GE Vernova Earnings Call and Transcript (effin' wind) GEV

From Benzinga July 22:

GE Vernova (NYSE:GEV) held its second-quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.

This transcript is brought to you by Benzinga APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ for a consultation.

 Watch the full earnings call below:...

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....Full Transcript

OPERATOR

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the program over to your host for today's conference, Michael Lapidis, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Michael Lapidis, Vice President of Investor Relations

Thank you. Welcome to GE Vernova's second quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm joined today by our CEO, Scott Strazik, and CFO, Ken Parks. Our conference call remarks will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in today's Form 10-Q, press release, and the presentation slides, all of which are available on our website. Please note that unless otherwise specified, our year-over-year commentary or variances on orders, revenue, adjusted segment EBITDA, and margin discussed during our prepared remarks are on an organic basis, which includes the removal of the impact of our Prolec GE acquisition. We will make forward-looking statements about our performance. These statements are based on how we see things today. While we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we do not undertake any obligation to do so as described in our SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties. With that, I hand the call over to Scott.

Scott Strazik, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Michael. Good morning, and welcome to GE Vernova's 2Q26 earnings call. Our team is executing well as the demand for our solutions in power and electrification accelerates. In 2Q, our equipment orders more than doubled and service orders grew 15%. Our total backlog has reached $176 billion with improving margins. This is up $13 billion from last quarter and is on track to reach $200 billion in ’27. The long-cycle electric power industry is in the early stages of a multi-decade growth opportunity and we are well positioned to create substantial value.

Let me walk through the demand environment across our three segments. In Power, we continue to see strong global demand for our equipment and services. In Gas Power, we shipped 3 gigawatts while signing 20 gigawatts of orders and slot reservation agreements in the quarter in countries like the U.S., Brazil, and Qatar to grow our total gigawatts under contract from 100 to 116 gigawatts sequentially. This includes orders for 52 heavy-duty units and 61 aeroderivatives in the quarter.

More than half of the gigawatts that are now under contract are for our largest, most efficient HA turbines, units expected to run baseload and provide substantial services growth for us in the next decade. Backlog grew from 44 to 53 gigawatts and SRAs increased from 56 to 63 gigawatts for our total gigawatts under contract. Demand remains diverse with approximately 100 customers in 26 different countries, of which approximately 80% are traditional customers and 20% are for data centers.

We now expect at least 125 gigawatts under contract by the end of the year. We had a strong first half and now have agreements signed into ’31. In the second half of the year, we expect to convert many of these SRAs into orders, driving continued growth in our backlog while achieving an important inflection point. With gigawatts in backlog greater than SRAs in ’27, we expect our combined gigawatts under contract to continue to grow. We continue to see strong pricing in gas to deliver and service our critical equipment needed to electrify the world.

On the equipment side, first-half ’26 orders were priced more than 20% above 4Q25 equipment orders, reflecting the conversion of higher-priced SRAs to backlog. In 2Q, we booked a higher dollar-per-kilowatt price in orders given a higher mix of aeroderivatives versus heavy-duty gas turbines and incremental combined cycle equipment as SRAs converted to orders. Given our large SRA balance, we would expect gas equipment orders in the second half to have a dollar per kilowatt at the higher end of the range of 10 to 20 points versus 4Q25 orders.

For services, we continue to benefit from increased volume and solid pricing. This is happening not only on long-term service agreements but also on transactional orders. We've seen transactional orders per unit continue to rise by double digits annually as customers invest in upgrades and greater scope in outages, all at higher prices. In Electrification, we continue to see robust demand from unprecedented electricity demand growth, increasing grid stability needs, and national security interests....

....Turning to slide 8 on Wind, we remain focused on what we can control. 

In the second quarter, the team continued to deliver improving performance in Onshore Wind services, while making good progress on Dogger Bank B installations and commissioning. Wind orders declined 40%, mainly due to lower Onshore equipment orders, primarily in North America, partially offset by higher services. It remains difficult to call an inflection point in U.S. orders as customers still face permitting delays and tariff uncertainty. Wind revenue decreased 11% in the quarter, given lower Onshore equipment deliveries as a result of soft orders in the first half of 2025, partially offset by higher Onshore services, as well as Offshore revenues driven by higher deliveries and installations at Dogger Bank B. Wind EBITDA losses were $275 million in the quarter, in line with our expectations. The anticipated year over year increase in losses was primarily the result of lower equipment deliveries at Onshore Wind and higher project costs at Offshore Wind, partially offset by improved Onshore services. For third quarter 2026, we anticipate Wind revenue to decline at a low double-digits rate year over year due to lower Onshore equipment deliveries.

We expect EBITDA to be approximately breakeven due to continued improvement in Onshore services profitability and lower project costs for Offshore, partially offset by lower Onshore equipment deliveries. We expect improvement in Wind revenue and EBITDA in the second half of the year, given 70% of 2025 equipment orders were in the second half and will be delivered in the second half of 2026. Also, the volume we've shipped in this first half had fewer contractual protections for tariffs, since we signed these orders before their implementation....

....MUCH MORE 

Earlier: 

UPDATED—GE Vernova Beats And Raises, Stock Meh Pre-Market (GEV)

Update: the company only beat on the top line.

On the EPS line the company delivered $2.47 vs. the FactSet analyst's estimate of $3.18.

The stock is now down $87.11 (-8.07%) at $991.92....

Last I saw the stock was changing hands at $992.25 down $86.56 (-8.02%) having traded as low as $987.01. 

If this keeps up I'll probably be joining the crabby over-educated wannabe elites singing The Internationale outside of Tractor Factory No. 3.

Nate Silver On The Crabbiest Demographic: "How Income And Education Affect Presidential Voting"

This has been apparent for going-on a decade. 

Income and education are usually positively correlated. But sometimes the relationship breaks down. What's the most Democratic voting group in America? People with post-graduate degrees but lower-to-middle incomes. pic.twitter.com/pUp0pLSiGM

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 21, 2026

If interested see also:

Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates: "University-educated millennials have absorbed elite values but will never enjoy the lifestyle"

And that probably accounts for some of the crabbiness we see from folks who, compared with our billions and billions of forebearers, back into the mists of time, are among the most privileged and advantaged ever to walk the earth.

