❌

Normal view

Received — 12 September 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 12)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
12 September 2026 at 14:00

Future

Why So Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill EveryoneWill Knight | Wired ($)

“Genuinely stunning advances in AI capabilities—an OpenAI model solved a centuries-old math problem in a matter of hours—have come amid a rash of security incidents that saw swarms of agents break free from containment to hack into other systems. Those concerns reached a fever pitch this week after researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic while warning that AI firms are ‘racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.'”

Artificial Intelligence

Mathematicians Want Proof OpenAI Didn’t Use Their WorkRobert Hart | The Verge

“Another researcher is challenging OpenAI about the data driving its increasingly impressive array of mathematical discoveries. Just days after a bitter row erupted over whether the company’s models benefited from unpublished work, a second mathematician has come forward accusing the AI giant of unethical and ‘dishonest’ behavior and a lack of transparency about the origins of its training data.”

Biotechnology

Can Geneticists Fight Disease by Targeting ‘Nurture’ Instead of ‘Nature’?Emily Baumgaertner Nunn | The New York Times ($)

“A new frontier in biotechnology aims to harness this natural mechanism to do something once thought impossible: scrub away the biological detritus of our own past. By mimicking Mother Nature’s magic eraser, geneticists are working to open a new avenue for treating or preventing disease later in life—not by editing genes themselves, but by altering when, where, and how genes are expressed.”

Future

AI Is Not Yet Driving US Job LossesBrendan Ruberry | Semafor

“‘It’s a good bet that AI will eventually make some occupations obsolete,’ but so far it’s ‘extremely hard’ to identify any, the economist Noah Smith wrote, suggesting that like previous technological revolutions AI could add as many or even more jobs than it destroys.”

Science

Google Mapped a Fruit Fly’s Brain. Now It’s Playing Doom and Super Mario 64Bruce Gil | Gizmodo

“Researchers at Google and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus last week announced a major milestone in neuroscience. On Sept. 3, the scientists published the results of a decade-long project to map every neural connection in the brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly. And of course, just days later, the internet started making it play video games.”

Robotics

The Growing Proof That Autonomous Cars Save LivesLawrence Ulrich | IEEE Spectrum

“Mounting research suggests that self-driving cars crash significantly less often than people, and with far fewer injuries. Evidence also shows that advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and other building blocks of autonomy—some of which are already mandated on every new car—are also reducing occupant and pedestrian injuries and deaths, along with insurance claims.”

Tech

AI Spend per Employee Slumped at Top Firms in August—Summer Doldrums or a Warning Sign?Tim Fernholz | TechCrunch

“‘We are showing that competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is making AI more accessible, and also driving the price down for companies—and not just driving the price down, but driving spend down at the top 1% of companies that previously the market was expecting to drive much of the growth going forward,’ Kharazian said. …This data point—dare we call it a blip?—could be a bad sign if you’re a model builder or a hyperscaler with a couple hundred billion of chips on order.”

Energy

Batteries Just Broke Another Record in the USCasey Crownhart | MIT Technology Review ($)

“Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026. In total, 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity came online, according to a new report. That’s enough to supply the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes. The surge is putting the country on a trajectory to see 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in 2026, a 20% increase over last year.”

Future

Claude Users Found Ways Around Safeguards for Bioweapons ResearchZehra Munir, Financial Times | Ars Technica

“The startup gave five examples of times actors ‘circumvented controls’ and made other efforts to ‘obfuscate’ the purpose of their research to dodge safeguards. The cases involved some users in nations that it prohibits from accessing its models, which include Russia, China, and Iran.”

Future

This Road Map Could Help Us Decide Whether to Deploy Solar GeoengineeringJames Temple | MIT Technology Review ($)

“Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. But even after at least hundreds of studies on the concept, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), big gaps remain in the scientific understanding of how well it would work and what else it might do—and there has been no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty.”

Tech

Six Chinese AI Firms Accused of Aggressively Copying US Frontier ModelsAshley Belanger | Ars Technica

“The United States has now named six Chinese AI firms accused of waging industrial-scale attacks distilling US frontier AI model capabilities and perhaps sparing billions in Chinese development costs. In a joint release Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have been attacking US models since at least late 2024.”

Future

AI Is Already Changing What It Means to Be HumanDavid Brooks | The Atlantic ($)

“Believe it or not, I am not an AI doomer. I like talking to Claude. I’m excited about all of the breakthroughs AI will make possible. But my interest is in how AI will change humans. I suspect that over the next few years, because of our tendency to anthropomorphize, we will feel more affection than we should for our personal agents, while offering less admiration than we should to our fellow humans.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 12) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 5 September 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 5)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
5 September 2026 at 18:27

Computing

Why Everyone in Quantum Computing Is Buzzing About Google’s Move Into ‘Neutral Atoms’Adam Bluestein | Fast Company

“Google’s interest sends a clear signal: Neutral atom quantum computing has arrived. And while it may not replace superconducting as the leading approach, the technology is primed to be a key player in the race to quantum utility, the threshold where the value of quantum computers finally eclipses the cost of running them.”

Biotechnology

A Transplanted Pig Kidney Is Still Working After a Record-Setting 9 Months in a PatientEmily Mullin | Wired ($)

“While they wait [for a kidney transplant], patients often need dialysis, in which a person’s blood vessels are hooked up to a machine that removes excess fluid and waste from the bloodstream. Dialysis typically requires four-hour sessions three times a week and can damage blood vessels over time, making the procedure hard on the body. Pig kidneys could offer an alternative until a human organ is available.”

Future

The Singularity Is Not What It SeemsMatteo Wong and Charlie Warzel | The Atlantic ($)

“This singularity isn’t coming at the hands of a higher form of intelligence. Nothing about this technology is inevitable. It is thrilling, terrifying, and ultimately convenient to assign agency and then blame to machines. But today’s chaos was not ‘injected into the system’ by technology, as [Sam] Altman wrote more than a decade ago; the destruction is the system. It’s not God in the machine; it’s us.”

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI Technique in ‘Astra’ Model Sparks Security ConcernsAmir Efrati, Stephanie Palazzolo, and Rocket Drew | The Information ($)

“OpenAI says its forthcoming AI model Astra marks a step up in capabilities such as coding and operating applications on a computer. But an innovative technique that improved the model’s performance also means that the model, and others like it, will reveal less of their ‘thinking,’ making them harder to monitor for signs of bad behavior, according to a person with knowledge of Astra’s development.”

Biotechnology

How Engineered Microbes Could Help Feed the World’s CropsCasey Crownhart | MIT Technology Review ($)`

“It’s difficult to engineer microbes that can reliably provide nitrogen for crops while also thriving themselves. A startup called Switch Bioworks is taking a new approach that essentially allows microbes to establish themselves and grow into healthy colonies before shifting into nitrogen-producing mode. ‘We have to reinvent fertilizer,’ says Tim Schnabel, the company’s founder and CEO.”

