making

An Air Canada pilot has been flying for 16 years without making a single mistake. And they have arrested him for one detail: he did not have a license

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Almost 20 years goes a long way, whether you are an airplane pilot or not. But if you are also one, you will have had time to accumulate almost a thousand international flights, take the controls of different types of aircraft and accumulate good money. It is the summary that Geoffrey Wall could make of his life when, once retired, he told this to his grandchildren or, who knows, told it to all of us in a book. One more story. Tasteless, without substance. But Geoffrey Wall may say otherwise. Yes, you can tell that He flew airplanes for decadeswho took the controls of the best-known commercial airplanes on more than 900 occasions and who accumulated millions of euros taking hundreds of lives from one place to another through the clouds. But he will also be able to tell how he managed to trick his airline into flying planes for 16 years without the relevant license to do so. Everything good, except for one small detail Because the future doesn’t look good for Geoffrey Wall. They count in cnn that the police knocked on his door and he was arrested. The reason: Air Canada notified authorities that one of its pilots was flying with a false license. Not only that, he had been doing it from 2009 until last year. The deception was discovered during a routine check. Nobody had reported irregularities in the controls, no aircraft had been put at risk. But in 2025, during a review of its documentation, it was found that there were some anomalies. By then, the pilot had been flying airplanes within the company for 27 years. However, the company points out that Wall began flying fraudulently starting in 2009. Then, the pilot was promoted to captain and was able to take command of the aircraft and direct operations. The small detail is that he falsified the ATPL-A, the highest level pilot’s license. At a press conference to explain what happened, Deputy Chief Nick Milinovich, of the Peel Regional Police (southern Ontario, Canada), pointed out that “It’s very similar to a doctor who is licensed to practice family medicine but is performing brain surgery in his office.” And he once again emphasized the importance of having the appropriate licenses to perform a job. Especially if in that job you have taken thousands of people through the air. The authorities have explained that the pilot left his job in 2025, just before “Project Icarus”, as the police work has been called internally, started rolling last January. months later They have managed to prove the falsification of the documents and on June 1 they arrested the pilot. However, Air Canada emphasizes that its pilots pass tests regularly and that at no time were passengers put in danger. They emphasize that Geoffrey Wall amply demonstrated his abilities to pilot the Boeing 767, 777 and 787 to which he had access during the last 16 years. During that time it is estimated that Wall earned more than two million dollars with his salary but will now have to face seven criminal charges, including fraud for money earned without a license and falsification of documents. In addition, it has already been fined by Transport Canada, the Canadian Government department in charge of ensuring compliance with all mobility regulations in the country. Photo | David Shypers In Xataka | Without a pilot or help from the ground: this is how the University of Munich has achieved the completely autonomous landing of a plane

In Spain, eating has become a procedure that must be quick and easy. And that is making gold for the supermarkets that prepare dishes

