Computing
Recent Fiber-Optic Record Allows 50,000,000 Movies to Be Streamed at OnceMatthew Sparkes | Recent Scientist ($)
“Faster speeds have been achieved before in highly regulated experiments, but this work crucially used existing cables which have been heavily used, have dirty connectors, sit underneath a bustling city stuffed with traffic and noise, and represent a real-world test that shows it may very well be rolled out on existing infrastructure. The researchers say that business roll-out could occur inside five years.”
Tech
AI Corporations Shatter Fund-Raising Records, as Boom AcceleratesErin Griffith | The Recent York Times ($)
“OpenAI, Anthropic, Waymo and other artificial intelligence firms shattered fund-raising records in the primary three months of the 12 months with a $297 billion haul, in line with data from Crunchbase, which tracks private investment. To place that sum into perspective: Last 12 months was already record breaking, with technology start-ups raising $425 billion, up 30 percent from 2024. The primary three months of 2026 put the industry heading in the right direction to almost triple that quantity.”
Energy
Battery Tech That Stores Over 9 Times More Energy Is Here and It’s Perfect for Your GadgetsPranob Mehrotra | Digital Trends
“This latest design tackles [reliability problems] by making the batteries more stable. If it performs as expected outside the lab, it could remove considered one of the most important hurdles holding Apple and Samsung back from adopting silicon-carbon batteries. It could eventually result in smartphones and wearables that last significantly longer without compromising reliability.”
Robotics
Chinese Humanoid Maker Agibot Rolls Out 10,000th Mass-Produced UnitJuro Osawa | The Information ($)
“The brand new milestone comes just three months after the corporate announced the rollout of its 5,000th unit in December. Prior to that, it took AgiBot a few 12 months to go from 1,000 units to five,000 units.”
Future
How Did Anthropic Measure AI’s ‘Theoretical Capabilities’ within the Job Market?Kyle Orland | Ars Technica
“Digging into the premise for those ‘theoretical capability’ numbers, though, provides a much less chilling image of AI’s future occupational impacts. Once you drill down into the specifics, that blue field represents some outdated and heavily speculative educated guesses about where AI is prone to improve human productivity and never necessarily where it should take over for humans altogether.”
Future
Facial Recognition Is Spreading In all placesLucas Laursen | IEEE Spectrum
“Facial recognition technology (FRT) dates back 60 years. Just over a decade ago, deep-learning methods tipped the technology into more useful—and menacing—territory. Now, retailers, your neighbors, and law enforcement are all storing your face and increase a fragmentary photo album of your life.”
Artificial Intelligence
Caltech Researchers Claim Radical Compression of High-Fidelity AI ModelsSteven Rosenbush | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“AI’s future won’t be defined by who can construct the most important data centers, but by who can deliver essentially the most intelligence per unit of energy and value, in line with investor Vinod Khosla. ‘So this is just not a minor iteration. It is a major technical breakthrough,’ Khosla said. ‘It’s a mathematical breakthrough, not only one other tiny model.'”
Artificial Intelligence
AI Models Lie, Cheat, and Steal to Protect Other Models From Being DeletedWill Knight | Wired ($)
“The researchers found that powerful models sometimes lied about other models’ performance as a way to protect them from deletion. Additionally they copied models’ weights to different machines as a way to keep them secure, and lied about what they were as much as in the method.”