As part of a planned data center in Pecos County, Texas, Amazon is investing in an on-site power plant that could become the largest source of climate pollution in the United States, according to The New York Times.

The NYT says the plant would burn natural gas and is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year — more than any other power plant in the U.S.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the data center will “be powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families.” (Data centers face growing political opposition for a number of reasons, including their effect on electricity costs.)

AI has already had a significant impact on Amazon’s carbon emissions, which it reported were up 16% last year — the wrong direction for a company that pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2040. And that could get worse as Amazon and tech companies back the development of huge natural gas plants to support their power-hungry data centers.

The Amazon spokesperson said, “The world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge,” while also claiming, “Our commitment hasn’t changed.”

NextSlide recently announced that it’s joining OpenAI, with the presentation startup’s team members now working on ChatGPT.

The NextSlide website currently displays a note from founder Ahmed Beshry describing the startup’s product as one “that could turn prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation.”

The ultimate goal, Beshry said, was “to make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly.” So by joining OpenAI, the team will “continue pursuing that same mission: building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work.”

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a note on LinkedIn, Beshry said the announcement is coming “a few months late,” as the acquisition took place “earlier this year.”

Beshry was previously a co-founder at Caper AI, a smart cart/cashier-less checkout startup acquired by Instacart in 2021.

X, the social media platform now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is shaking up how it pays influencers and creators.

In announcing the change, the company said it will be winding down its existing Revenue Sharing program and replacing it with something called Original Content Rewards. X will stop accepting new Revenue Sharing participants, while existing participants will continue earning money through September 7.

Then, starting on September 8, they’ll be able to apply for the new program. Participants will still need to subscribe to one of X’s Premium tiers, and there will be qualifying thresholds for follower count (500 verified followers) and impressions (500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users in 90 days), but it sounds like the big change is the emphasis on originality. 

What counts as original content? X said it can include original reporting and analysis, photos and videos created by the poster, or memes and graphics they’ve designed themselves. Commentary also counts, but “if your content regularly incorporates material created by others, you’ll need to contribute meaningful original value for it to qualify under our original content guidelines.”

The company also included examples of posts that won’t count as original, such as those just copied over from another account, downloaded from one account and re-uploaded to your own, or reposting content “without meaningful transformation.”

This announcement follows repeated attempts by X to reform the Revenue Sharing program, for example reducing payments to aggregators and “clickbait” accounts in April. But these efforts have also prompted complaints from popular accounts profiting from the current system; Musk even reversed some of those changes (giving a creator’s local audience more weight when calculating payouts) after a backlash.

In a post about the new changes, X’s Allegra Jacchia wrote that the existing program “had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned.”

“Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts,” she said. “We could have kept adding more rules and exceptions, but ultimately the better decision was to start fresh and build a program designed from day one to reward originality.”

Jacchia added that X be “continue refining the program, improving our models, and raising the bar over time.”