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When it comes to eating, we Spaniards no longer want only tasty dishes. We want time. We want flexibility. We want an assortment that allows us to choose. And if possible, we want all of the above at a good price. Whoever can square the circle will have the keys to a billion-dollar business. For now, the data from Worldpanel by Numerator reveal that more and more people are finding this offer in the prepared foods section of the supermarket, which in just four years has seen its sales increased by 55%. The curious thing is that this percentage reveals much more about us as consumers than about the business itself. The figure: 55%. The food sector has been around for a long time emitting signals about what the business of prepared food is growing in Spain, but few (or none) have been as clear as the one just shared by Worldpanel by Numerator. In your report ‘Convenience, the super power that changes everything’, the platform specialized in data and market analysis, has revealed that sales of ready-to-eat dishes have skyrocketed 55% from 2022. A name: Mercadona. Worldpanel has not provided more detailed data on demand, net consumption or per capita intake, but the percentage is still revealing. Above all because it helps us better understand how the demand for this type of product works, how the market behaves and who its protagonists are. As a reference, Worldpanel calculates that Mercadona monopolizes “one third” of the growth recorded in the category since 2020. It is not at all surprising if you take into account the commitment that the Valencian chain has made for its ‘Ready to eat’ section. Since its launch in 2018, it has been expanding it through its network of stores in Spain and Portugal until closing in 2025. almost 1,500 points selling and conquering much of it of the demand. If both prepared food and pre-cooked foods (creams, packaged chicken or refrigerated pizza, for example) are taken into account, last year Mercadona entered 3 billion of euros between both countries. Habit changes. That the prepared food business is growing so quickly is just a reflection of our own changes as consumers. We buy differently than our parents did because our priorities are also different. In the same study Worldpanel reveals two data that prove it. First, the time we spend cooking has been reducing until it remains at 24.5 minutes a day. Second, that 41% of consumers (5% more than in 2020) admits that he usually eats in a hurry, without time to relax. They are dynamics that fit well with what the prepared food sections of Mercadona or other chains offer, such as Alcampo, Carrefour or Lidland they give them a clear competitive advantage compared to traditional restaurants. As if that were not enough, our way of eating seems to be simplifying little by little: the occasions in which we have lunch with a single dish have increased about 5.5% since 2020. If we talk about dinners, that percentage is 3.3%. Is it that important? Yes a lot. So much so, in fact, that what is catapulting the sale of prepared dishes is not their greater or lesser attractiveness, the variety of the offering or their healthy appearance. When Worldpanel technicians asked customers what was the deciding factor that led them to buy convenience food instead of going to a bar or restaurant, about a third (28.4%) responded that the price. That is the factor that most often tips the balance on the side of Mercadona and other similar supermarket chains. The second is convenience. 13.4% stated that what they value most is speed, 10.4% the possibility of taking advantage of visits to the supermarket to make other purchases and 10.1% the flexibility of being able to consume food when and where it suits them best. That last piece of information is key. Although in recent years several chains of supermarkets have begun to enable spaces in their premises so that people can eat there, most of the customers take the dishes home. It occurs in 78% of cases. If we talk about large consumption in general (not just food) the percentage of intra-domestic spending is around 71%. Image | Carrefour In Xataka | Madrid is encountering a growing problem in its metro stations: the illegal sale of street food

It’s about making a movie for a non-existent audience.

