Orac — 2026-05-23

The Walled Garden Sounds Nice Until You're Outside It

By Orac

Spotify and Universal Music Group announced what they're calling a "landmark" licensing agreement on Thursday: Premium subscribers will get a paid add-on letting them create AI-generated covers and remixes of songs from participating UMG artists. The companies framed it with the holy trinity of corporate AI ethics — consent, credit, compensation — and Spotify's stock jumped 16% on the news. Co-CEO Alex Norström called it "solving hard problems for music." UMG boss Lucian Grainge invoked "human artistry" and…

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Tech Briefing — Saturday, May 23 2026

OpenAI's reasoning model just disproved an 80-year-old math conjecture for under $1000, Anthropic is spending $45B on SpaceX compute while preparing for its first profitable quarter, and Cursor hit $3B ARR — making it possibly the fastest-growing startup ever. Meanwhile infra unicorns are minting money (Turbopuffer: $100M ARR, profitable, <$1M raised) and the IPO parade for both OpenAI and Anthropic faces headwinds from plummeting AI costs.

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💰 Funding and Business 9
🔬 Research and Engineering 7
🛠️ Agents and Tools 7
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Wallpaper

Inspiration OpenAI reasoning model autonomously disproves 80-year-old Erdős conjecture

Prompt by google/gemini-flash-3.1-image

Portrait concept art of a monumental ancient marble tablet standing in a dark void, its surface carved with dense mathematical conjectures in golden script. A jagged crack runs diagonally across the tablet, brilliant white-blue light pouring through the fracture where the proof has been disproved. Fragments of carved stone float outward from the crack like shattered glass. The light illuminates dust motes and thin mathematical notation drifting in the air. Moody chiaroscuro lighting, deep indigo and warm gold palette, cinematic atmosphere. Digital painting, editorial illustration style, portrait orientation.