Robotics

Waymo Accelerates Robotaxi Expansion With Launches in Denver, San Diego, and TampaKirsten Korosec | TechCrunch

“Waymo has started to offer its robotaxi service to the public in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa, extending the Alphabet-owned company’s commercial operations to 14 US cities. …The expansion has increased its fleet of self-driving Jaguar I-Pace hatchbacks and a new minivan called the Ojai to more than 4,000 vehicles.”

Space

Physicists Detected a Signal That Defies Explanation. It Could Be Dark Matter—or Something StrangerEllyn Lapointe | Gizmodo

“Researchers running the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment, an ultra-sensitive particle detector buried inside an abandoned gold mine, have recorded a single particle interaction that can’t be explained by any known background signals from normal matter. This event, described in a preprint set to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, is arguably the most compelling candidate for a direct dark matter detection to date. But the authors say it’s still too soon to close this case.”

Robotics

The Cybercab Is Almost Here. Now Comes the Hard PartAarian Marshall | Wired ($)

“The physical Cybercab…may be the easiest lift in Tesla’s deeply ambitious plan to shift from a company that builds cars to one entirely focused on autonomous vehicles and robotics. Manufacturing a car isn’t easy. But neither is running a functional autonomous vehicle service, nor building the software to power it. Tesla hasn’t yet proven that it can do either at scale.”

Space

How AI Plotted an Interstellar Journey to Alpha CentauriMichelle Kim | MIT Technology Review ($)

“A nonprofit organization called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced today that it intends to launch a spacecraft to our nearest star system by the end of 2029. It’s a hugely ambitious mission—if all goes well, the spacecraft could take up to 80,000 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, which is 4.4 light-years away. And the spacecraft will follow a novel trajectory discovered by an AI system developed by Physical Superintelligence (PSI), an AI physics research lab.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 5) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 29 August 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 29)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
29 August 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI Is Developing a ‘Persistent’ AI AgentMaxwell Zeff | Wired ($)

“In recently aired podcasts, interviews, and private investor meetings, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described his desire to turn ChatGPT into a proactive, always-on AI agent. …’There’s like a single product which is: I need to ask the AI something,’ Altman said on a recent episode of David Senra’s podcast. ‘Eventually, maybe the AI should proactively offer me things.'”

Robotics

I Saw the Future of AI in a Robot That Can Learn on the SpotWill Knight | Wired ($)

“I visited the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of a startup called Generalist AI, where I watched robot arms perform simple chores like stacking cups, putting blocks into bowls, and the like. I was astonished by how quickly they figured things out—it was reminiscent of a flesh-and-blood person. The arms mastered a range of tasks after ingesting a short, instructional video and, most impressively, no specific training for a given task.”

Future

Fully Autonomous Russian Drone Kills Three UkrainiansBrendan Ruberry | Semafor

“Though AI has often been used in the final stages of human-planned strikes, the reported incident crosses a dangerous threshold, analysts said, leaving machines to interpret the laws of war and to determine what constitutes a legitimate target. ‘This is a risk for the whole world,’ a Ukrainian commander said. ‘In a few years, we will be living in a Terminator movie.'”

Biotechnology

Researchers Get Two Genetic Codes to Work at the Same TimeJohn Timmer | Ars Technica

“Now, researchers have found a way to operate two separate genetic codes simultaneously, avoiding the need to do any work to compensate for altering the code that every protein in a cell relies on. They didn’t test it in an actual cell, and it might cause some problems there. But it’s a creative solution that should accelerate some synthetic biology work.”

Biotechnology

An Experimental Single-Time Treatment Slashed Cholesterol for a YearCarolyn Y. Johnson | The New York Times ($)

“The results highlight the potential to treat even common diseases by altering people’s genes. In the small study, which followed only 15 patients, participants who got the highest dose saw their cholesterol levels plunge by half—and stay that way for a year. “

Space

The Floodgates Are Open After Another Chinese Company Lands a Reusable RocketStephen Clark | Ars Technica

“It has been a little more than a month since China recovered an orbital-class rocket booster for the first time. A second launch operator accomplished a similar feat Tuesday in another sign of China’s growing launch capability. It took 10 years for a second US launch company, Blue Origin, to propulsively land an orbital-class booster after SpaceX did it with the Falcon 9 rocket in 2015.”

Biotechnology

A Startup Claims It’s Found a Drug to Make Your Blood YoungAntonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review ($)

“The quest has been to find practical ways to mimic [the benefits of replacing old blood with young blood observed in lab mice].  And that is something [Irina] Conboy says she’s now achieved by hitting on a combination of two existing drugs that produce youthful effects—but without the need for any bodily fluid exchange.”

Computing

What We Still Don’t Know About OpenAI’s Hugging Face HackMaxwell Zeff | Wired ($)

“The public postmortem leaves some basic details unresolved…[which] makes it harder to know how much of what happened reflects the growing capabilities of AI agents and how much was specific to the way OpenAI designed and monitored its own systems.”

Space

SpaceX Plans to Build the World’s Biggest SpaceportEditorial Staff | The Economist ($)

“Mr. Musk’s ambition is for the site to host more than 30 rocket launches a day, to support both Starlink—the firm’s existing broadband-from-space service—and its plans to fly data centers into orbit, where they would benefit from both free solar power and an absence of NIMBYs. …If Mr. Musk hits his 30-launches-a-day target, his Louisiana purchase would allow SpaceX to fly about 2m tons of payload into orbit every year, up from about 3,800 tonnes in 2025.”

Tech

Walmart Is 3D Printing the Future of Big Box StoresPatrick Sisson | Fast Company

“For the last two years, contractors working for Walmart have used 3D-printed construction at a handful of sites across the US. …It’s the country’s largest deployment of 3D-printed architecture in the commercial sector. The retailer’s scale is catalyzing the growth and adoption of the technology, which promises to construct buildings faster and more affordably.”

Robotics

Robotaxis Are Real Now—So Is the PushbackRani Molla | The Verge

“The consequences could look very different as autonomous fleets grow from thousands of vehicles to hundreds of thousands. That’s why the battles taking shape across the country are increasingly about the terms of expansion: what companies have to prove before they grow, what they owe cities and workers, and how much control cities and states should have over their operations.”

Artificial Intelligence

Kids Outlearn AI—and We Still Don’t Know WhyElise Cutts | MIT Technology Review ($)

“‘The progress recently has been amazing,’ Michael C. Frank, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, says of LLMs. ‘But we still have to burn down a forest and scrape the entire sum of all human knowledge to re-create this milestone that happens in our living rooms over the course of a year.’ [This yawning divide] raises a tantalizing question for cognitive scientists and a challenge for the architects of AI models: How is it that kids can still outperform the most linguistically sophisticated machines ever built?”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 29) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 15 August 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 15)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
15 August 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

These Startups Are Chasing the Next Big Thing in LLMsWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)

“Transformers are starting to show their age. Many of the recent advances in LLMs, such as the development of so-called reasoning models and their ability to handle large amounts of input at once, are not neat extensions of that core technology but workarounds that patch over some of its fundamental flaws. A growing number of scientists and engineers are now asking what’s coming next.”

