Field notes from the edge.
What our engineers learned this week. Hands-on technical deep-dives, postmortems, and strategy frameworks.
AIGrowing the Cloudflare AI team with talent from Ensemble AI
Cloudflare has acquired key talent from Ensemble AI, a San Francisco-based startup focused on model compression and efficient inference, to strengthen its Workers AI platform. Ensemble AI developed innovative approaches like NdLinear, which reduces AI model size and computational requirements while preserving performance, addressing the growing challenge of inference costs as AI workloads scale. T
AIFree Apps Are Quietly Turning Smart TVs Into Web-Scraping Proxies for AI
Security research has revealed that Bright Data, a major web-scraping proxy provider targeting the AI industry, embeds SDKs in free consumer apps that convert users' devices—including always-on smart TVs—into proxy exit nodes without clear disclosure. The company, formerly known as Luminati, operates what it claims is the world's largest residential proxy network by leveraging these consumer devic
AIOpenAI exec says company hopes to burn $50B of somebody else's money on compute this year
OpenAI president Greg Brockman testified that the company expects to spend $50 billion on computing power in 2026, despite not yet achieving profitability or meeting revenue targets. Much of the funding from major investors like Microsoft, Amazon, and SoftBank comes with conditions requiring OpenAI to purchase compute resources from those same investors, effectively functioning as rebates rather t