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The Masters of the Universe movie It has good reviews, a seemingly infallible fan base and an 87% audience rating. on Rotten Tomatoes. And after its first weekend it is already one of the biggest box office failures of 2026: it seems that the inhabitants of Eternia cannot escape the curse of their audiovisual adaptations, which has followed them since that distant version of the Cannon of 1987. Although more prosaic issues come into play here than an old and endearing evil eye. The figures. On the weekend of June 5 to 7, ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’ raised 29.3 million dollars in the United States and 25 million in the 86 countries where it was released simultaneously, adding a global total of 54.3 million. It is calculated that Amazon MGM invested between 170 and 200 million dollars in production, which would make it necessary for the film, adding marketing expenses, to earn about 425 million just to recover what was invested. For now, Amazon denies the biggest one: Kevin Wilson, head of domestic distribution at Amazon MGM, stated in a statement that the weekend represented “a very solid start” and that the audience response had been “fantastic.” The sights are set, very clearly, on Prime Video. The eighties. The Masters of the Universe have been starring in the same story for about forty years. In August 1987, Cannon Films, the Israeli-American production company known for its films with Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson and other B-movie action stars, released the first live-action adaptation of the franchise, with Dolph Lundgren in the lead role. The budget was 22 million dollars. The final collection, 17.3 million. The failure, added to that of the tremendous ‘Superman IV’, contributed directly to the bankruptcy of Cannon Films. What is the difference. However, the budget differences between the 1987 version and the 2026 version are very noticeable. In the Cannon Wager, for example, budget constraints prevented Orko or Battle Cat from appearing on screen, and most of the story took place in California, rather than Eternia, which was reduced to a couple of wastelands. The 2026 film has a better billing (although if you ask us, the cast of that one is unbeatable: Lundgren was joined by Frank Langella and Meg Foster) and, in fact, this one recovers sequences that were left out in the eighties, such as Beast Man’s attack on Earth. But it has been of no use. Not understanding. What both versions do share is a commercial logic that has failed: a successful toy should produce a successful movie. When ‘Barbie’ raised 1.4 billion dollars globally in 2023Mattel drew a clear lesson: its toy franchises have economic potential on the big screen. The company launched the development of more than 14 films based on their catalog: ‘Hot Wheels’ produced by JJ Abrams, ‘Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots’ with Vin Diesel, ‘Polly Pocket’, ‘Barney’, ‘Magic 8 Ball’… ‘Masters of the Universe’ is the first big bet of this new era. But that reading of ‘Barbie’ ignores why ‘Barbie’ worked. The box office of Greta Gerwig’s film had nothing to do with nostalgia for the original toys, but rather with turning that starting point into a commentary on gender roles that worked even for an audience that had not held a Barbie in their hands in decades, or even that despised the toy for considering that it conveyed a toxic message, precisely the opposite of that of the film. ‘He-Man’, however, appeals to the nostalgia of a very specific segment of the public, adult men who grew up with the animated series in the eighties, without offering anything to those outside that perimeter. Liminals and parodies. A look at last weekend’s box office shows a panorama that Amazon has not been able to interpret. On the one hand there is the success of ‘Backrooms’. The A24 film, directed by Kane Parsons, cost 10 million dollars and has already been 212 million raised in less than two weeks. His film starts from a internet mythology about liminal spaceswithout a franchise to respect by heart, without decades of commercial history to sell. On the other hand, we have ‘Scary Movie’. The sixth installment of the Wayans brothers’ parody franchise, absent from theaters since 2013, grossed 55 million domestics and 105.5 million global with a budget of only 30 million. The first works because Parsons has an organic connection to the material (twenty years old, YouTuber) and an audience that has followed him from the internet to the living room. ‘Scary Movie’ presents a direct proposal, and although it refers to past hits, it does not appeal to nostalgia and its audience knows exactly what they are going to see. Both films, in different ways, respond to a real demand. And ‘Masters of the Universe’, despite its indisputable virtues, seems designed to respond to a non-existent demand. In Xataka | Something is changing in cinema: films by directors trained on YouTube are eating up Disney films

“When making a will it is wise to leave specific assets to each child and the home to only one”