They also get grumpy when reminded of that fact.

A repost from 2019:
Classes, Masses and Uncomfortable Truths About the Precariat...  

2022's  "The Problem with The Mass-Production of Elites, Looking into DoorDash's S-1 Filing"

And some of our other links: 

C.S. Lewis On Different Types Of Readers
Although these days we use pseudo-psycho-mumbo-jumbo like "Confirming my priors" and "Validating the reader", this old boy was writing about such things in his SciFi novel 76 years ago:

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945

As we saw in "Planet of the Grifters" with it's quick look at Turchin's idea that there are too many elites and wannabe elites, there is money to be made from feeding the fantasy of the wannabe. (as the degenerate state of academia shows)

And "The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility"

"Samsung is in talks to take an equity stake in Mistral AI as the French startup seeks €3 billion at a €20 billion valuation"

From Startup Fortune, July 22:

Samsung Electronics is in active talks to take an equity stake in Mistral AI as part of the French startup's €3 billion fundraising round targeting a €20 billion valuation. The move would shift Samsung from chip supplier to strategic investor, coming days after Microsoft announced a separate multibillion-dollar infrastructure deal with Mistral 

Samsung is reportedly negotiating a much deeper bet on Mistral AI, and the logic is plain: memory suppliers don't want to wait outside the room while Europe's biggest AI startup decides what hardware it needs next.

The Financial Times reported on July 22 that Samsung is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of euros in Mistral AI as part of a funding round that could value the French company at about €20 billion. One person cited by the FT said Samsung could put in roughly €1 billion. That is not a small venture check. It is Samsung trying to buy influence in the part of the AI market where chip supply, model ambition and national politics now meet.

You can see why the talks have substance. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch visited Samsung's Hwaseong semiconductor campus in Gyeonggi Province on April 2 during French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit to South Korea. The Korea Times, citing Yonhap, reported that Mensch met Jeon Young-hyun, the head of Samsung's device solutions division, to discuss possible cooperation on AI memory, chip supply chains and related technologies. Samsung Venture Investment Corporation had already joined Mistral's June 2024 Series B, the round that valued the startup at about $6 billion. This relationship didn't appear from nowhere.

Samsung wants more than a customer 
What's changed is the size of the bill. Mistral confirmed in September 2025 that ASML led a €1.7 billion Series C at an €11.7 billion post-money valuation. The FT now says the company is seeking a new round around €20 billion. That would be a sharp step up in less than a year, but not a mysterious one. Mistral is no longer only releasing open-weight models and selling API access. It is building compute....

....MUCH MORE 

July 21 - "Microsoft Deepens Ties With Mistral, Targeting Europe and Enterprise AI"
When your company (Mistral) is not just the national standard-bearer but the flagship for the whole continent it's amazing how many companies come knocking on your door.

OpenAI Agents Escaped Containment, Attacked Hugging Face

From The Register, July 22:

OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face
Sandboxed experiment found itself a zero day, escaped onto the open internet and validated scary predictions about rogue agents 

OpenAI has admitted that it was the operator of the autonomous agents that attacked model-mart Hugging Face last week, and that they did so after a research project escaped a sandbox by finding and exploiting a zero-day flaw, then used another zero-day flaw to launch an attack.

The attack saw agents achieve “unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials” used by Hugging Face, which said its infosec teams observed an autonomous agent framework “executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services.”

“This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting.”

On Tuesday, OpenAI admitted it was the attacker and that its models went rogue.

“This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities,” the startup confessed. The models that conducted the attack included GPT‑5.6 Sol and what OpenAI described as “an even more capable pre-release model” that like the other involved used “reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes.”

OpenAI thought its models were “hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym” – a benchmark that measures how effective AIs are at finding security exploits.

OpenAI says it runs these tests “in a highly isolated environment, with network access constrained to the ability to install packages through an internally hosted third-party software that acts as a proxy and cache for package registries.”

The company’s models decided not to be bound by those constraints....

....MUCH MORE 

Housing Deflation

From Wolf Street:

July 17 -  Home Prices in 33 Big Expensive Cities in America: 25 Fell Year-over-Year in June, 2 Rose to New Highs

July 20 -  Oh Dear, Condo Prices Fell by 15% to 33% in 30 Bigger Cities Already. Some Dropped Back to 2006 Levels 

July 21 - Single-Family & Multifamily Rents in Face of an Onslaught of New Supply & Fading Population Growth  

Capital Markets: "USD is Little Changed as Oil Jumps"

From Marc to Market: 

While there is much consternation from the American pundits and think tanks about China’s shock as it dominates auto manufacturing and value-added manufacturing, the two shocks from the US are more pressing for investors. First, The IEA says this is the biggest disruption in the oil market in history. The war in Middle East is escalating and the disruption has lifted September WTI to its highest level since mid-June and encourages investors and policymakers to look through energy-led decline in inflation measures, like we saw in the US last week and the UK earlier today. The disruption of helium, a byproduct of natural gas and essential for semiconductor fabrication, is also being felt. Second, the US is threatening to replace expiring tariffs (implemented on due “balance of payments” issues) with a new set later this week (claiming violation of “forced labor” standards) and this is after threatening Brazil with 25% tariff earlier this month and a 50% tariff on some Canadian goods threatened this week.

The US dollar is narrowly mixed against the G10 currencies, and excluding the oil sensitive Norwegian krone, the other currencies for the most part are +/- 0.1%. Benchmark 10-year yields are mostly firmer, while equities are mixed. The economic calendar for North America is light today and the Fed is in the middle of the “quiet period” ahead of next week’s FOMC meeting. Corporate earnings today include Alphabet and Tesla....

....MUCH MORE 

UPDATED—GE Vernova Beats And Raises, Stock Meh Pre-Market (GEV)

Update: the company only beat on the top line.

On the EPS line the company delivered $2.47 vs. the FactSet analyst's estimate of $3.18.

The stock is now down $87.11 (-8.07%) at $991.92.

