Grok 4.5 Puts On a Suit as Amazon Winds Down Mechanical Turk
Elon Musk's newly renamed SpaceXAI launched Grok 4.5, pitching a model with a notorious past as a buttoned-up assistant for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, according to The Register. The company says the model scored number one on Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark, was trained on tens of thousands of Nvidia GB300 GPUs, and is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, undercutting rivals, while The Register notes independent benchmarks from Artificial Analysis still place it below Anthropic's Claude Fable and roughly level with OpenAI's GPT-5.5.
The era of anonymous crowd-work that trained the AI industry is ending, per Tech Times, which reports that AWS confirmed Mechanical Turk will stop accepting new customers on July 30, 2026, closing out 21 years of what Amazon once called "artificial artificial intelligence." Tech Times ties the decline to a 2023 EPFL study estimating that 33 to 46 percent of MTurk workers were already using large language models to complete their tasks, and to research finding workers earned a median of roughly $2 an hour on a platform that once counted more than 500,000 registered workers across over 190 countries.
Anthropic and Jeff Bezos touted "powerful AI" amid rising data center needs, according to a Livingston Enterprise report that could not be retrieved in full. The World Association of News Publishers appointed Ezra Eeman as director of AI in Media effective October 1, 2026, per Complete AI Training, giving its network of 60 national associations representing over 20,000 publications a dedicated AI strategy lead. And Complete AI Training also reports that ASUS and Intel, with Bahwan Projects and Telecoms, opened an AI lab at Oman's Ministry of Education in Ibri on July 8, the first AI-focused ASUS Education project in the region, in support of Oman's Vision 2040.
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