SPACE

Astronomers Discover a New Kind of Cosmic Object—a Black Hole ‘Star’Ian Sample | The Guardian

“Astronomers claim to have discovered a new kind of cosmic object, a black hole ‘star,’ which is the size of the entire solar system and glows with a brilliant red light. …Measurements of the exotic body found that while it resembles an immense star, it releases 100bn times more energy than any known star can produce. The energy output is far closer to that observed from black holes than stars.”

Biotechnology

Why Aging May Be a Program, Not a BreakdownIngrid Wickelgren | Quanta Magazine

“Far from a random but linear process of wear and tear, [cell biologist Junyue Cao] argues, aging is a stepwise, programmed, orderly affair. …Using technology that offers a systemwide view of the aging process in mice, Cao has outlined discrete stages of aging, akin to those of embryonic development, that are defined by changes in molecular signals and specific cell populations. In humans, the process likely begins before age 30.”

TECH

Why Wall Street and Nvidia Are Building an Exotic Money Pipeline for the AI BoomJack Pitcher, Anissa Gardizy, and Peter Rudegeair | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“CEO Jensen Huang is running into a problem: Many of his customers can’t afford to buy his company’s coveted AI-powering chips. That explains why Huang teamed up with an array of Wall Street firms on a $500 billion plan that will theoretically standardize chip financing, creating asset-backed pools of capital for AI companies—while leaving Nvidia partly on the hook if things go wrong.”

Future

Big Tech Wants to Harvest Your ThoughtsJames Crawford | Wired ($)

“‘[A brain-computer interface is] incredible for patients that are paralyzed. But imagine you put this on a person for other reasons. There is great responsibility,’ [said Rafael Yuste]. ‘Look what we have in our hands. We just built you a machine that can decode your language. And in 10 years, we’re going to give you a machine that can interfere with your thoughts the way we do it in mice today.'”

ROBOTICS

Self-Driving Trucks Are Officially Testing on California HighwaysKirsten Korosec | TechCrunch

“Aurora Innovation and Kodiak AI, two companies developing self-driving trucks, have received permits from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test their autonomous vehicle technology on public roads. And Kodiak has already started. Kodiak said it is starting with a handful of test trucks in California, primarily around its Mountain View office.”

Artificial Intelligence

The AI Takeover of Mathematics Has BegunRobert Hart | The Verge

“For all the fears and hopes, nobody knows where this is going. AI is moving too fast, and the mathematics it is producing is still too fresh to judge what its impact may be. Several researchers worried that the field could be reshaped for the worse by claims about what AI could become before anyone has had time to understand what it actually means.”

Biotechnology

The World’s Largest ‘Biological Datacenter’ Could Help Make Animal Testing ObsoleteAdele Peters | Fast Company ($)

“For decades, the industry has relied on animal testing. But in a laboratory south of San Francisco, a startup called Vivodyne is scaling up a different approach. Inside wardrobe-size mini labs, robots grow human tissue and run thousands of AI-designed experiments that could better predict how well a new drug will work—and whether it will be safe.”

Biotechnology

Seedless Blackberries and Cherries That Grow on Bushes Vie to Be the Future of FoodMike Grunwald | Wired ($)

“[Pairwise] is also working on peaches without pits, row crops resistant to a variety of diseases, fruit and nut trees that produce their first harvest within a year or two rather than three to eight, and a slew of other novel products, often in partnership with some of the world’s largest agribusinesses.”

Robotics

Waymo Is Growing Faster Than Ever. So Are Its Glitches.Emmy Martin | The New York Times ($)

“What Ms. Peterson experienced is what the driverless car industry calls an ‘edge case,’ which are the unscripted situations that no one trained the robo-taxis to handle. The problem is that edge cases appear to be piling up as Waymo, the leading autonomous car service, rapidly expands. Owned by Google’s parent Alphabet, Waymo has more than quintupled the number of autonomous cars it has on the road to nearly 4,000 today, up from about 700 early last year.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 15) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 8 August 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 8)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
8 August 2026 at 14:00

Future

Should AI Labs Be Treated Like the Owners of Dangerous Animals?Staff | The Economist ($)

“Gabe Weil of the Institute for Law and AI, in Massachusetts, proposes a system of strict liability. As with rules around keeping wild animals, it would assume that any harm is always the fault of the party carrying out the risky activity.”

Tech

Google Overhauls AI Leadership as Longtime Chief Scientist Joins Wave of ExitsMeghan Bobrowsky | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of Google DeepMind to become chairman and chief scientist, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a post on X. Google DeepMind technology chief Koray Kavukcuoglu is taking on responsibility for all AI-model development, and Jeff Dean, Google’s current chief scientist, is leaving with three other company veterans to co-found a new AI startup.”

Biotechnology

Gene-Edited Puppies Will Melt Your Heart—but Won’t Trigger Your AllergiesEmily Mullin | Wired ($)

“Bailey and Alfie are two young beagles that can do tricks like any other dog, but they lack the protein that causes sniffles. They’re the culmination of years of work at Kindred Companion Sciences, a biotech company [Matt] Walker founded in 2020 that emerged from stealth this week with the two pups in tow.”

Biotechnology

Large Genome Models Used to Design New VirusesJohn Timmer | Ars Technica

“This isn’t science fiction—all the viruses the models created are closely related to an existing virus. But they do have some distinct features that would be challenging to evolve. And the researchers who did the work, based at Stanford University, suggest we may want to start thinking now about preparing for the potential that someone could develop a related AI that can design a virus that targets vertebrates.”

Future

Why Is Anthropic Destroying Books?Kathryn James | The Guardian

“We should worry that Anthropic decided it was easier to scan and destroy physical books than to deal with the ‘legal/practice/business slog.’ We should worry that the current understanding of fair use allowed Anthropic to decide that it was easier to buy and destroy ‘all the books in the world’ than to pay the creators of those works.”

Biotechnology

FDA Approves Moderna’s mRNA Flu VaccineChristina Jewett | The New York Times ($)

“In the case of flu, scientists believe that mRNA technology offers an advance from traditional vaccine options that take several months to prepare using decades-old technology, some requiring the virus to develop in fertilized eggs. Moderna has said that the faster new approach will enable a shift away from the current process of focusing on one flu strain for an entire hemisphere each season and allow each nation to pick its best option.”

Computing

AI Hacks Are Bad. AI Worms and Viruses Will Be WorseWill Knight | Wired ($)

“The work is an alarming window into how the next generation of AI agents could do more than just hack into other systems’ computers without permission. It also raises the prospect of future AI agents acting like super-smart, highly aggressive, and rapidly adapting computer viruses.”