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There are few situations so capable to break up a family as the distribution of an inheritance. Lawyers know it. Notaries know it. And those involved also know it, sometimes too late, and the always wise proverb already warned: “You know your brothers when there is an inheritance.” They were warned. According to published data by The Newspaperinheritance is main source of legal conflict for 77% of Spaniards. Every year, tens of thousands of families have to decide what to do with an apartment inherited between several siblings, and of course, there are differences of opinion and from them the spark of discord is born. According to the latest data From the INE of March 2026, 47,474 homes transmitted by inheritance have been registered in Spain. Many of them do so under the ownership of several heirs. Trends collected that the distribution of these indivisible assets is the main focus of conflicts between heirs, for this reason, lawyers, notaries and jurists recommend leave the home to a single heir and compensate the rest to avoid co-ownership. You inherit a floor and a problem When two or more siblings inherit a home in equal shares, what the law calls community of property, or condominium. In theory, all They have the same rights about the good. In practice, no one can do anything without the others agreeing. One proposes to sell, another wants to rent and a third I would like to stay and live there. Since no decision can be made without unanimity of the owners, the most frequent result is a complete blockage. The floor is frozen and the relationship between siblings, deteriorated. In an interview for InfobaeAntonio Martínez, founding partner of the Martínez Lafuente Abogados law firmpoints out without hesitation: “when making a will it is wise to leave specific assets to each child and leave the home to only one,” ensuring that sharing property ends up being “a source of problems between the family, unless there is a very close relationship between the siblings.” The most delicate scenario is when one of the heirs already lived in the property or moves in after death. The situation becomes what Martínez calls the “squatter heir”: someone who occupies the good without compensating the rest and who is very difficult to throw out without going to court. What lawyers and notaries propose: assign, not share Instead of making an “equal” distribution among the heirs leading them to become co-owners of the same property, lawyers and notaries agree that the best way to avoid these conflicts is to make use of current legislation, and assign each asset to a specific heir compensating the rest with other goods or money until the value equals reduces the risk of conflict in the resolution of inheritances. The most typical case in Spain is that of an estate made up of an apartment, money in the bank and some land in the town. With two children as heirs, the most practical thing is not to distribute everything 50/50 as one might think, but for one to keep 100% of the home and the other to be compensated with the money and the land, as long as the values ​​are equivalent. Spanish legislation establishes that the distribution is equitablenot that all heirs must be co-owners of all assets. The notary María Cristina Clemente Buendía points out in one of his posts on social networks that this option, the most practical and the least knownalso has a tax advantage: it saves the heirs a subsequent condominium extinction deed so that they can decide who ultimately gets the property, with the corresponding property transfer tax that is generated. And there is another common fear that the notary also clarifies: that monetary compensation between siblings generates additional taxes. a sentence of the TSJ of Madrid of September 2024 made it clear that this economic compensation, intended for offset excess value between the property that one of the heirs was going to receive and the distribution that the rest was going to receive, does not imply an increase in the settlement of inheritance tax. The consensus among professionals in the sector about the convenience of this type of inheritance distribution is broad. Lawyers like Martínez, notaries like Clemente and specialized jurists like David Jiménez agree on the same premise: allocate specific assets to each heir to prevent them from having to share properties they don’t want to share. What does the law say when the conflict has already arrived? The will already exists, the assets are distributed equally and the brothers cannot agree. What options remain? The first is to negotiate. It seems obvious, but many times it does not happen because each party hopes that the other will give in. If dialogue does not work, the Civil Code offers the condominium extinction (articles 400 and 1,062) because no heir is obliged to remain undivided indefinitely. In this way, as David Jimenez explained in one of his videos“one is awarded 100% and financially compensates the other.” The tax advantage of this 100% award is important since, while a conventional sale would be taxed between 6% and 10%, documented legal acts are around 0.5% and 1.5%. according to the autonomous community. Furthermore, as Jiménez points out, “there is no need to pay municipal capital gains when the condominium is terminated, unless there is an excess of allocation.” If the negotiation becomes entrenched, there is figure of the counter-splitter: a lawyer or notary who resolves the distribution objectively and with a binding nature. The judicial route is the last resort, and the most expensive. In a judicial auction, Martínez warns, “the valuation of the property will always be much lower than the market value.” Everyone loses something, but the conflict is unlocked. In Xataka | If the question is how much money can be donated to a child without declaring it to the Treasury, the law makes it clear: none Image | Unsplash (Jakub Zerdzicki, Vitaly Gariev)

Computer companies didn’t make money on computers. What they are doing is making money thanks to AI servers