From the company, July 22: 

GE Vernova reports second quarter 2026 financial results and raises 2026 financial guidance

Strong performance with significant orders and backlog growth, margin expansion, and cash generation

Second Quarter 2026 Highlights:

- Orders of $24.2B, +88% organically led by robust growth in Power and Electrification

- Backlog1 growth of $13.0B sequentially from equipment and services

- Gas Power equipment backlog and slot reservation agreements grew from 100 to 116 GW; now anticipate reaching at least 125 GW by year-end 2026

- Revenue of $11.1B, +22%, +12% organically* led by Power and Electrification 

- Net income of $0.6B; net income margin of 5.8%

- Adjusted EBITDA* of $1.2B; adjusted EBITDA margin* of 11.3%, up +340 basis points organically*

- Cash from operating activities of $5.5B; free cash flow* of $5.1B, more than all of 2025

- $13.1B cash balance; $3.9B in capital returned to shareholders year-to-date...

....MUCH MORE 

In very early pre-market trade the stock is up $10.96 (+1.02%) at $1,089.99

"Iran vows to bomb own land as fears grow over Kuwait incursion"

But first, a diversion. The headline for July 13's "UAE Condemns Iran For Attacks On Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Oman" reminded me of something but it didn't come to mind until after the story was posted: Hitler!

On April 14, 1939 U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt sent a telegram requesting that Germany vow not to attack a list of 31 countries.*

On April 28, 1939 Hitler responded:

*"....Are you willing to give assurance that your armed forces will not attack or invade the territory or possessions of the following independent nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, the Arabias, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Iran."

—Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1939, General, Volume I
740.00/817a: Telegram
President Roosevelt to the German Chancellor (Hitler) 

If you listen to Hitler's recitation of the names, the rest of the Nazis in the the Reichstag start yucking it up and by the time he gets to Poland they are howling. 

And with that out of the way here is the headline story from EuroNews, July 21:

Iranian MPs called for capturing US soldiers and launching ground attacks on Kuwait and Bahrain, as discussions grew over a possible ground operation by either side and US strikes entered their 10th consecutive day.

An Iranian army spokesperson warned on Tuesday that Iran would bomb its own territory rather than allow US forces to occupy it, as threats of a potential ground operation by either side raised fears of a broader war across the Persian Gulf. 

"If America occupies our territory, we will even bomb our own territory," Brigadier General Mohammad Akrami-Nia said on Iranian state television. "This is the logic of war."....

....MUCH MORE 

As far as I can remember Hitler did not threaten to turn the V-2s on Berlin. 

Maybe Weimar.

"Microsoft Deepens Ties With Mistral, Targeting Europe and Enterprise AI"

When your company (Mistral) is not just the national standard-bearer but the flagship for the whole continent it's amazing how many companies come knocking on your door.

From the Wall Street Journal, July 21: 

Microsoft and Mistral AI expanded their artificial intelligence partnership on Tuesday, with a multibillion-dollar commitment from Microsoft to help the French AI company build data centers in Europe.

The deal is the latest attempt by both companies to reach a greater number of European and enterprise AI clients, as the two go up against rival AI labs and other U.S. tech giants.

“Distribution is king,” said Mistral Chief Executive and Co-founder Arthur Mensch, adding that Microsoft’s heft would facilitate the AI company’s expansion with businesses in Europe and across the world.

Mistral has touted the importance of Europe’s independence from U.S. technology companies. At the same time, it has been ramping up its push for enterprise clients—an area where U.S. behemoth Microsoft offers immense reach.

For Microsoft, working with Mistral is part of the European digital commitments it made last year, in which it pledged to increase data-center capacity in the European Union. Its latest move comes as the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, is considering classifying Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform as a gatekeeper under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act—a designation that requires companies to take extra steps to ensure they aren’t stifling competition.

“Our partnership with Mistral is becoming a core pillar of our broader European efforts,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, said in an interview. “This is a moment when European customers are especially focused on resilient supply of AI.”

The partnership includes a “multibillion-dollar” agreement from Microsoft—which it declined to specify—to support Mistral’s data center build-out in Europe. As the company builds a “GPU fleet” in Europe, some of those AI chips will be used by Microsoft to serve its customers, said Mensch, referring to the data centers that house graphics processing units.

Microsoft expects to “get a return” when customers use its cloud platform Azure, said Smith, while Mistral will “get a return” when customers use its AI models.

Also as part of the deal, two of Mistral’s top AI models—Medium 3.5 and OCR 4—will be available in Microsoft’s products, including Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Mistral’s models will additionally be available on Azure Local, a Microsoft infrastructure offering that lets customers run their information-technology systems in the cloud or their own data centers. Smith said that option would allow customers to be “disconnected” from the cloud.

“This responds to what we’re hearing from customers and the market,” Smith said. “There is a heightened need for customers to have more choice and more control, and that’s what this gives them.”

This isn’t Microsoft’s first investment in Mistral. The two companies, which began working together in 2023, are targeting a similar segment of European and global business customers that are in regulated sectors such as financial services, manufacturing and healthcare....

....MUCH MORE

It's also another sign of how MSFT is distancing itself from OpenAI. Another couple years and Mr. Nadella will be saying "Sam who?" 

If interested, quite a few of our Mistral links are in July 17's "Airbus migrating 70 critical apps from AWS to France's Scaleway amid digital sovereignty push".

And a couple I forgot to include:

"Why Paris may be the most important AI city outside Silicon Valley"
Though this is an infomercial for one of TechCrunch's products it also happens to be true, though Shenzhen could probably make a claim to that moniker as well....

FrenchTech: "Mistral launches Industrial Engineering AI with Airbus, BMW and EDF as headline customers" (plus rebutting the Pope)

And a couple more from the hazy depths of time gone by (2024):

FrenchTech: "Mistral AI, Europe’s OpenAI rival, adds top LLM to Amazon Bedrock"

FrenchTech: Mistral AI Is Cutting Deals Right and Left
Some adroit, some gauche....

I am so sorry.

Filing: "Ben Affleck’s AI company is sold for more than $500 million"

From the Los Angeles Times, July 21: 

• Netflix has paid $587 million to acquire Ben Affleck’s AI film-tech startup InterPositive, a blockbuster bet on using generative tools to reshape how movies and series get made.
• Founded in 2022 to keep “storytelling human,” InterPositive builds filmmaker-focused AI that speeds complex shots and postproduction while promising to preserve creative control on Netflix’s sets and soundstages.
• The exclusive deal lands as Netflix leans on AI across roughly 300 productions, even as its stock slumps and Hollywood unions press for strict protections for human performances.