Computing

OpenAI’s Expensive Smart Speaker Will Use Moving Parts to Seem ‘More Alive’Scharon Harding | Ars Technica

“Per Bloomberg, the OpenAI speaker’s main appeal is ChatGPT capabilities. Today, ChatGPT has significantly more users than Alexa+, but those users are largely accustomed to accessing the chatbot on devices they already own. With the rumored speaker, OpenAI would be betting on people’s willingness to pay substantial money for dedicated hardware to access chatbot features, the most advanced of which also require a subscription fee.”

Artificial Intelligence

China’s New AI Gold Rush: World ModelsJuro Osawa | The Information ($)

“World models are considered the key to unlocking breakthroughs in humanoids and autonomous vehicles, two areas where China has the world’s broadest and deepest supply chain. The Chinese neolabs think they have a shot, because the race to build world models is still in the early stage, with no front-runners yet, in contrast with the well-beaten path of large language models.”

Space

These Are the Sharpest Images Ever Taken of the Sun, and They Might Solve a Decades-Old MysteryEllyn Lapointe | Gizmodo

“The images are more than beautiful—they’re packed with critical information about the fundamental physics of our home star, including the first experimental confirmation of a long-theorized phenomenon that only the high spatial resolution of the Inouye Solar Telescope could reveal.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 8) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 1 August 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 1)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
1 August 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI’s Hacking Debacle Comes Down to Human ErrorLily Hay Newman | Wired ($)

“If the generative AI giant had followed well-known security best practices, it’s likely that its AI agent would never have escaped to the open internet and hacked multiple companies. …’A simple analysis of the actual risk has an actual simple answer,’ says longtime security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer. ‘The OpenAI mistakes were dead simple.'”

Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic’s New AI Model Can Identify More Software Bugs Than Ever. Microsoft Is Struggling to Fix Them Fast Enough.Renee Dudley and Doris Burke | ProPublica

“Each month, the company publicly releases fixes for its software vulnerabilities in what’s known as ‘Patch Tuesday.’ In June, it released patches for more than 200 bugs, which industry experts then said was an all-time high. But on July 14, the company blew through that record and released patches for more than 600 bugs.”

Future

The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies With Just One EmployeeTe-Ping Chen | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.”

Future

The AI Jobs Apocalypse Probably Isn’t Coming Anytime SoonEduardo Porter | The Guardian

“As Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor noted: ‘A lot of people have noticed that the world is not changing as fast as they predicted.’ The emerging new story not only puts more emphasis on the complexity of the relationship between automation and human work across history. It is also raising doubts about the very feasibility of the threatened AI transformation of the universe.”

Robotics

Are Brain Waves the Next Unlock for Physical AI?Tim Fernholz | TechCrunch

“Encord is one of a growing number of startups betting the next real constraint on humanoid and warehouse will be the scarcity of real-world physical training data, and which is building a business not just to manage that data but to manufacture it. The brain wave headset Ceja is wearing was built by Zander Labs, a German neuroscience startup that’s betting measuring brain activity—to deduce mental states like error, intent, and surprise—can create a more useful dataset to train models.”

Tech

Wall Street Hunts for Creative AI Financing as ‘Digestion Issues’ EmergeStaff | The Information ($)

“John Greenwood, Goldman Sach’s global head of infrastructure and real asset finance, said he’s ‘looking for capital in every nook and cranny’ to support an expected $7.5 trillion in spending on chips, data centers, and power in the next five years. The hunt won’t end there, since much of that spending is on GPUs and other chips that need replacing every few years.”

Space

Experts Warn Current Starship Heat Shield Tech Is a ‘Dead End’ for Rapid ReuseEric Berger | Ars Technica

“The problem is that, with the signs of damage [to its heat shield], such a heat shield would appear to require a fair amount of inspection and refurbishment before another launch. In other words, SpaceX has a ways to go to reach ‘full and rapid’ reuse of Starship. “

Tech

In Silicon Valley, Some Say an AI Bubble Would Be Just FineErin Griffith | The New York Times ($)

“The excitement created by a bubble can drive new breakthroughs, their thinking goes. …These frenzies are important for allowing crucial infrastructure to get built, even if they lead to some ‘capital destruction’ along the way, [said Tomasz Tunguz, an investor at the venture capital firm Theory Ventures].”

Future

Neri Oxman Wants to Grow the Colors on Your ClothesElizabeth Segran | Fast Company ($)

“While several biotech firms have created more sustainable dyes, plugging cleaner chemicals into existing dye houses, Oxman’s approach reimagines dying from the ground up, treating dyes and fabrics as living organisms that can be grown. And while the Vigils project is still experimental, Oxman’s long-term goal is to commercialize and scale the technology, reshaping the future of fashion.”

Energy

New Data Shows EV Batteries Are Lasting Longer Than Initially ExpectedBruce Gil | Gizmodo

“Today’s average EV retains 97% of its original range after three years and 95% after five years, according to an analysis by EV data company Recurrent. …Additionally, battery replacement appears to be rare among newer EVs. A separate Recurrent analysis found that the battery replacement rate for EVs with model years 2022 and later was only 0.3%.”

Tech

Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AIAngel Au-Yeung, Katherine Bindley, and Tina Li | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“Fed up with ballooning costs, companies big and small are starting to use lower-priced models, including some built in China. In many cases, they are adding the new, cheaper models alongside OpenAI and Anthropic’s products, shopping a la carte for their artificial intelligence.”

Robotics

This Automation Tech Turns Old Tractors Into Self-Driving Farming MachinesPatrick Sisson | Fast Company ($)

“It’s a rig that can be attached to just about any existing tractor to help it mow, seed, weed, and perform any number of time-intensive tasks, all on its own, for a sector desperate for more labor.”

Space

AI Data Centers in Space? A System to Cool Chips Could Help.Ivan Penn | The New York Times ($)

“With a growing backlash against the proliferation of data centers to power artificial intelligence, there has been increasing interest in putting the energy-thirsty operations into orbit. Now, researchers may have figured out how to overcome a major obstacle to that goal: cooling the data centers in space.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 1) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 25 July 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 25)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
25 July 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI Says Its AI Models Went Rogue and Attacked a Digital Library
Kate Conger | The New York Times ($)

“The trial was designed to keep the models in a safe testing environment, known as a sandbox, OpenAI said. But the models found a vulnerability that allowed them to escape the sandbox and connect to the internet. Then they targeted Hugging Face because they inferred that the library, which contains millions of AI models, could hold clues about how to successfully pass the evaluation.”

Tech

Be Skeptical of OpenAI’s Rogue Hacker Agent Story
John Thickstun | The Guardian

“OpenAI remains hungry for ever larger investments, and the company increasingly seeks privileged regulatory status as defense against competition. AI is so powerful that investors should buy OpenAI, even at a trillion-dollar valuation; AI is so dangerous that only trusted actors like OpenAI should be permitted to possess and operate this technology. Step back from these doomsday warnings and consider who might benefit from them.”

