credited new fraud-detection measures implemented by the Trump administration for the arrests. He said that "this is the first international seizure of its kind in Kenya," while warning fraudsters that the crackdown has only just begun.

[...] At a press conference, McDonald was joined by FBI and Department of Education officials to explain how the scheme works. It starts with bad actors purchasing personally identifiable information (PII) of Americans -- most frequently targeting high school graduates who never attended college and went straight into the workforce. Once they have that sensitive data, they fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) while seeking to enroll in universities and community colleges. If accepted, student aid is distributed first to schools to cover tuition and fees, but any leftover money is deposited into bank accounts controlled by the fraudsters. Dozens of Americans have opened bank accounts to act as money mules for fraudsters, the DOJ said.

To keep money flowing, bad actors use AI to fill out applications, complete coursework, and even make it appear that a student is attending virtual sessions. "It looks like the ghost student is actually completing the class," McDonald said at the press conference. "Some even create the appearance of a fake student in an online classroom to trick schools into believing a real person is present. The goal is to keep the ghost student in school for as long as possible, semester after semester after semester." So far, the DOE has "identified over 830,000 potentially fraudulent federal student aid accounts created by using this PII of US citizens," officials said at the press conference. If all those accounts are ghost students, total losses come close to $130 million, the DOJ said.

U.S. technology stocks plunged for a second consecutive day on Friday as investors grew increasingly concerned about the enormous cost of artificial intelligence development and whether those investments will pay off. The Nasdaq fell more than 3.5%, while Intel shares dropped as much as 30%, Reddit fell 26%, and Alphabet extended its losses after shedding more than $500 billion in market value Thursday. The BBC notes that Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft have collectively committed to spending $800.6 billion on AI in 2026. From the report: Chris Low, from investment management firm FHN Financial, said the bulk of what was happening in the stock market was in reaction to some of the biggest tech players such as Amazon and Google. He told Reuters the companies were "showing some pretty significant growing pains as they aggressively pursue the AI build-out." "The thinking is that these signs suggest that the entire sector is going to slow down."

Kathleen Brookes, research director at trading firm XTB, said there have been many ups and downs in AI trade in recent months. "Investors have turned ruthless, punishing any signs of disappointment in [third quarter] earnings," she said. "The AI trade has had a good run in recent years, but now investors want payback, and companies like Alphabet and Intel are in the crosshairs." [...] Brookes noted that November is typically a strong month for stocks. "If we see AI stocks continue to struggle in the coming days, it could suggest the AI trade is past its peak, and investors will be looking for a new theme to drive markets," she said.