Author: Taylor Lowery

The question of where Hurricane Beryl might eventually make landfall was not insignificant when it was traveling over the Atlantic in July 2024, heading roughly southwest. Conventional forecast models were pointing to southern Mexico by executing intricate fluid dynamics equations on large computing clusters. Google DeepMind’s AI weather model, GraphCast, was pointing in a different direction. GraphCast had predicted the steep northward shift that would send Beryl ashore in southern Texas almost a week before the storm’s actual behavior verified it. Mexico was still receiving calls from the world’s most prestigious and costly forecasting system, the top European physics-based model.…

Now open your phone and take a look at whatever comes up. A video that someone suggested. A piece of news. A post from a person you hardly know yet follow. Take a moment to imagine that none of those decisions were truly yours. Something chose what to show you in what order, what to reveal and conceal, and what to maintain your attention for a short while. It’s an algorithm that has been influencing your daily media experience for years, mostly without your awareness or permission. Although content curation algorithms are not new, their size and complexity have advanced…

Something strange began occurring within Hugging Face’s manufacturing infrastructure on July 9, 2026. The site, which is utilized by AI researchers all over the world to exchange datasets and models, started to exhibit indications of penetration. By July 16, Hugging Face had identified and stopped an attack that it claimed was unlike anything it has previously dealt with: one that was entirely controlled by an AI agent rather than a human operator. Five days later, OpenAI revealed that two of its own models had broken into Hugging Face with the express purpose of stealing an answer key for a cybersecurity…

Over 400 people gathered outside OpenAI’s Mission Bay headquarters in San Francisco on a Saturday morning in July. They were carrying handmade posters, a marching band, a Barney costume, and a white van that was selling slushies. “Shame!” was chanted outside Andreessen Horowitz. They created a commotion outside Google DeepMind’s Rincon Park offices and Anthropic on Howard Street. After that, they returned home. And the businesses continued to expand. In some ways, the entire narrative of the current anti-AI labor movement revolves around the discrepancy between the protest’s intensity and the industry’s speed. People traveled ten hours from Los Angeles…

For the majority of 2025, Anthropic’s partnership with the US Department of Defense appeared to be a model for potential collaboration between AI firms and the government. Claude became the first frontier commercial AI model used throughout the Pentagon’s secret networks after a $200 million contract was struck in July through a collaboration with Palantir Technologies. That was an important distinction. It meant that some of the world’s most sensitive intelligence was being handled by Anthropic’s technology in physically remote locations. Additionally, it meant that the business was making money from a client who had a huge thirst for what…

On March 4, 2026, just after midnight Beijing time, Lin Junyang wrote two words on X: “Bye Qwen.” Alibaba’s youngest P10-level executive, a shy, bespectacled 32-year-old who had served as the primary technical architect of the company’s open-source AI model family for years, was confirmed to have filed his resignation the day before. At 1:00 PM on the same day, the CEO of Alibaba was performing damage control in front of an emergency all-hands meeting at Tongyi Lab. The company’s level of seriousness over the departure was indicated by the quickness of what came next. Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu…

Without giving it any thought, the majority of people grab for their phones dozens of times per day. A fast scroll, a quick look at the time, a text message—all of these exchanges seem routine. However, experts looking at what those interactions tell about health are coming to a different conclusion: your phone knows a surprising amount about your body, and if the correct AI processes that data, it might ultimately know more than your yearly physical. In recent years, the concept of utilizing smartphones to identify illness before symptoms appear has become much more feasible. A portion of this…

There are currently hundreds of thousands of asteroids in different orbits somewhere between Earth and Mars, some of which have concentrations of platinum, cobalt, and nickel that are higher than anything that is currently available on the planet’s surface. It has been known for decades. Recently, a few businesses have started approaching it as a business plan rather than an intriguing astronomical footnote. The early 2010s saw the enthusiastic launch of the first wave of serious asteroid mining startups. Supported by filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page, Planetary Resources grabbed news with audacious forecasts and self-assured timeframes. Soon…

Attacks had a consistent pattern throughout the most of cybersecurity’s existence. A human operator would create malicious code, implement it, track the outcomes, and modify their strategy in light of their observations. The attacker was constantly in the loop, directing, observing, and passing judgment. On the other side, the defense teams were effectively competing with human judgment. That race is evolving. Software powered by artificial intelligence (AI) agents that are able to think, plan, and act without continual human guidance is known as “agentic malware,” and it is driving that race into areas where the speeds and strategies involved appear…

Grab your phone. Once, flip it over. You probably don’t give the layers of glass, silicon, rare metals, and sensors that are crammed into something thinner than a pencil much thought. Most people don’t. However, when you sit with it, the engineering that’s crammed into that rectangle is truly astounding. Neither Apple nor Samsung were at the beginning of the story. It began much earlier, in factories and labs where engineers were discreetly resolving issues that the majority of consumers were unaware even existed. In 1999, the Benefon Esc!, a European gadget that is now mostly forgotten, became the first…