Tech

You use AI every day. It writes your emails, summarizes your documents, drafts your presentations. It’s faster and frankly better at first drafts than most of us. But here’s the question scientists are now asking with real urgency: what happens to the brain you’re no longer using? A wave of studies from Georgetown, MIT, UPenn, Carnegie Mellon, and Microsoft Research is converging on a troubling answer. Heavy AI users score worse on critical thinking tests. They’re less creative. They remember less. And most don’t even realize it’s happening. ...

Every major US AI lab is now under government pre-release review. Let that land for a second. Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI just signed agreements to submit their unreleased AI models for security evaluation through NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — joining OpenAI and Anthropic, who were already on board. All five frontier labs. Government eyes on the code before it hits your screen. Six months ago, the Trump administration was actively dismantling AI safety guardrails. So what changed? ...

Picture thousands of giant steel orbs bobbing in the Pacific Ocean, each one quietly running AI models while powered entirely by the waves beneath them. No power grid. No cooling towers. No angry neighbors fighting a new data center build. Peter Thiel just bet $140 million that this isn’t science fiction. Portland-based startup Panthalassa announced its Series B this week to build what might be the most audacious answer yet to AI’s insatiable hunger for electricity: autonomous, wave-powered computing nodes that operate in the open ocean. And in a world where companies are exploring space-based solar and nuclear micro-reactors to keep the lights on, floating data centers might actually be the conservative option. ...

The AI industry has a flair for the dramatic, but even by 2026 standards, Anthropic’s “Code with Claude” developer day in San Francisco was something else. In a single afternoon, the company announced it’s renting the entirety of Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 data center and unveiled a feature called “dreaming” that lets its AI agents review their own work and self-improve between sessions. Both announcements signal very different but equally important shifts in the AI race. ...

Yesterday we wrote about the White House considering pre-release AI oversight. Today, it’s happening. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation — CAISI, sitting under the Department of Commerce — has announced formal agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Elon Musk’s xAI. The deals give the government access to conduct pre-deployment evaluations of their most powerful AI models. Combined with renegotiated agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic from 2024, every major American AI lab is now operating under some form of government review. ...

Two rival AI labs. Same strategy. Same day. This isn’t a coincidence — it’s a declaration of war on a $700 billion industry. On May 4th, Anthropic announced a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to embed its engineers and Claude directly into enterprise operations. Hours earlier, Bloomberg reported OpenAI is finalizing a nearly identical play: a $10 billion venture called “The Development Company,” backed by TPG, Brookfield, Bain Capital, and 16 other investors. ...

Everyone’s launching AI models. IBM just launched a management layer for all of them. And it might be the smartest move in enterprise AI right now. At Think 2026 in Boston, CEO Arvind Krishna unveiled what IBM calls the “AI Operating Model” — a bet that the real money in enterprise AI isn’t in building the smartest model, but in being the one who keeps a thousand AI agents from crashing into each other. ...

The same administration that revoked Biden’s AI executive order on Day One is now considering something arguably more interventionist: mandatory government review of AI models before they hit the public. If that sounds like whiplash, buckle up. What’s on the Table According to the New York Times, Reuters, and Bloomberg, the White House is discussing an executive order that would create a formal review process for new AI models before release. The NSA, Office of the National Cyber Director, and Director of National Intelligence would oversee evaluations — granting the government early access to frontier models without necessarily blocking their deployment. ...

The math is stark: 8,000 people out, $145 billion in. That’s the deal Mark Zuckerberg laid out at a company town hall last week. No euphemisms about “restructuring for the future.” No corporate doublespeak about “aligning resources.” Just a blunt admission: compute infrastructure and people are Meta’s two major cost centers. With AI hardware costs exploding, something had to give. That something is 10% of Meta’s workforce, starting May 20th. And Zuckerberg wouldn’t rule out more cuts later this year. ...

A 23-year-old with no math degree typed an unsolved conjecture into ChatGPT on a Monday afternoon. Eighty minutes later, he had a valid proof that defeated professional mathematicians for sixty years. Fields Medalist Terence Tao confirmed it. The math world is losing its mind. The Kid Who Didn’t Know It Was Hard Liam Price wasn’t trying to make history. He was “vibe mathing” — his term for feeding random open problems into GPT-5.4 Pro to see what happens. He’d been doing it for months with his friend Kevin Barreto, a Cambridge undergrad, pulling unsolved conjectures from erdosproblems.com like lottery tickets. ...