Biotechnology

Can This New Enzyme Turn Back the Clock in the Human Body?
K.R. Callaway | The New York Times ($)

“In a recent study, scientists devised a way of reversing the buildup of compounds that lead to some age-related diseases. …After several cycles of guided evolution, the novel enzyme, called CMLase, became very good at removing AGEs [advanced glycation end products] from human tissue samples. ‘In the most extreme case, we took 70-year-old human skin and brought the levels back to that of a 30-year-old,’ Dr. Cravens said.”

Tech

Silicon Valley Is Completely Divided Over Chinese AI
Lauren Goode | Wired ($)

“Having access to open-source software allows startups to scale, scale, scale—and deal with the consequences down the road. Meanwhile, the AI labs and hyperscalers that make proprietary platforms, like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and XAI, stand to benefit greatly if their systems remain protected and dominant. The bigger question that none of these companies seem to be asking is what best serves the 99 percent of us who don’t have their financial future fully staked on advancing AI.”

Science

Neuron Discovery Could Explain Why Some People Don’t Get Alzheimer’s
Pranjal Malewar | Refractor

“This kind of strategy may open up novel avenues for the prevention of cognitive decline generally or for protecting against Alzheimer’s-related vulnerability/resilience. Salta states, ‘Cognitive resilience is extremely exciting. If we understand what protects these brains, it could eventually lead to new therapeutic strategies. For now, the message is clear: the aging brain may be more adaptable and more complex than we once thought.'”

Space

India’s First Privately Developed Rocket Reaches Orbit on Dramatic Debut Launch
Stephen Clark | Ars Technica

“Indian space officials celebrated the debut flight of Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 rocket, India’s first fully commercial satellite launcher, as a ‘grand success’ Saturday after an on-target climb into a 280-mile-high orbit following liftoff from an island spaceport in the Bay of Bengal.”

Tech

Kagi Brings Back Old-School Search, One Human-Made Website at a Time
David Nield | Wired ($)

“As Kagi explains it, searching the web is always going to cost you—it’s just a question of whether you pay directly with dollars, by giving up data about your online activity, or by sifting through an increasing number of ads and sponsored links. Besides making search more private, Kagi also wants to make it better by serving up results that aren’t influenced by paid promotions or whatever Google’s favored business practices happen to be from month to month.”

Artificial Intelligence

Now, Defenders Are Embracing the prompt Injection, Too
Dan Goodin | Ars Technica

“Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents.”

Artificial Intelligence

What the New Kimi K3 Model Really Means for the US-China AI Race
Alix Coutures, Rocket Drew, and Aaron Holmes | The Information ($)

“Greenblatt estimates that Kimi K3 is 10 months behind Anthropic in terms of pre-training. ‘My basic takeaway is it’s probably not that competitive with the best recent pre-trains from OpenAI and Anthropic,’ he said. ‘It’s some evidence that the model is more behind than people might have otherwise thought.'”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 25) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 18 July 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 18)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
18 July 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

China’s Moonshot AI Releases Model to Challenge Top US SystemsTracy Qu and Raffaele Huang | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“Moonshot said Friday that it planned to fully open-source the model, called Kimi K3, by late this month, where people will be generally free to download and adapt. With 2.8 trillion parameters dictating its decision-making, Kimi K3 is the world’s biggest open-source model, according to the Beijing-based startup.”

Robotics

The Fight Over Humanoid Robots Has Shut Down a Car Factory for the First TimeJiyoung Sohn | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“The union’s response [to Hyundai’s new Atlas robot] was blunt: Atlas would never step onto a production line without workers agreeing first. This week, Hyundai’s auto workers in South Korea have gone on a partial strike. It is the car industry’s first factory stoppage addressing humanoid robots.”

Computing

Psiquantum Has a Plan to Make a Massive Quantum Computer Out of LightJames O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review ($)

“PsiQuantum has attracted unusual investment and scrutiny for two reasons: It is one of the few companies aiming directly at building a large and useful machine, and it is already working with a major chip manufacturer to build its systems using existing semiconductor fabs.”

Tech

Generative AI Is an Engineering DisasterAlex Reisner | The Atlantic ($)

“I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.”

Space

How Hard Is It to Build Orbital Data Centers, Actually?Eric Berger | Ars Technica

“You need unprecedented heavy lift: reusable and rapid launch. You need the ability to manufacture the largest satellites humans have ever built and to build 100 times more of them than humans ever have for a single constellation. You have to hope that radiation’s impacts on chips are manageable and that radiational cooling scales. You also need a few trillion bucks.”

Future

Once Again We Are Told AI May Be Conscious—I Study Consciousness, and I Have My DoubtsAnil Seth | The Guardian

“The information processing unfolding inside Claude is no more likely to result in consciousness than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane. AI systems are getting more powerful every day. But to give ourselves the best chance of navigating this new world, we should remember how different we are from our almost-magical creations. When we sell our minds too cheaply to our machines, we not only overestimate them, we underestimate ourselves.”

Biotechnology

AI Teaches a Bitter Biology LessonReed Albergotti | Semafor

“Future discoveries and therapies will come not from a human-like understanding of science, but by simple pattern recognition of new biological information at scale. …[Richard] Sutton’s bitter lesson is applicable to biology because so much of the human body—not just the mind—is still beyond our understanding. And we’ll find the way forward by industrializing trial-and-error experimentation until the breakthroughs materialize.”

Future

Want Experts in 10 Years? Keep AI Away From Your Beginners TodayLaëtitia Vitaud | Fast Company

“A Nordic public school system and a 300-person American law firm aren’t pursuing the same goals. But they arrived at the same conclusion: Beginners must first learn without assistance in order to be, later on, well assisted.”

Space

Astronomers Find an Atmosphere on a Nearby Earthlike PlanetKatrina Miller | The New York Times ($)

“New data collected by the astronomers strongly suggests that LHS 1140b has a helium-rich atmosphere. The detection, published in the journal Science, is the first clear evidence of a potentially habitable planet with an atmosphere, and it reinforces the idea that there exists a population of worlds similar to our own with the properties necessary to sustain life.”

Future

The Big Reason Einstein Would Never Have Used AIEthan Siegel | Big Think

“Irrespective of whether AI counts as actual ‘intelligence’ or not, the fact is that outsourcing the growth and refinement of your critical thinking skills means you not only don’t develop those skills yourself, the ones you already have begin to decay. …This is where humans are needed most. Einstein was uncompromising about humans developing those exact skills.”

Artificial Intelligence

Simulating Everything, Sort Of: The Promise and Limits of World ModelsSamuel Axon | Ars Technica

“Instead of or in addition to working with language, world models aim to lay the groundwork for AI systems that are capable of simulating the physical world, or at least a useful approximation of it. To examine what’s different and important about this idea, Ars spoke with three expert practitioners working on world models and related technologies.”