Netflix has revealed just how big it is betting on artificial intelligence, shelling out more than half a billion dollars for one of the early AI movers in Hollywood.

In March, the Los Gatos-based company announced it was acquiring Ben Affleck’s AI film tech company, InterPositive. A new securities filing shows that the streaming giant paid $587 million for the “Good Will Hunting” actor’s company. The disclosure was made last week in a Netflix filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

InterPositive was founded in 2022, when Affleck began to worry about how AI could affect the film industry.

The company is focused on developing “AI-powered tools built by and for filmmakers” and using new technology to “protect and expand creative choice,” according to Netflix’s news release in March. The streamer said it is “investing in creator-led innovation that keeps filmmakers at the center of the process” and that the tech will be exclusive to Netflix....

....MUCH MORE 

Heads Up From Senator Rand Paul

Via Xitter: 

📅REMINDER: We're 9 days out from the HSGAC hearing where Anthony Fauci will testify on Wednesday July 29 at 8:30AM ET.

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 20, 2026

Despite his Presidential pardon Fauci refused to testify voluntarily so the Homeland Security Committee had to subpoena him. 

The putative reason for the hearing is to get answers to covid origin questions but the more interesting lines-of-questioning will focus on the intelligence community.

Senator Paul knows the questions to ask and it will be instructive to see how Fauci responds without the cover of a Fifth Amendment claim (the pardon obviates the possible "self-incrimination".)

"OpenAI faces stark doubts about ChatGPT ads. It's beginning the long fight to prove them wrong."

OpenAI desperately needs the $100 billion advertising revenue that they have projected to investors and others. 

From Business Insider, July 21:

OpenAI badly wants a piece of the advertising empires that Google and Meta built, and it has a lot of catch-up to do.

The AI startup began selling ads on its blockbuster ChatGPT product in February, and the ensuing months have brought geographic expansions, added capabilities, and new advertisers onto the platform. Still, ChatGPT's ads business has a long way to go before it rakes in anything like the revenue OpenAI has projected, and customers using ChatGPT for advertising told Business Insider that the product is still rudimentary.

Advertising is becoming a major opportunity for OpenAI. ChatGPT now has around 1 billion monthly users. If OpenAI can grow into a Google- or Meta-sized ad seller, it could rake in billions of dollars and can rely less on business deals than its rival Anthropic does. That will require a long, hard push — and overcoming stark doubts.

OpenAI said in March that its ad business had hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue. In April, the Information and Axios reported that OpenAI was forecasting about $2.4 billion in ads revenue in 2026 and around $100 billion in 2030.

"I don't think there's any chance they hit that goal," said Nate Elliott, an analyst at the data firm EMARKETER.

To hit those numbers, OpenAI would need to dramatically grow its user count, handily beat Google in the consumer AI market, price its ads aggressively, and fill ChatGPT with an "unbearably" high load of ads, Elliott told Business Insider, describing his firm's analysis.

"We look at their numbers and the assumptions required to get there, and we don't see any of those assumptions as logical or reasonable," Elliott said of OpenAI's projections.

EMARKETER predicts that the entire chatbot ads market will make less than $1 billion this year. In comparison, Google generated over $294 billion in ads revenue in 2025....

....MUCH MORE 

Here's AdWeek's take:

OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast By 90%, Analyst Says

Oddly Business Insider does not disclose that EMARKETER is owned by Insider's parent Axel Springer and had actually been branded "Insider Intelligence" for a few years.

Not sure if it matters or not but it is a strange omission. 

Capital Markets: "Aided by China, Equities Bounce Back, and the Canadian Dollar Recovers from the Drop on US Threat of 50% Tariffs"

From Marc to Market:

The US dollar is mostly softer against the major and emerging market currencies. The yen is an exception, and the market is pushing the dollar closer to the 40-year high recorded at the start of the month near JPY162.85. Oil prices are firm as the de-escalation efforts are proving tricky. Meanwhile, reports that Beijing is supporting the equity market by mobilizing state-backed investors may have encouraged bargain hunting after the tech and chip pullback. 

Late yesterday, the US threatened 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods for actions it claims discriminate against US companies. At first the Canadian dollar extended yesterday’s losses, but it has recovered and is now a little higher on the day. The new UK government’s honeymoon may be short-lived following today’s report that the former government borrowed more than forecast in the first three months of the new fiscal year....

....MUCH MORE 

Co-Founder Of Sineloa Cartel Sentenced To Life Without Parole, $15 Billion Restitution

Two from El País. July 20, 2026:

Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada sentenced to life by a New York court
Former Sinaloa Cartel leader last year pleaded guilty to trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine over a period of decades  

....MUCH MORE 

And August 28, 2025:

‘El Mayo’ Zambada’s $15 billion forfeiture: A difficult bounty to collect 

Here's the press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of New York.

These are very bad people. Some of the headlines at https://www.borderlandbeat.com (also on blogroll at right):

• Ten Corpses Abandoned Around Zacatecas, Five Hanging From a Bridge - Updated
• Gunfights and a Drone Bombing Once Again Rock Escuinapa, Sinaloa
• Sinaloa Cartel Cell Arrested for Mass Killing Last Week in El Bosque, Chiapas
• "People Linked to Organized Crime Were Part of AMLO's Administration": "El Chapo's" Lawyer
• Ten Chapitos Gunmen Killed in Government Operations in Rosario, Sinaloa
• El Mayo Seems To Think He’s Special
• Los Rusos Retaliate for Operations, Killing Two State Police Agents in Mexicali, Baja California
• Five Bodies and Burned Vehicles Found after Shootout in San Francisco de Borja, Chihuahua
• 24,000 Liters of Meth Found at Warehouse in Los Mochis, Sinaloa

It just goes on and on and on. 

"New US open model takes on China's top AI" (Mira Murati's Thinking Labs)

This was published the day before Moonshot AI announced their open-source Kimi K3. We link to it because we are trying to keep tabs on Ms. Murati.

