Tech

The company that introduced AI to mainstream consumers — remember when Siri debuted in 2011 and it felt like the future had arrived? — is now widely considered an AI laggard. And the man tasked with fixing that just landed the biggest promotion in tech. Apple announced that John Ternus, its longtime hardware engineering chief, will become CEO on September 1, replacing Tim Cook, who moves to executive chairman. It’s only the third CEO transition in Apple’s modern history, and it arrives at arguably the most consequential inflection point since Steve Jobs returned in 1997. ...

When the co-founder of the company that literally invented the Transformer admits a startup is beating them at coding, something seismic is happening. Sergey Brin wrote an internal memo to DeepMind staff last week that might as well have been a fire alarm: “To win the final sprint, we must urgently bridge the gap in agentic execution and turn our models into primary developers.” Google has now assembled a dedicated “strike team” within DeepMind to close a widening gap with Anthropic’s AI coding tools. And the details are more revealing than the headline. ...

While the tech press chases LLM benchmarks and chatbot drama, NVIDIA just quietly revealed something far more consequential at Hannover Messe 2026 in Germany. The AI-powered factory isn’t a concept anymore. It’s shipping. And the scope is staggering. Manufacturing’s Breaking Point Global manufacturing is caught in a vise. Tighter production cycles. Relentless efficiency demands. A skilled labor shortage that keeps getting worse. Incremental automation improvements stopped cutting it years ago. ...

Imagine an AI model so good at hacking that it found critical security flaws in every major operating system and web browser on Earth. Now imagine the company that built it saying: “Yeah, we’re not releasing this one.” That’s Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview in a nutshell. Two weeks after its unveiling, finance ministers are discussing it at IMF meetings, the Bank of England is stress-testing its implications, and the Federal Reserve Chairman summoned banking CEOs for an emergency meeting. ...

The AI industry has an energy problem it can no longer hide. Data centers are projected to consume roughly 1,050 TWh globally by 2026 — enough to rank them as the fifth-largest energy consumer on Earth, wedged between Japan and Russia. Every major AI lab is scrambling for power, and the grid can’t keep up. Panthalassa thinks the answer is floating in the ocean. A Giant Lollipop That Thinks The Vancouver, Washington-based company has spent a decade in semi-stealth building something that sounds like rejected sci-fi: autonomous, self-propelled data centers that ride ocean waves, generate their own electricity, and beam results back to shore via Starlink. ...

The AI music wars just got a new heavyweight contender — and this one has unlimited compute, YouTube distribution, and major-label licensing relationships already in place. On April 19, Google officially launched Flow Music, a standalone text-to-music platform that generates original, fully-produced tracks up to three minutes long from nothing but a text prompt. No instruments. No studio. Just words in, music out. From Research Lab to Product Flow Music didn’t appear from nothing. Google acquired ProducerAI in February 2026 and quickly folded it into the broader “Google Flow” suite alongside its AI video tools. The platform builds on Google’s MusicLM research and its Lyria 3 model, but where those were experiments buried inside other products, Flow Music is a dedicated web app — Google’s clearest signal that AI music deserves its own stage. ...

What if the next great leap in AI hardware didn’t come from shrinking transistors — but from printing flexible circuits that literally speak the brain’s language? A team at Northwestern University just proved that’s possible. Published in Nature Nanotechnology, their research demonstrates printed artificial neurons that generate electrical patterns realistic enough to activate living mouse brain cells. Not simulate. Not approximate. Activate. This sits at the collision point of neuroscience, materials science, and AI’s looming energy crisis — and it deserves your attention. ...

When an AI company says its own model is too dangerous to release, you’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes. We’ve heard the script before. But when the Bank of England governor calls it “a very serious challenge for all of us” and Canada’s finance minister compares it unfavorably to the Strait of Hormuz, the script just changed. Claude Mythos — Anthropic’s latest and most controversial AI model — has discovered thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser. One bug had been sitting undetected for 27 years. And this week, it hijacked the agenda at the IMF spring meetings in Washington. ...

AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems just filed to go public on Nasdaq under ticker “CBRS.” The headline numbers look incredible: $510 million in revenue, a swing from a $485 million net loss to $87.9 million in net income, and $24.6 billion in remaining performance obligations. But buried in the S-1 is a financial arrangement so tangled it deserves far more scrutiny than it’s getting. OpenAI isn’t just Cerebras’s biggest customer. It’s also an investor, a lender, and the single reason this IPO is happening at all. ...

An AI model is now sharing agenda space with active wars at the IMF spring meetings. That sentence alone tells you everything about where we are in April 2026. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos — an AI model the company literally refused to release because of how good it is at hacking — has finance ministers, central bankers, and Fortune 500 CEOs in full crisis mode. Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne compared it to the Strait of Hormuz. The ECB president says we have no governance framework to handle it. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent summoned the CEOs of America’s systemically important banks to Washington specifically to discuss it. ...