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On Friday, May 29, Dell shares they grew 39% suddenly. Since becoming a publicly traded company seven years ago, Dell has never had a rise like that. At first glance, this growth would seem strange, but the company has discovered that with stagnant PCs, the focus had to change. Nothing has gone wrong with that turn of the helm, but other traditional PC manufacturers have also taken advantage of the opportunity. The PC is dead, long live the server. In recent years the PC segment has been struggling with low margins and sales that have slowly been slowing down. Manufacturers were totally tied to that situation, but some have taken advantage of the opportunity that AI offered them. Dell and Lenovo rub their hands. Dell published its financial results and they were spectacular: 88% year-on-year growth thanks to the fact that its revenue in the server segment has risen 757%. Not only that, its guidance for this year has improved as well, further boosting confidence in the company’s near-term future. Lenovo also had a fantastic quarter: May was its best month on the stock market since 1999, doubling the value of your shares thanks again to that fever for hardware dedicated to AI. AI as a shield against inflation. The entire sector is experiencing a paradoxical situation: the cost of components such as DRAM memories or SSD units is absolutely shotbut companies are earning more than ever. Dell has tripled its net profit to $3.44 billion, allowing it to offset those costs through almost daily price increases. Lenovo has managed to maintain its margins because once again the market is willing to pay whatever it takes for servers and AI infrastructure. Beyond hyperscalers. One might think that to have resources in the age of AI it would be necessary to turn to hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google), but Dell and Lenovo have shown that their experience in servers has managed to offer an alternative for all types of clients. Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer at Dell, explained that the need for AI hardware is so enormous that this segment continues to break sales records. The PC is no longer the protagonist. Although Dell’s Client Solutions division—which includes its revenue from PC and laptop sales—grew a more than decent 17%, that figure pales in comparison to the 181% growth of its infrastructure division. Lenovo follows a similar line: its shares rose 22% last Friday after confirming that its AI revenues manage to offset the weakness of the traditional PC business. The focus changes. Something similar happens with HPE, the company that spun off from HP to focus on the business segment. Its server business hasn’t grown as much, but they already have contracted orders worth $5 billion and that guarantees a promising second quarter. Other consumer products makers are also migrating to AI infrastructure: Foxconn has absolute trust in which the demand for these components will continue to be exceptional in the coming months, and the same happens with Quanta Computer, which continues to see how its servers do not stop growing in importance in revenue for the company: They were already 80% of the total in the first quarter of 2026. Image | Dell In Xataka | For some people there is something much better than having a PC at home: having a server rack

American chipmakers keep making money there

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China is unequivocally the largest market in the world if we stick to the size of its industrial productionto the volume of your e-commerce already its export capacity. If you look at your adjusted gross domestic product purchasing power parity, also leads. However, if we stick to its nominal gross domestic product and domestic consumption per capita, USA is ahead. Be that as it may, depending on the metric we observe, the country led by Xi Jinping establishes itself as the first or second largest market. Its leadership in some sectors, such as financial services or software, is not entirely clear. And, for this reason, it can be argued. However, in the area of electric cars, steel production either semiconductorsChina leads with authority. In fact, its integrated circuit market is larger than that of the US, Taiwan, South Korea or Japan. And American companies are not at all immune to this reality. The report “Hurun Top 100 American Companies in China 2026”, which has been prepared by the Hurun Research Institute, defend that the income of twenty-six American semiconductor companies grew on average by 20% in China in 2025 despite the trade tensions between the US and China. Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD or Intel are some of them. In the current confrontation scenario It is surprising that China remains such an important market for American IC companies. The Chinese market continues to grow A note before we move forward: Hurun Research Institute is part of Hurun Inc., a media, data analytics and investment company founded in 1999 by British entrepreneur and analyst Rupert Hoogewerf. The report I told you about a few lines above follows the trajectory of 100 publicly traded US companies and pays close attention to their economic performance in China over the past year. Western Digital, Analog Devices and AMD have led this expansion Curiously, 26 of the 100 companies with the highest income from this Asian country belong to the semiconductor sector, which has been classified as strategic by both the US and China. And among the 10 with the highest revenue during 2025 are Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, Broadcom, Applied Materials and AMD. Another interesting fact: Western Digital, Analog Devices and AMD have led this expansion with an interannual growth rate of 43%, 34% and 24% respectively. The three occupy positions 33, 30 and 10 on Hurun’s list. Nvidia is not one of the American companies that has grown the most in China for a compelling reason: it is the most damaged company due to the export controls that the Donald Trump Administration has deployed. Be that as it may, Rupert Hoogewerf has pointed out in a statement that “the strong momentum in this report underscores the Chinese market’s robust demand for computing power for artificial intelligenceof high-end chips, and also the expansion of the semiconductor industrial chain.” Image | Intel More information | SCMP In Xataka | The chip of the future comes from Japan: it is 1,000 times faster than current semiconductors and does not heat up

Uber has spent its annual AI budget in four months because AI is making us addicted to it