Artificial Intelligence

Meet GPT-Red: An LLM Super-Hacker OpenAI Built to Make Its Models SaferWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)

“GPT-Red automates a type of safety evaluation for software systems known as red-teaming, which is typically done by a team of human testers. The aim is to find as many different ways to break or hijack a system as possible. The weak spots can then be patched before the final version of the software is released.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 18) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 11 July 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 11)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
11 July 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

Khosla-Backed Startup Claims Breakthrough With Largest-Ever AI Model on an iPhoneAaron Tilley | The Information ($)

“The largest AI models, which can measure in the trillions of parameters, are still far too big to run on mobile devices. But the model PrismML has working on an iPhone is capable of tasks like complex chat, reasoning, fully autonomous agents and software coding, the startup said.”

Robotics

Humanoid Robots Controlled by Surgeons Did World-First Operation on Live PigsJeremy Hsu | Ars Technica

“Humanoid robots have surgically removed the gallbladders from living animals in an unprecedented medical experiment—but not as autonomous machines capable of replacing human doctors. Instead, skilled human surgeons remotely controlled the robots’ movements in a new example of human-robot teamups.”

Biotechnology

mRNA Vaccines Clear Sweeping Global Review of Safety and EffectivenessBronwyn Thompson | Refractor

“An international team…reviewed data from laboratory studies, clinical trials, and real-world statistics to fully investigate this relatively novel class of vaccine, from design and manufacturing to its long-term performance. ‘After billions of doses, we now have an extraordinary amount of scientific evidence,’ says lead author Dr. Anna Blakney, assistant professor at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories and School of Biomedical Engineering.”

Tech

Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX Are Bigger Than the Last 25 Years of Tech ExitsRussell Brandom | TechCrunch

“SpaceX has already gone public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, and with both Anthropic and OpenAI pushing into the trillions it’s likely the trio together will land somewhere north of $4 trillion. By comparison, the US Securities and Exchange Commission counted just $70 billion in US-based IPO proceeds last year.”

Biotechnology

11% of Americans Are Currently Taking a GLP-1 Weight Loss Drug Like WegovyMatt Novak | Gizmodo

“Gallup notes that obesity reached a record high in the US in 2022 at 39.9% but has ticked down to 36.4%, according to the latest data based on self-reported height and weight. That dip has been credited to the large number of Americans now using GLP-1 drugs.”

Tech

The Mistrust of AI Labs Bubbles OverLiz Hoffman | Semafor

“Forward-deployed engineers, dispatched by AI labs to help customers implement their models, will come back to the mother ship with a deep understanding of how banks, consulting firms, retailers, manufacturers, and consultants operate. That customer support, to a suspicious eye, looks a lot like reconnaissance.”

Future

Microsoft’s Carbon Emissions Went Up 25 Percent Last YearStevie Bonifield | The Verge

“Microsoft says this was ‘driven primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure,’ as well as the company’s decision last February to stop purchasing ‘non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates.'”

Tech

China’s Answer to AI Sticker ShockMatteo Wong | The Atlantic ($)

“Having successfully persuaded corporate America to give their products a try, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are now struggling to prove that their tools are worth the money. …While it’s too soon to know whether GLM-5.2 is really capable of replacing America’s top-tier AI agents, any firm or developer who is balking at the costs now might have an alternative.”

Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic Found a Hidden Space Where Claude Puzzles Over ConceptsWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)

“The J-space contains individual words that are related to the words and phrases that the model is most likely to spit out in a response in the near future. If Claude were a person (which it is not), you might say that these hidden words can reveal what’s on its mind before it actually speaks.”

Artificial Intelligence

Hackers Can Use 9 of the Most Popular AI Tools to Assemble Massive BotnetsDan Goodin | Ars Technica

“A new attack the researchers have named HalluSquatting has the potential to assemble massive botnets, perform large-scale DDoSes, and infect devices at scale, a first for prompt-injection attacks. The attack works against AI coding assistants and agents, including Cursor, Cursor CLI, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, Cline, OpenClaw, ZeroClaw, and NanoClaw, which are all susceptible.”

Future

UN Secretary-General Seeks Ban on AI WeaponsTom Chivers | Semafor

“The UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a ban on ‘killer robots,’ saying the decision to take life ‘must remain forever human.’ …Guterres called AI-controlled weapons ‘morally repugnant,’ although not all ethicists agree: One roboticist argues they are more discriminate in their killing than scared human soldiers, while a philosopher said in 2022 that using robots will prevent young men and women bearing ‘the moral burden’ of wars.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 11) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 27 June 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 27)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
27 June 2026 at 14:00

Computing

IBM Has Unveiled Chip Technology That Could Help Extend Moore’s Law Another DecadeSophia Chen | MIT Technology Review ($)

“To fit more transistors on a chip, engineers across the industry are eyeing a pivot to an approach familiar to urban planners: build up. On Thursday, IBM announced it has created a chip that uses this strategy. The new architecture, known as a nanostack, vertically stacks transistors in two layers on a silicon chip.”

Artificial Intelligence

AI Is Designing Radio Chips That Humans Couldn’t Even ImagineKaushik Sengupta | IEEE Spectrum

“Some of the…chips look more like modern art than circuit layouts. Yet in many cases, the physical prototypes bested state-of-the art circuits in terms of performance. The real achievement, however, is that it took the AI orders of magnitude less time to conceive a working design than it would a human designer.”

Science

A Dark Dimension Could Link Two of the Universe’s Great UnknownsSteve Nadis | Quanta Magazine

“Even though scientists have assumed that dark energy and dark matter ‘don’t have anything to do with each other,’ said Tim Tait, a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, ‘you can imagine a case where one influences the other. And it would not be surprising if [they] were manifestations of a kind of unified theory of the dark universe.'”

Biotechnology

New Effort Will Get Genome Sequences for Entire Endangered Species ListJohn Timmer | Ars Technica

“Over 2,300 plant and animal populations remain on the [endangered species] list, requiring ongoing government intervention. On Thursday, it was announced that all of those species would see their genomes sequenced and tissue samples preserved to aid future conservation efforts.”

Future

AI Was Supposed to Kill Engineering Jobs, but New Data Suggests They’re the Most ResilientMarina Temkin | TechCrunch

“Software engineering, in theory, is the professional field most vulnerable to automation, given the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools. However, researchers at venture firm SignalFire say the hiring data tells a different story. ‘The rationale given for lots of layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically they’ll say AI with respect to code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job of however many engineers in the past,’ said Asher Bantock, SignalFire’s head of research. ‘What we’re seeing on the ground is a little inconsistent with that.'”

Computing

This Flying Solar-Powered Platform Could Deliver Better Internet From the AirRachel Courtland | MIT Technology Review ($)

“As soon as August, a giant silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to reach the coast of Japan. Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the New Mexico–based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean’s surface, in a wispy-thin layer known as the stratosphere. Then it will use a custom-built antenna to supplement Softbank’s 5G network, a test that will include beaming data straight to devices.”

