Author: kirklandc008@gmail.com

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What’s at stake in AI’s trillion-dollar gamble When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to assess AI’s impact on the economy over the next few years, she faced a long list of uncertainties. So she started with a “remarkable fact” that is not in question: a handful of so-called hyperscalers are investing huge amounts of money to build AI data centers. Instead of trying to predict how widely deployed AI models…

Meet PitchFly, WIRED’s latest editorial recruit.He has 165,112 neurons, and they’re all trained to generate story ideas. A sampling of his early output: “The Hidden Weather Problem Inside Surveillance”; “The Engineers Who Think Elon Musk Needs Less Computer Security”; and my personal favorite, “Everyone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump.”PitchFly uses a detailed map of the brain of a male drosophila—the common fruit fly. Developed by researchers from Google and a number of academic institutions, the map, known as a connectome, captures the way that 166,000 neurons and 125 million connecting synapses fire in response to stimuli. In essence,…

The way I try to describe it, think of a pyramid, I call it the performance pyramid. You have commodity materials at the bottom of the pyramid and you have high performing specialty materials at the top of the pyramid. At Syensqo, all we do is we operate at the top of the pyramid and we’re continually trying to raise the top of that pyramid by bringing newer and newer and more higher performing materials out. Now you might say, okay, but why doesn’t a data center or a semiconductor manufacturing fab need a specialty versus something in the commodity…

This article is brought to you by VicOne.Robot safety has traditionally asked: Can a machine remain safe when something goes wrong? Physical AI raises a harder question: Can a machine remain safe when an attacker changes what it sees, decides, or does even when nothing appears to have failed?As AI and robotics continue to advance at an unprecedented pace, modern robots perceive through multimodal sensors, interpret context using AI models, and translate those interpretations into physical action. As they move into dynamic environments, their safety increasingly depends on the integrity of the data guiding their decisions.That dependence creates risks that…

The effort to mix the brain tissues of distant species is being reported today in the journal Nature by a team at Stanford University, led by neuroscientist Sergiu Pașca.  Pașca’s group previously showed that human brain “organoids”—small blobs of neural tissue—could survive, and even function, after being injected into the heads of baby rodents. Now, Pașca has taken things a step further by genetically modifying mice so their brains don’t fully develop in the first place. These modified mice are missing most cells of both the cortex and the hippocampus, two key brain areas. That creates much more room for…

For years, many of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley have argued that the US is locked in an AI arms race with China, and that the consequences of losing would be disastrous. But over the past week, those same executives have started emphasizing a different message. AI has the potential to become so dangerous, tech leaders say, that the two countries urgently need to work together to slow the race down.“Global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post published…

Because the foundation holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI, it is now be on track to become the richest charitable organization on the planet, potentially sitting on $250 billion in stock value. (By comparison, the Gates Foundation and a trust associated with it held about $180 billion at the end of 2025.)   Making good use of that kind of money will not be easy. The foundation, based in San Francisco, is still hiring for many key roles and started ramping up its grantmaking only this year. Its largest single gift so far, of $100 million, was awarded in August…

When the body goes to war on itself, it wreaks havoc.The immune system is one of our most powerful defenses, protecting us from infections, cancer, and other threats. But it’s a double-edged sword. Sometimes all that firepower is turned against healthy tissue. The resulting autoimmune diseases can be devastating. Take multiple sclerosis, an insidious disease that gradually eats away at the insulating coating around delicate nerve fibers, scrambling the electrical signals that control our bodies. The disease often strikes in young or middle adulthood, and there’s no cure.Now a new clinical trial turns the immune system’s arsenal against the cells…

For Hollywood stars, press junkets are an opportunity to promote new work while connecting with fans. They tell funny or embarrassing stories about one another, give us a glimpse into the film production process, and reveal mannerisms that make them more relatable.So why would anyone want to talk to Tilly Norwood, an interactive, British-accented digital character and “actor” developed with generative artificial intelligence by Xicoia, an AI division of a studio called Particle 6 Group? It’s a fair enough question considering that it does not exist in our physical realm and will never appear in a movie that any halfway…

Listen to the session or watch below Employees at the world’s leading AI labs are saying there’s a real possibility that advanced AI could destroy humanity. Are they right? Or is this more scaremongering and hype? Watch a conversation unpacking AI extinction fears: where they come from, whether they hold any water, and, if so, what we should do.