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Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga recently explained how his company decided to deploy Claude Code to its 5,000 engineers. Adoption of the tool skyrocketed from 32% to 84% in one month, and everyone started using it so much that Uber ran into a problem: the real cost went from $500 to $2,000 per month per programmer, which destroyed the company’s spending forecasts: In four months the entire annual budget was spent to implement AI in the company. Welcome to the end of AI grants. Microsoft will also control spending. The Uber case is not an isolated event. Microsoft has virtually unlimited computing resources with Azure. However, has made the decision to withdraw Claude Code’s internal licenses from its developers in the Experiences + Devices division. The reason is twofold: first, they want to curb operating spending before the end of their fiscal year. Secondly, they want to force the use of their own tools with GitHub Copilot as the clear protagonist. GitHub ends its flat rate. This company, owned by Microsoft, also wants to prepare for the future, and from June 1, 2026 all GitHub Copilot plans abandon their “flat rate” option to move to a usage-based billing model. The base subscription price remains the same, but is converted into “AI credits” that will be consumed as the model is used. If developers use GitHub Copilot intensively, the credits will run out quickly and the system will stop unless we pay extra to continue working. On GitHub they pointed out that “charging a flat rate for autonomous agents is no longer sustainable.” Source: Hedgie (X). The graphic that explains it all. An X user named Hedgie warned that this is just the beginning and added a useful image to understand what is happening. The traditional SaaS (Software as a Service) software model works in a straight line. You pay a monthly fee and the server costs barely vary whether you use that app or service for ten minutes or ten hours: the profit margin is predictable, and the load is manageable. This is what happens with “flat rates” for streaming services, for example. Whether you watch more or fewer hours of Netflix doesn’t make a big difference to Netflix’s infrastructure. But agentic AI operates under an exponential curve. As seen in the image, when a programming AI agent like Claude Code starts working, it can use thousands or even millions of calls to the provider’s API (in this case, Anthropic) to receive, process and redeem millions of tokens. The flat rates offered by ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro are adequate for conversational use of AI, but AI agents devour tokens and consumption skyrockets. That’s why Anthropic, OpenAI, and others put limits on their flat rates and even prohibit their use for agentic tasks (such as those provided by OpenClaw or scheduling agents). There they ask you to pay per use with the API, and that increases the costs. Crossroads. This situation puts companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in a dilemma. If their clients (like Uber) begin to cut back on the use of AI to protect their budgets, these companies’ revenues may be dampened and that will affect their valuations. The other potential solution is to artificially lower prices to keep those customers happy, but that means absorbing significant operating losses that would harm your profitability. AI dependence and addiction. These companies are realizing that using AI can be really beneficial, but also expensive. Anthropic or OpenAI’s business model is not new, and we have seen that pattern in the past. A company launches a product or service, often free or very cheap, but after gaining a sufficient volume of users it ends up changing its conditions to charge you more and more for that product or service. It’s already happened. We have a good example in Google Photos or streaming services, which trapped us and then squeezed us with increasingly higher monthly fees. With AI the scenario is the same: catch us now with reduced costs and then cover the free service and make us pay if we really want to take advantage of it. There will always be alternatives such as using local models or opting for cheaper platforms, of course, but for those who offer the most advanced models and features the strategy is clear. In Xataka | Nvidia’s financial results are simply dizzying. And it still hasn’t sold a single chip in China

This Prime Video series ends after 7 years and 40 chapters, making history with an audience more divided than ever

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Today Prime Video premieres the last episode of ‘The Boys‘. It is not just any ending: it comes with the highest audience figures in the entire history of the series and, at the same time, with social networks converted into a battlefield over whether this latest installment of the superhero satire has been worth it. What is clear is that one of the most ambitious and rounded productions of the recent era of the streaming. ‘The Boys’ was born as an adaptation of the comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson published between 2006 and 2012 and arrived on Prime Video in July 2019 with a brutal premise:what if superheroes were corporate tools with powers of mass destruction? The series created by Eric Kripke immediately connected with a eerily similar political and information climate to the starting point of the series. In the following seven years, the fiction has accumulated five seasons, a spin-off (‘Gen V’) and an expanding universe that turned Patriot, more than a villain, into a disturbing reflection of reality. For a series to reach its conclusion at the best audience moment in its history is not usual. ‘The Boys’ has done it. The fifth season has reached an average of 57 million viewers per episode on a global scale, the highest figure in the entire history of the series. The season is also among the ten most viewed from any Prime Video original series. All this while there has been a more heterogeneous public reception than ever with the series (often praised by critics, but with very combative detractors for its powerful political message). In addition, this season has encountered criticism of its pacing, filler episodes and lack of action. It has been compared to ‘Game of Thrones’ in its controversial final stretch and although Kripke has defended the decisions that have been made, today is the day to check to what extent the series manages to live up to its prestige. In Xataka | 8 premieres this week on Netflix, including a science fiction and mystery series from the creators of ‘Stranger Things’