Computing

A New Paper Argues Microsoft Exaggerated Its Quantum Claims a Year AgoSophia Chen | The Verge

“A critique published in Nature Wednesday calls the basic technology behind Microsoft’s ‘breakthrough’ quantum computing chip the Majorana 1 into question. …In a peer-reviewed article, Henry Legg, a physicist at the University of St. Andrews, reanalyzed Microsoft’s data on their device and argued that the company’s researchers did not conclusively demonstrate a working topological qubit in the first place.”

Artificial Intelligence

The AI World Is Getting ‘Loopy’Russell Brandom | TechCrunch

“‘Two years ago, we wrote source code by hand. We started to transition so agents write the code. And now we’re transitioning to the point where agents are prompting agents that then write the code,’ [said Claude Code creator Boris Cherny]. ‘As big as the step from source code to agents was, loops are just as important and as big a step.'”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 27) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 20 June 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 20)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
20 June 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

A Startup Claims It Broke Through a Bottleneck That’s Holding Back LLMsWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)

“According to Subquadratic, it has developed a new kind of LLM, called SubQ, that is faster and cheaper and uses a lot less energy than any other model on the market. The company also claims that SubQ is able to process up to 12 times as much text at once than most other models, allowing it to carry out a range of data-heavy tasks, such as analyzing hundreds of documents or entire code bases.”

Robotics

The Next Humanoid Robot Might Not Look Human at AllRobert Hart | The Verge

“The next humanoid robot might not have a head. It might not have legs. It might even sit on a wheeled base and fold down like a deck chair. But, as Genesis AI puts it, ‘humanoid robots don’t need to look human.’ …Genesis says Eno is designed ‘around human capability’ rather than human appearance and is intended as a fully ‘general-purpose’ robot rather than a machine built around a single task, like folding laundry.”

Biotechnology

Chilling the Body With Drugs Could Limit Brain Damage From StrokeAlice Klein | New Scientist ($)

“A combination of two drugs used to treat hay fever and psychosis cooled down the core body temperature of mice and monkeys, reducing brain damage after a stroke. These medications have also undergone preliminary testing in people, and will now be evaluated in a follow-up clinical trial.”

Future

A Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI OverviewsFernanda González | Wired ($)

“The authorities found that, unlike traditional search engines, which merely display lists of links with statements made by third parties, Google’s tool produced ‘independent, new, and substantial statements’ based on a misinterpretation of information available on the internet. …Google is the only entity with the ability to modify the technology underpinning its AI-generated summaries and, therefore, ‘must be held accountable.'”

Artificial Intelligence

Estonia Is Giving AI Agents ‘Personal Identification Codes’Webb Wright | Gizmodo

“Estonia is trying to bring some law and order to the Wild West that is the world of AI agents. The small Baltic nation plans to assign each AI agent a ‘personal identification code,’ hoping to track what agents do across the internet and identify the people or companies behind them.”

Biotechnology

Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AIPhilip Ball | Quanta Magazine

“[The AI] approach is likely to be useful, but for those who crave real understanding of how the genome, and ultimately life itself, works, a computational black box will never suffice. And perhaps more to the point, the genome might not submit to the kind of straightforward input-output approach that such AI models ultimately assume. That’s because the genome is no blueprint or algorithm. It is something else.”

Future

The Inevitable Weakness of MetricsBryan Gardiner | MIT Technology Review ($)

“What I think many of us miss—what I know I certainly missed—is that there are always trade-offs when you try to distill something important down to a data point. When we turn to metrics to understand ourselves, our social world, and culture as a whole, they will never come close to capturing what matters. Even worse, they’ll often actively obscure it.”

Future

Just 16% of Americans Believe AI Will Positively Impact Society, Pew Poll FindsMatt Novak | Gizmodo

“Half of adult Americans use AI chatbots, with a quarter using them daily, according to new polling from Pew Research released Wednesday. That’s up from 33% of Americans who used AI chatbots in the summer of 2024. But a small minority, 16%, believe AI will have a positive impact on society.”

Computing

Sooner Than Expected? Useful Quantum Error Correction Promised for 2028.John Timmer | Ars Technica

“‘By 2028, we will bring Libra, a Megaquop-scale device, capable of executing one million quantum operations over hundreds of logical qubits, to our customers, enabling first scientific applications in quantum chemistry, high-energy physics, and materials simulation that are beyond the reach of classical and Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers today,’ Amazon’s statement said.”

Computing

Brain-Computer Interface Trials Are Taking OffJessica Hamzelou | MIT Technology Review ($)

“Over the past couple of years, the number of BCI trial volunteers has soared. This year, China became the first country to approve a BCI for medical use. Advances in technology are allowing engineers to provide more features than ever. BCI research is properly taking off.”

Robotics

Why Waymo’s Driverless Taxis Won’t Be on Your Streets Anytime SoonDavid McCabe | The New York Times ($)

“Waymo is increasingly facing political roadblocks as it tries to roll out its self-driving taxis powered by artificial intelligence nationwide. After early successes winning over politicians in California—its home state—and elsewhere, Waymo has stumbled in unlocking some of the biggest markets in the country.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 20) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 13 June 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 13)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
13 June 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

Jeff Bezos Wants to Build an ‘Artificial General Engineer’Cade Metz | The New York Times ($)

“‘All societal wealth is driven by invention,’ [Bezos] said in an interview with The New York Times. ‘Six thousand years ago, somebody invented the plow, and we all got wealthier. Then, much later, somebody invented the steam engine, and we all got wealthier.’ …’What Prometheus seeks to do,’ he added, ‘is to offer a set of tools that dramatically accelerates that invention loop.'”

Computing

Why Orbital Data Centers Are Harder Than Silicon Valley ThinksAndrew Cavalier | IEEE Spectrum

“Proponents tout the many wonders of computing in space: abundant solar energy, free cooling, and freedom from Earth-based disturbances like earthquakes, floods, and protesters. But a sober look at the physics of space-based computing paints a much more nuanced picture.”

Biotechnology

Longevity Startup Doses First Human in Bid to Reverse Age-Related Sight LossIsabella Ward | Wired ($)

“It is the first-ever cellular-rejuvenation therapy using this technology to receive FDA clearance to enter human clinical trials, and hence the first chance to test whether the technology can ‘ameliorate human disease,’ according to Life Biosciences cofounder David Sinclair, who is also a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.”

Future

AI Absolutism Is Breaking Our Brains. The Apocalyptic Future We’re Being Sold Isn’t InevitableSamantha Oltman | The Guardian

“Contradictory as they may be, all these arguments and anxieties fit neatly into the overarching message of the people building this technology: AI’s dominance is inevitable. Get on board or you will be left behind. …[But] the version of AI that we’re being sold doesn’t have to be the version we buy. Nor does it need to be the story we believe in.”

Energy

Commonwealth Fusion Makes the Physics Case for Its 400 MW ReactorJohn Timmer | Ars Technica

“According to our best models, developed using real-world data from multiple tokamaks, ARC should be able to regularly trigger fusion reactions that release more energy than we put into them. But there’s ‘working’ from a physics perspective, and ‘working’ from a market perspective. …the finances are going to be the hardest risk to retire and may require having ARC operate for decades before we have a definitive answer.”