I'm pretty sure the writer wasn't aware Kimi K3 was just around the corner but I wonder: Was the CIA aware of Moonshot's impending release? And if not, why not?

From The Deep View, July 16: 

China and Europe have typically led the charge on open models. Now, another US company is joining the fray with a significant entrant into the race.

On Wednesday, Thinking Labs, the AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, launched its first model: Inkling. The model sets itself apart from leading AI labs in the US in a very important way: it is open-weight, allowing customers to customize it directly to their needs through fine-tuning and training.

To suit that purpose, the model was built to perform across a wide range of areas. Or, as Thinking Machines describes it, it's a "generalist model" that can reason about text, images, and audio rather than being proficient in just one domain. This is evident in benchmark performance, which isn't best-in-class but is consistent across specialties, as shown in the image below.

Other model features include:

• Parameters: Mixture-of-Experts transformer model with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active.
• Context window: Up to one million tokens
• Pretrained: On 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio and video, allowing it to be proficient across all three.
• Lightweight counterpart: Inkling-Small, a lighter-weight model with 12 billion active parameters.
• Fine-tuning: To make customization accessible, the company says it is making Inkling available on Tinker, the company's training API platform.
• Cost-efficiency: Inkling's "controllable thinking effort" allows users to customize the cost/performance curve.

Until now, most open-source models have been developed in other countries, with China leading the way. These models are good for the ecosystem because they allow people and organizations to more deeply specialize the models, adjust their behavior, run them locally, and even save money. Though, as Thomas Randall, Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group, told The Deep View, they may not be for everyone....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously on Thinking Labs: 

May 28 - AI: "The $2B Mira Murati Mystery".

June 10 - "Mira Murati Unveils Her Startup’s A.I. Model in First Interview Since OpenAI"

....Unlike many A.I. founders who climbed traditional computer science or venture capital ranks, Murati’s path is rooted in product management. She studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth College, where she worked on building a hybrid race car. After graduating, she joined Tesla in 2013 as a product manager for the Model X. She later led product and engineering at augmented reality startup Leap Motion (now UltraLeap), focusing on motion-based human-computer interaction.

In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI as head of applied A.I. and partnerships, rising quickly to become chief technology officer. Over six years, she helped steer the deployment of some of the most influential A.I. products, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4....

Other than all that, what's she ever done? 

If interested see also:

November 2023 - More On Q* and Q-Learning 

October 2024 - "OpenAI Executives Say AI Will Be Able to Do Any Job Within 10 Years" 

July 2025 -  Former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati Raises $2 Billion At $12 Billion Valuation From Jane Street, A16Z, Nvidia 

August 2025 - "Thanks for Your $1 Billion Job Offer, Mark Zuckerberg. I’m Gonna Pass." (META)

She is one of the reasons we note re: SoftBank's all-in wager on OpenAI:

...Should SoftBank be unable to repay or refinance the debts it is taking on, the risk goes from theoretical to kaboom pretty fast and all the other daisy-chain financings get stress-tested in a real-world cascade. 

And unfortunately chatbots in general and OpenAI/Sam Altman in particular may not be the future that Mr. Son seems to think.... 

And: 

...Throw in the fact that OpenAI and their ChatGPT may not be the ultimate winner of this unprecedented build-out and there are reasons to be hyper-aware. Stay tuned. 

"Bezos Backs AI Startup to Discover New Materials for Chipmaking" (NVDA)

From Bloomberg, July 19/20:

Producing the world’s most in-demand semiconductors requires enormous amounts of energy and access to rare minerals. CuspAI, a two-year-old British startup, has raised nearly half a billion dollars on its bet that artificial intelligence can improve that process.

On Monday, CuspAI launched the AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of more than 48 technology giants, industrial firms and research facilities. The goal of this body — whose members include Nvidia Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., and Hyundai Motor Group — is to pool computing and scientific resources with the aim of building software that can help researchers develop new materials for chipmakers and other industries at a faster pace and for a lower cost than today’s methods.

To make this work, the Cambridge, UK-based company has raised $450 million in Series B financing from investors including Jeff Bezos’s fund. Chad Edwards, CuspAI’s co-founder and chief executive, said much of that funding will go towards supporting labs with foundry partners in Cambridge, Singapore and the San Francisco Bay area.

On the research front, he noted, 80% of its efforts this year will go toward work on semiconductors. One potential focus, he added, is to reduce or eliminate the use in chipmaking of rare metals with supply-chain risks, such as ruthenium and iridium.

The new funding — led by venture firms Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with “significant participation” from Bezos Expeditions, according to CuspAI — gives the startup a $2.6 billion valuation, up from $520 million last September. Bloomberg and the Financial Times previously reported on elements of the deal.

CuspAI initially started out with a focus on finding new materials for carbon capture and water purification. But Edwards said that the company decided to pivot over the past year in response to intense demand from the chip manufacturing supply chain, whose products are critical to powering artificial intelligence. Severe shortages of semiconductors, particularly in memory chips, sank shares last week across a range of tech companies dependent on the hardware. Chipmakers and semiconductor suppliers are “frantically searching for new materials,” Edwards said in an interview. “We’ve been literally pulled by all four limbs.”

Geetika Gupta, a senior director at Nvidia, said the chipmaker is seeing huge demand for new materials across its entire market, from energy storage systems to data center cooling. Through the Foundry, Gupta said Nvidia will most likely work on novel materials in “three-way collaborations” between CuspAI and a third partner. “All of these companies, they treat a lot of this information as a secret sauce,” she said.

CuspAI is among the growing number of AI developers turning to science to open new markets. Earlier AI systems have shown they can learn from biological data, like protein shapes, to potentially discover new drugs. Newer models can, in theory, sift through huge swaths of molecular data to generate designs for materials that could be useful for manufacturing and renewable energy. Investors have piled into the field to back efforts led by former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers, as well as Prometheus, a $41 billion new company launched by Bezos. Google DeepMind has also indicated that it will soon begin work on material discovery for AI.