A man is making a fortune selling Yu-Gi-Oh cards he found in the trash. Or that’s what he says

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When it comes to collectible card games, the first one that comes to mind is ‘Magic: The Gathering’but he is not the only one. There are other highly sought-after games in the world of collecting such as Yu-Gi-Oh, the card game based on the Japanese manga of the same name and the protagonist of this crazy story. What has happened? They count in 404media that a Texas man claims to have found a stack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in a dumpster, valued at almost $1 million. What at first seemed like a peculiar stroke of luck has unleashed a drama, with part of the community accusing him of having stolen them and his mother intervening to defend him. The beginning of the drama. In late March, several uncut sheets of Yu-Gi-Oh cards appeared on eBay, Facebook, and TikTok. It immediately attracted the attention of the community because it is very rare for these types of leaves to appear for sale. The usual thing when there is a printing error (for example, a color does not come out correctly or a plate is misaligned) is that those sheets are destroyed and in fact Konami, the company behind Yu-Gi-Oh, is very strict about this. They do give out sheets of 3×3 cards as prizes in some tournaments, but they do not allow their sale and in the past they have intervened when they have detected this type of products on online sales platforms. In total, the “stash” consists of more than 500,000 bulk letters and at least 400 uncut factory sheets, almost nothing. Suspicious. Besides the rarity of what he was selling, there were other factors that were highly suspicious. Instead of selling slowly and at high prices, it began to sell at prices well below its value and very visibly on different platforms. In the ads there were blurry photos with hundreds of sheets of ultra-rare letters, piled up like trash. Each of these sheets can cost thousands of dollars, so their value is enormous, and selling one sheet occasionally is one thing, selling hundreds set off all the alarms. Theft accusations. The seller, who claimed on Facebook to have already made “over $60,000 on these damn Yu-Gi-Oh! cards out of the trash,” had very erratic behavior: he posted ads with titles that didn’t match what he was selling, deleted posts, and posted strange comments. The case reached Uncut Sheet Collectors Facebook Groupwhere the majority agreed that the letters had to be stolen, something that did not please the seller, who commented insisting that he had found them in the trash, but no one believed him. Maternal intervention. “Well, let me ask you all: if you found the same thing that was found in the trash (the uncut sheets, the cards and so on), would you try to sell it or not?” said the seller’s mother in one of the posts in the Facebook group. In addition, he asked that a video compiling several advertisements published by his son be removed because it was exposing “his past history.” Until that point, no one had looked into the seller’s past, but the mother’s message caused a Streisand effect and they discovered that he had a criminal record for theft. What was missing. What if in the end he told the truth? It’s not entirely clear, but there are hints that the dumpster story could be true. The strongest one is that the mother owns a company in Dallas, which is where one of the factories is located. Cartamundi, company dedicated to the manufacture and distribution of collectible cards. Furthermore, some of the prints he sent were in very poor condition, which would be consistent with having found them in a container. In redditthe consensus is that they really came out of the trash and that the seller was inexperienced and was overwhelmed by the situation. The last thing known about the seller is that on May 4 he posted on Facebook that he was “back in business.”

