Future
If Anthropic Succeeds, a Nation of Benevolent AI Geniuses Could Be BornSteven Levy | Wired
“The vision [Dario Amodei] spins makes Shangri-La look like a slum. Not long from now, maybe even in 2026, Anthropic or someone else will reach AGI. Models will outsmart Nobel Prize winners. These models will control objects in the real world and may even design their own custom computers. Millions of copies of the models will work together—imagine an entire nation of geniuses in a data center!”
Tech
Move Over, OpenAI: How the Startup Behind Cursor Became the Hottest, Vibiest Thing in AINatasha Mascarenhas | The Information
“[Anysphere’s $200 million in annual revenue is] an astonishing amount considering that Cursor’s launch came in January 2023. It all adds up to a stunning reality: Anysphere is one of the fastest-growing startups ever, and what Truell and his co-founders have built is a bona fide AI rocket ship with a trajectory that stands out even among other AI startups hurtling into the stratosphere.”
Computing
How Extropic Plans to Unseat NvidiaWill Knight | Wired
“Extropic has now shared more details of its probabilistic hardware with Wired, as well as results that show it is on track to build something that could indeed offer an alternative to conventional silicon in many datacenters. The company aims to deliver a chip that is three to four orders of magnitude more efficient than today’s hardware, a feat that would make a sizable dent in future emissions.”
Computing
Could Nvidia’s Revolutionary Optical Switch Transform AI Data Centers Forever?Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum
“According to Nvidia, adopting the CPO switches in a new AI data center would lead to one-fourth the number of lasers, boost power efficiency for trafficking data 3.5-fold, improve the reliability of signals making it from one computer to another on time by 63-times, make networks 10-fold more resilient to disruptions, and allow customers to deploy new data center hardware 30 percent faster.”
Artificial Intelligence
A New, Challenging AGI Test Stumps Most AI ModelsMaxwell Zeff | TechCrunch
“‘Reasoning’ AI models like OpenAI’s o1-pro and DeepSeek’s R1 score between 1% and 1.3% on ARC-AGI-2, according to the Arc Prize leaderboard. Powerful non-reasoning models, including GPT-4.5, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash, score around 1%.”
Computing
The Quantum Apocalypse Is Coming. Be Very AfraidAmit Katwala | Wired
“One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the world’s secrets. Your secrets. Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Day—the day someone builds a quantum computer that can crack the most widely used forms of encryption.”
Biotechnology
How a Bankruptcy Judge Can Stop a Genetic Privacy DisasterKeith Porcaro | MIT Technology Review
“Any new owner of 23AndMe’s data will want to find ways to make money from it. Lawmakers have a big opportunity to help keep it safe. …A bankruptcy court could require that users individually opt in before their genetic data can be transferred to 23andMe’s new owners, regardless of who those new owners are. Anyone who didn’t respond or who opted out would have the data deleted.”
Just One Exo-Earth Pixel Can Reveal Continents, Oceans, and MoreEthan Siegel | Big Think
“In the coming years and decades, several ambitious projects will reach completion, finally giving humanity the capability to image Earth-size planets at Earth-like distances around Sun-like stars. …Remarkably, even though these exo-Earths will appear as just one lonely pixel in our detectors, we can use that data to detect continents, oceans, icecaps, forests, deserts, and more.”
Future
Does All Intelligent Life Face a Great Filter?Paul Sutter | Ars Technica
“Maybe we’re alone because essentially nobody ever makes it. Maybe there’s some unavoidable barrier between the origin of intelligent life and said life setting off to explore the galaxy. The position of this Great Filter, as [economist Robin Hanson] named it, is critically important as we contemplate the future of humanity.”
Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of ScienceSheon Han | Wired
arXiv’s unassuming facade belies the tectonic reconfiguration it set off in the scientific community. If arXiv were to stop functioning, scientists from every corner of the planet would suffer an immediate and profound disruption. ‘Everybody in math and physics uses it,’ Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. ‘I scan it every night.'”
Farewell to Gaia, the Milky Way’s CartographerKatrina Miller | The New York Times
“It is difficult to capture the breadth of development and discovery that the spinning observatory has enabled. But here are a few numbers: nearly two billion stars, millions of potential galaxies and some 150,000 asteroids. These observations have led to more than 13,000 studies, so far, by astronomers.”