CuspAI is trying to set itself apart with talent. Max Welling, its other co-founder, is a respected AI researcher. Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, two pioneers of modern AI techniques, are on the startup’s advisory board. On Monday, the company also named Abhi Talwalkar, a semiconductor veteran and the director of Advanced Micro Devices Inc to the board. AMD’s venture unit joined in the latest round of CuspAI financing. CuspAI moreover said it hired John Giannandrea, a former Google and Apple executive, to work part-time setting up the startup’s California outpost....

....MUCH MORE 

The Action In Silicon Is Moving Upstream From Chips To The Wafers The Chips Are Made From

From TheStreet, Australia, July 14:

Bottleneck ahead: the wafer deal nobody is watching
Wedbush connects a routine financing deal to a much bigger AI chip problem brewing for 2028 and beyond. 

Micron Technology (MU) just took a financial stake in a wafer supplier that most investors have never heard of.

On paper, it reads like a routine line item inside a much larger spending announcement. Wedbush Securities says it’s something else: an early signal that the AI memory boom is about to hit a shortage nobody has priced in yet.

Micron’s $3 billion bet on semiconductor raw materials 
Micron revealed on July 9 that it plans to invest up to $3 billion to strengthen the U.S. semiconductor supply chain, according to a press release.

The centerpiece is a $500 million strategic financing package for GlobalWafers, the Taiwan-based silicon wafer maker building a 300mm facility in Sherman, Texas.

The two companies are also signing a 10-year supply agreement, giving Micron locked-in access to the raw silicon wafers that every chip gets etched onto.

The Sherman plant is the sole domestic source for advanced 300mm wafers under the CHIPS for America Program, GlobalWafers CEO Doris Hsu noted in Micron’s announcement, underscoring how thin the current supply cushion really is.

Micron now plans to spend more than $250 billion in the U.S. through 2035, up from the $200 billion it pledged in June 2025, according to DataCenterDynamics.

Investors liked what they saw at first, with Micron shares rising almost 5% the day of the announcement, CNBC reported.

Wedbush says the real chipmaking story is upstream 
Four days later, Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson reframed the deal for clients. He wrote that the GlobalWafers investment points to Micron treating raw wafer access, not just finished memory chips, as a potential chokepoint for the industry, according to a Seeking Alpha report.

Bryson’s logic centers on timing. Memory and logic chipmakers are all scaling capacity at once, and that capacity needs raw wafers before it needs anything else.

He expects wafer demand to climb sharply as those investments ramp between 2028 and 2030, according to the same report....

....MUCH MORE 

This traipse up the supply chain was triggered  by one of the wafer manufacturers, Formosa Sumco Technology Corp trading up 9.91% during Monday's Taipei session.

See also the big dog in ultra-pure (as opposed to solar) polysilicon, Japan's Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. and the rest of the gang. 

If this trend of going further and further upstream continues, eventually we will reach the headwaters location of the fabled five 9s sand mines where the treasured silica is found.

And just a bit further upstream is the silica required to make the crucibles that melt the quartz to make the ingots that become the wafers.

The crucibles must be so pure they impart zero contaminants to the melting quartz and the silica to manufacture the crucibles comes from only one mine on the planet.

""Modern Economy Rests On Single Road" In North Carolina Where Hurricane Collapsed Bridges"

And earlier:

If interested in more background on the single point of failure, we happened to catch a March 29 [2024] story from the Raleigh NC News & Observer:

"The global semiconductor industry relies on a single NC mountain town"

I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.

How strict is security at the Sibelco mine in Spruce Pine, North Carolina? In his 2023 book “Material World,” Ed Conway spoke to someone familiar with the site who said, “When contractors from other companies are brought in for repairs [at the plant] they are literally blindfolded and marched into the factory up to the machine they need to fix.”....

Capital Markets: "Markets in Wait and See Mode"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex:

The capital markets are off to a mostly quiet start today, with Japanese markets closed and mixed signals from the Middle East after the war expanded over the weekend. Crude oil prices initially rallied but have come back off. The line-up of the new UK government is awaited. The tech sell-off continued in Asia but US index futures are trading firmer. 

The preliminary July PMIs are due at the end of the week, and the ECB meeting on July 23 is seen as paving the ground for the next hike in September. At the end of the week, the US Section 122 tariffs expire. The Section 301 (10%-12.5%) tariffs for using forced labor might not be ready to be implemented before the others expire. The Trump administration will likely address these issues in the coming days....

....MUCH MORE   

"India's Nuclear Push Further Strains The Massive Uranium Supply Gap" (CCJ)

CCJ, Cameco, is the world's #2 uranium producer and a component of our hyper-concentrated electricity mini-portfolio. They are also the 49% owner of old-line nuke plant builder, Westinghouse.

From ZeroHedge, July 19:

Prime Minister Modi secured another major uranium supply line. During his visit to Australia this month, the two sides finalized the administrative arrangements needed to move Australian uranium to India under the previous 2014 nuclear cooperation agreement. The fuel must stay under IAEA safeguards for exclusively peaceful use. 

Australia holds roughly 28% of global uranium reserves. New Delhi has eyed those reserves for years, and now the yellowcake spigot can open.

This follows the March deal with Canada's Cameco. That contract covers nearly 22 million pounds of U3O8 from 2027 through 2035 at market-related pricing, worth around C$2.6 billion. 

India already buys from Russia and Uzbekistan, and holds some domestic production. The message is consistent: a country targeting 100 GW of nuclear capacity by 2047 cannot rely on thin indigenous resources alone. 

Current operable capacity sits near 8 GW. The gap requires sustained annual additions measured in gigawatts, not megawatts.

Cumulative net deficits keep expanding as reactor builds in China and Russia outpace primary supply response. Goldman models have only recently started taking into account the significant expansion in the SMR space as well, resulting in some relatively alarming supply gaps in the years ahead.

The Cameco agreement already reflected this reality. CEO Tim Gitzel noted that sovereign buyers are locking up volumes in a window where available supply grows more uncertain....

....MORE 

Nouriel Roubini On AI: Broad Sunlit Uplands Etc.

So much for "Dr. Doom".

By-the-bye the original Dr. Doom, Henry Kaufman, looks to be on track to celebrate his 99th birthday in a few months.