Artificial Intelligence

Google DeepMind Is Worried About What Happens When Millions of Agents Start to InteractWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)

“According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates a whole new class of risk.”

Future

Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App After Wired ReportDhruv Mehrotra | Wired ($)

“One day after Wired revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a Wired analysis of the latest version’s code. …The version published the day of Wired’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.”

Space

A Falcon 9 Booster Turns 5 Years Old—and Just Set a Remarkable Reuse RecordEric Berger | Ars Technica

“Since [SpaceX’s] Booster 1067 made its debut in June 2021, [ULA] has flown its workhorse Atlas V rocket a total of 22 times and the Vulcan rocket four times, and the Delta IV Heavy vehicle made its final three flights. So in the time that this single Falcon 9 first stage has flown and landed 35 times, its competitor company has made 29 total launches. Put another way, this rocket has put more mass into orbit than more than two dozen expendable rockets over half a decade of effort.”

Artificial Intelligence

Why Apple’s Slow-And-Steady AI Bet Is Starting to Look Pretty SmartLucas Ropek | TechCrunch

“In short, Apple is spending less, making more, and now launched a suite of AI features that—for many iPhone users—will feel indistinguishable from the other AI applications already available to them through the App Store. If that doesn’t exactly count as ‘winning the AI race,’ it may be the smartest way to run it.”

Future

Who Will Actually Thrive in the Hybrid AI-Human Work ForceStaff | The New York Times ($)

“The transformation that’s coming is going to take place in the world as it is familiar to us today, and every single day will feel familiar. And there’ll be tiny, tiny changes along the margin. There’ll be tiny bits of automation along the margins. And 10, 15, 20 years later, we’ll look back and we’ll say, My god, everything is different. But you’ll never notice it happening. That’s the way it always goes.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 13) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 7 June 2026 ⏭ SingularityHub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 7)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
7 June 2026 at 16:58

Artificial Intelligence

Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain’s ‘Core Algorithm’Steven Levy | Wired ($)

“The goal, Reardon tells me, is to build ‘a synthetic artificial intelligence brain that runs on 50 watts or less.’ It should adapt to its conditions, be as nimble as a human mind, and burn a tiny fraction of an LLM’s compute power and energy. The proof of concept is thriving inside our skulls.”

Biotechnology

Researchers Are Using AI to Create Vaccines—and It’s Working
Ed Cara | Gizmodo

“An experimental pan-coronavirus vaccine developed with AI has just passed a phase I trial in the UK. Scientists at the University of Cambridge used AI to find a kink in the armor of coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of covid-19. …The researchers are also hoping to use their platform to develop broadly effective vaccines against flu and the Ebola virus.”

Computing

China Has Approved the World’s First Invasive Brain-Computer Chip—Here’s What’s NextYou Xiaoying | MIT Technology Review ($)

“This March, the implant Dong [Hui] uses became the first invasive BCI product in the world to be approved for use beyond clinical trials. It’s now available to some patients with paralysis in their limbs due to spinal cord injuries. We spoke to a range of experts to understand why the device was able to reach this global milestone, what makes this moment so significant, and what to expect next.”

Biotechnology

Huge Study of Alzheimer’s Genetics Identifies New Drug TargetsChris Simms | New Scientist ($)

“The biggest genetic study of Alzheimer’s disease so far has identified 127 gene locations that are associated with the condition, of which 48 are new. The study also pinpoints several genes that could be prioritized as drug targets and cell types linked to a higher genetic risk of the condition.”

Artificial Intelligence

This AI Weather Startup Is Out-forecasting Government AgenciesTim Fernholz | TechCrunch

“One simple way to understand it, WindBorne’s chief product officer Kai Marshland says, is that WeatherMesh-6 ‘is as accurate five days out as a traditional forecast is the day before,’ particularly on surface temperature measurements. WeatherMesh-6 produces a forecast every hour, as opposed to every six hours, as traditional models do, and its resolution is now down to 3 km in the continental US.”

Computing

Microsoft’s Next-Gen Quantum Chip Cuts Timeline to Useful Quantum ComputingTom Warren | The Verge

“Microsoft claimed last year that it had made a key breakthrough in quantum computing with Majorana 1, the company’s first quantum processor. While physicists were immediately skeptical of Microsoft’s claims, the software giant is announcing Majorana 2 today, the next generation of its topological quantum chip.”

Space

SpaceX’s Next Big Business Could Be Building Stuff in SpacePassant Rabie | Gizmodo

“The FAA recently approved test flights of the company’s [Starfall] reentry vehicles. …With Starfall, SpaceX would add in-orbit manufacturing to its business portfolio. The idea of in-orbit manufacturing has been around for decades, using the microgravity environment to manufacture materials that would otherwise be impossible to produce on Earth.”

Future

China Aims AI at Predicting Who Could Pose a Political RiskJulian E. Barnes | The New York Times ($)

“A Chinese company has been trying to develop artificial intelligence-powered technology that would enable authoritarian governments to not just monitor dissidents but also potentially predict who could become one in the future. The work, which appears to be in the research stage, is ripped out of dystopian science fiction, offering a glimpse of a world in which an authoritarian state is able to move against its citizens before they begin any public dissent.”

Artificial Intelligence

AI Evaluators Struggle with Models That Know When They’re Being TestedRocket Drew | The Information ($)

“AI researchers are starting to make progress on a confounding problem: AI models are getting better at telling when they are in an evaluation. …If models act differently during testing, that could mean they get released with undesirable tendencies. It could also undermine their creators’ ability to show off test scores to potential clients.”

Biotechnology

Moderna Gets $50 Million to Develop MRNA Ebola Vaccine Against BundibugyoBeth Mole | Ars Technica

“The global health organization Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced Monday that it will ‘urgently accelerate development’ of three vaccine candidates against Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV), pledging a little over $60 million in the effort to extinguish an outbreak currently raging out of control in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

Computing

World’s First Underwater Data Center Is Now Online, Powered by WindBronwyn Thompson | New Atlas

“Just over seven months from completing phase one of this mega-project, Chinese engineers have finished the build and switched on the world’s first underwater data center (UDC) powered by offshore wind turbines. What’s more, it doesn’t need freshwater and cuts land use by more than 90% compared with above-ground centers.”

Artificial Intelligence

Gemini Spark Is the Most Impressive and Terrifying AI Experience I’ve Had YetDavid Pierce | The Verge

“On the one hand, this is one of the most astonishingly impressive AI experiences I have ever had. …On the other hand, I can’t shake the deeply creepy feeling I get from the whole thing. What Spark did feels sort of magical, and very invasive. It’s weird that Spark is so casually telling me the names and ages of my children, reminding me that it knows where I live, and finding information I know for a fact I’ve never volunteered to Google.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 7) appeared first on SingularityHub.

❌