Anthropic and OpenAI know that where AI is making money is in companies. They have found a way to squeeze that strategy

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We end users no longer matter much to the AI ​​giants. These companies are confirming that income is currently in the professional world, and they are already making moves to conquer that segment. And if they have to do it company by company, so be it, because now OpenAI and Anthropic are a little less AI companies and a little more consulting. AI is more business than ever. Anthropic and OpenAI have understood that the real business of AI is not currently in individual $20 subscriptions, but in integrating their AI models into all types of corporations. Both companies have almost simultaneously launched alliances with other companies to provide consulting services. The objective is simple: to stop being external web tools to become the “operating system” of thousands of businesses through these exclusive sales channels. Anthropic on the one hand… The company led by Dario Amodei has formed a joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman valued at $1.5 billion. This new firm will act as a consultancy bringing Claude directly into the operating environments of mid-sized businesses, from mid-sized banks to local manufacturers to healthcare systems. These companies have committed to provide $300 million each for AI engineers to work closely with these clients to integrate custom solutions. …and OpenAI on the other. In turn, Sam Altman’s company has not been slow to replicate that initiative with the creation of the so-called The Development Company, an entity valued at about 10,000 million dollars. It is backed by funds such as TPG, Bain Capital and SoftBank. Theoretically, OpenAI has already raised $4 billion to accelerate the adoption of its AI models in more than 2,000 companies that are already part of those investors’ portfolios. The initiative is led by Brad Lightcap, until now COO of the company, and who wants to make the GPT family models an integral part of the operations of all types of companies. Engineers on the line of fire. To promote these strategies, both companies are adopting the so-called ‘Forward Deployed Engineer’ (FDE) model, a deployment system that was already popularized by Palantir and that consulting firms traditionally use. Instead of simply selling an API, Anthropic and OpenAI will send their engineers to work with doctors, financial analysts, or IT staff so that their AI models can be seamlessly integrated into those professionals’ real-world workflows. Going public as a goal. In recent months we seem to be experiencing a race against the clock towards the IPO in both cases. With absolutely stratospheric valuations (OpenAI 852 billionAnthropic hanging around 900,000 million), the pressure to justify these figures to the public market is immense. The integration of programming tools such as Claude Code has been a clear driver of recent growth, but the real gold mine is in the automation of processes in sectors such as health or finance. If you are joint ventures fail to scale quickly, the valuation bubble could deflate before those IPOs. Conflicts of interest. When a venture capital fund invests in a technology provider and simultaneously pressures its portfolio companies to adopt that same technology, competition ceases to exist. Many companies will not have much real choice based on product quality. What is reinforced here It is that “circular economy” in which innovation is not chosenbut is imposed by financial and business interests. The customer does not buy because he needs the tool, but because his own financial owner has a stake in whoever supplies that tool. But wouldn’t AI automate everything? The dependence on the FDE model is paradoxical. Theory tells us that software must be infinitely replicable at zero marginal cost. However, these alliances show that AI is still not smart enough to operate without direct human supervision. We need someone to teach us how to use it well, the companies say, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are going to take advantage of that need even if what we really have is luxury personalized consulting. For now, AI will be more part of the services offered by a consulting firm than a truly autonomous “plug and play” tool. New Job: Deployment Engineer. Now Anthropic and OpenAI will not only be AI companies: they will also be consultancies in need of manpower. That also serves as an example that although AI theoretically will eliminate jobswill also create new ones. Here we face a growing demand for “deployment engineers” —OpenAI already requests them—, professionals who are precisely in charge of adapting these AI models to the needs of companies that want to implement them in their daily lives. And the data, what. There is another fundamental problem: medium-sized companies will not have much capacity to manage their data sovereignty. For Claude or GPT to function properly in the business, they will need access to critical workflows, medical records, or sensitive financial data. And when one cedes that control to third parties, they remain vulnerable. Not only that: the security of this data is compromised because in order to process it, it must leave and be processed in the cloud of an external provider. The AI ​​models of these companies can also probably learn from these processes, although it is reasonable to think that Zero Data Retention policies will come into play (“No data retention”). Image | TechCrunch | Wikimedia Commons In Xataka | The White House wants to review new AI models before anyone uses them: first the Pentagon, then the rest of the world

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