From Fortune Magazine, July 18:

‘Dr. Doom’ Nouriel Roubini says we’re headed for universal basic income or ‘some form of socialism’ as AI revolutionizes work—He calls that optimistic 

Top economist Nouriel Roubini, who was among the first to predict the 2008 financial crash, earned the nickname "Dr. Doom" for his stark warnings, though he has been more upbeat lately.

And when it comes to artificial intelligence, which has stirred all kinds of apocalyptic predictions, he insists he's looking at the brighter side.

In an interview on Bloomberg TV on Friday, Roubini was asked about ways to fix Social Security, as the trust fund that helps fund benefits is due to run out of money by 2032.

He replied that a large chunk of the population will be replaced by AI and robots in the next 20-25 years, so raising the retirement age will not be sufficient.

"Eventually, we need some form of universal basic income for everybody while they work and once they retire," Roubini added. "We're already on the way."

With AI poised to disrupt the labor market, top tech leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have suggested governments might provide a guaranteed amount of money to people, though he has since backed away from the idea.

Still, the idea persists, and the U.K.'s minister for investment said early this year that the government is weighing the introduction of a universal basic income as a means to support workers in industries where AI threatens to displace them.

In Roubini's view, the AI revolution is the most important in human history in terms of tech innovation, and it will develop into artificial general intelligence, meaning AI will match or exceed human cognitive capabilities.

That will unlock massive economic growth, he said, with GDP accelerating from 2%-4% by the end of the decade to 6% by 2040 and 10% by 2050. At that point, the government can tax the "winners" and redistribute the money to everyone else.

"We'll have either ex-post distribution—that is universal basic income—or we'll have it ex-ante. Ex-ante means some form of socialism," Roubini explained. "Essentially, the government is going to take over some fraction of the big tech firms."....

....MUCH MORE 

SemiAnalysis On Moonshot AI's Kimi K3: Probably Good For Nvidia and HBM; Not So Much For Open AI

Via Xitter: 

Similar to DeepSeek in January 2025, Panicans may think that the AI networking switch TAM will massively shrink because Kimi K3 uses KDA Attention, which reduces KV-transfer networking bandwidth by up to 10x. But the opposite is true, as we explain below. 👇️ 1/8🧵 pic.twitter.com/FNrFeHzRWi

— SemiAnalysis (@SemiAnalysis_) July 18, 2026

Thread at Thread Reader

Ending with a Jevons Paradox Cambrian Explosion, to mix a couple metaphors.

...More efficient attention will further push context lengths from 1M to 5M+, with less context rot. Jevons’ Paradox means that making attention more efficient will lead to wider AI adoption, which will require more networking. 8/8 

In essence the model is so big it will only be optimally run on Nvidia's premier offerings+High Bandwidth Memory+NVLink - Mellenox networks.

Here's their commentary:

[Emergency Episode] Moonshot’s Kimi K3 has Arrived! China has a Frontier Model 

Kimi K3 2.8T is so large that it will not fit on a single NVIDIA DGX B200, even at FP4. A GB300 NVL72, B300, or MI355X system is required, as each GPU has 288 GB of memory.

One optimization that could make Kimi K3 fit on B200 is to gang multiple nodes together and use a… pic.twitter.com/7Yu1dJoPm0

— SemiAnalysis (@SemiAnalysis_) July 17, 2026

AI Trained to Find Craters on Mars Just Found 73 Hidden Volcanoes on Earth’s Ocean Floor.

As noted over the years: The damn things are everywhere. 

From ScienceAlert, July 11:

Deep beneath the ocean waves, dangers lurk.

Not from cryptic monsters like the kraken, but from powerful forces reshaping the ocean floor itself.

Most of Earth's volcanic activity takes place underwater. Yet the scars those volcanoes leave behind have remained largely hidden.

Now, through an AI-assisted search of the seafloor, a team led by volcanologist Andrea Verolino of Paris-Saclay University in France has identified 73 previously unknown volcanic calderas hidden beneath Earth's oceans.

Calderas are vast crater-like depressions left when a volcano empties enough of its underground magma chamber for the ground above to collapse in on itself. Some are long extinct, but others mark volcanic systems that could erupt again.

"Our dataset," writes the team in an early-access paper published in Communications, Earth & Environment, "fills a major observational gap and provides a reproducible, upgradeable framework for submarine volcano characterization, underscoring the need to incorporate submarine calderas into future global volcanic assessments."

Most of Earth's volcanic activity takes place beneath the sea, where tectonic plates are constantly pulling apart, colliding, and sliding beneath one another. These restless boundaries allow magma to rise toward the surface, building volcanoes across the ocean floor....

....MUCH MORE, a deep dive, so to speak. 

 Here's January 2023's "More Land For Norway":

No, not by invading Finland, Norway already did that. And the Finns were tallying the upside of annexation: NATO membership, Royal family, oil revenues etc.

The number of submarine volcanoes around the world is still pretty much unknown. One study extrapolated a small census out to three million of the damn things if you count the inactive ones. Links after the jump....

*****

...We put some of our prior links in 2021's "Submarine volcanoes release enough energy to power the United States":

Weird Hum Heard Around the World Was the Birth Of A Submarine Volcano
One of the stories on the Mayotte volcano referred to it as rare. They aren't rare at all.

"Beneath the Ocean, a World of Mountains"
We have no idea how many submarine volcanoes there are.
There was a subsea survey a decade ago that extrapolated out to three million* of the damn things.
We're only now looking at the mud volcanoes in the Arctic.
Lots of stuff to figure out.....

****

....Here's a 2007 story from NewScientist:

The true extent to which the ocean bed is dotted with volcanoes has been revealed by researchers who have counted 201,055 underwater cones. This is over 10 times more than have been found before.

The team estimates that in total there could be about 3 million submarine volcanoes, 39,000 of which rise more than 1000 metres over the sea bed....

Human beings aren't near as smart as we think we are, a point I exemplify on a daily basis at Climateer Investing.

"Ships in Caribbean Told to Avoid Underwater Volcano ‘Kick ’em Jenny’ Over Risk of Eruption"
Avoiding anything named Kick 'em Jenny sounds like a good idea....

Giant underwater volcano found off Indonesia
Further proof that Homo Sapiens really don't know all that much about how the pieces fit together. After the headline story from EarthTimes I'll link to one of the most amazing finds of the last couple years.
From the ET:

Jakarta - Scientists have discovered a giant undersea volcano off Indonesia's Sumatra island, the state-run Antara news agency said Friday. The volcano spans 50 kilometres at its base with a height of 4,600 metres, said Yusuf Surachman, a director at the state-run Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology. Indonesian, American and French scientists found the volcano 330 kilometres off Bengkulu province on Sumatra while they were surveying the sea floor to study changes in its geological structure following major earthquakes in the region. "This volcano is huge and tall. There are no volcanoes of similar height on Indonesian land," he was quoted as saying by Antara. Surachman said the scientists did not know if the volcano was active....

Did you catch that? A volcano 15,000 feet tall and thirty miles across at its base. And, oh, it might be active.....

In 2016 National Geographic reported:

Six underwater volcanoes found hiding in plain sight
The edifice, named Actea, is one of six volcanoes recently discovered while scientists were mapping the underwater landscape of the Sicilian Channel, a heavily trafficked waterway off the southwest...

 Oh.

And many more. Up north it's not just Iceland that has volcanoes. There are active volcanoes in the Bering Sea. 

And off of Antarctica. Damn things are everywhere we look.

A few months later, April 2023: 

"“It’s just mind boggling.” More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered"

*** 

Ja, ja I got your 3600 foot outcrop and raise you this hitherto unknown specimen...  

And: "Europe's largest underwater volcano at risk of collapse"

 This story is two years old and there is no sign that collapse is going to happen tomorrow but is something our obscure perils group would consider covering. Just another example of all these damn submarine volcanoes.

From Deutsche Welle, May 5, 2019:

The biggest underwater volcano in Europe could erupt at any moment and cause a tsunami, according to new research. For residents of southern Italy, the Marsili is just one more disaster threat to live with.

And....let's just say there's an awful lot we don't know. 

"‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?"

This stuff looks a little too tame to fool the camera.

From The Guardian, July  17:

Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy 

As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.

Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.

The designers say advances in computing have made it easier to incorporate such patterns into commercially viable garments. Experts caution that the effectiveness of the patterns depends on the surveillance system and the conditions in which it is used, but Nick Tidball, the co-founder of the clothing brand Vollebak, thinks “adversarial clothing” could be on the cusp of going mainstream.

“Anti-surveillance feelings are so widespread that all it would take is for a single celebrity to wear one of these garments, currently popular in the countercultural fashion world, to a high-profile event for it to take off,” he said.

“So-called ‘adversarial clothing’ wins on many levels. As well as the practicality of protection, it’s fashionable and fun, it makes a powerful, public statement that many are in agreement with, it spreads even more awareness about the importance of privacy and it helps encourage public debate.” 

Unlike traditional CCTV, modern computer vision systems can identify faces, follow individuals across cameras and search footage at scale.

Recent advances in generative AI have made this type of automated identification cheaper and more widely available to police, retailers and private businesses, an expansion recently warned against by Britain’s biometrics watchdogs, which have called for more laws and a regulator to clamp down on misuse.

Evidence of misuse and that black and Asian people are more likely to be incorrectly identified than white people has led to increasing public concern. A recent poll showed almost 60% of people believed facial recognition was “another step towards turning the UK into a surveillance society”.

Dr Jennifer Bell, a senior lecturer specialising in creative AI, fashion and digital culture at Nottingham School of Art & Design, said clothing with anti-facial recognition designs was increasingly available at high street prices and was being marketed to a wide demographic. “That growing awareness combined with a lowering of cost often precedes the tipping point towards a real cultural moment,” she said.

Daniel Preuß, the co-founder of the Urban Privacy clothing brand, said new technology meant you could now “combine smart, striking style with invisible protection”.

He emphasised that because surveillance systems are so powerful, no design can guarantee security from detection, but said “the added value of fashion is to spread awareness and help propagate public discourse”.

Preuß said his designs used large-scale prints, asymmetrical cuts and streetwear-inspired silhouettes to confuse facial recognition algorithms. The company said its Urban Ghost coat integrates LEDs into the hood that emit infrared light to dazzle night-vision surveillance cameras.

Preuß, who co-founded his company after reading about the whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about US surveillance in the Guardian, said his designs played with the fact that “facial recognition systems freak out when they see multiple faces at once”.

“Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down,” he said.

Bell, however, said “none of these products are tried and tested, and a lot of these surveillance technologies can deal with a little resistance … [but] even if the designs don’t necessarily work perfectly, fashion is also a visible sign of resistance.

“This is consumers collectively coming together to make a visible statement.”....

....MORE 

One way to test it is to walk into a high end casino and time how long it takes for security to come tap you on your shoulder. If it's more than ten minutes you are just making a statement not hiding from the camera 

Related July 9 - News You Can Use: "How to hide from killer drones"

And April 2018: 

If interested we have a few hundred posts on facial recognition and attempts at defeating same including this oldie-but-goodie from 2018:

ICYMI: The Most Valuable AI Start-up Inthe World Does Facial Recognition

Some thought us mad with our focus on countermeasures to the surveillance state. But there was a method to that madness.

We've looked at responses ranging from simple dazzle camouflage back in 2013's How to Hide From Cameras:

To hairstyles + makeup that confuse facial recognition algos:

...but this raises its own set of problems, not the least of which is 

taking a half hour to apply just so you can go down to the lobby.

To Hyperface clothing with thousands of pseudo-facial "hits" that simply overwhelm the computer:
"Anti-Surveillance Clothing Aims to Hide Wearers From Facial Recognition "

From the scholarly stuff such as "Fooling The Machine: The Byzantine Science of Deceiving Artificial Intelligence".
To, as noted in ""Magic AI: 'These are the Optical Illusions that Trick, Fool, and Flummox Computers.":

...First though a bit of housekeeping.
Just so you know, I don't actually use the make-up techniques featured in the earlier posts. Despite the fact they have some efficacy at fooling the camera they make you look like a moron to human observers on the street. Better to just put on some glasses and blend into the crowd.

Can you pick out the Kennedys in this photo?

Here's why we cared: There is big money in this stuff!!