AI

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. ...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just made the kind of statement that sounds absurd until you remember what year it is: only humans can win Oscars. In a sweeping rules update announced May 2nd, the Academy declared that acting performances must be “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” and screenplays must be “human-authored” to qualify for nomination at the 99th Academy Awards in March 2027. Ninety-nine years of handing out golden statues, and they never had to spell this out before. ...

What if the biggest breakthrough in AI isn’t a better chatbot — but an AI that doesn’t need human knowledge at all? That’s the bet David Silver is making. The man who created AlphaGo just announced that his startup, Ineffable Intelligence, has raised a staggering $1.1 billion in seed funding at a $5.1 billion valuation. It’s the largest seed round in European history, backed by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Nvidia, Google, and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Fund. ...

The US government has always been able to spy on its citizens. But AI is making it so easy, so fast, and so comprehensive that even the lawmakers who built the surveillance infrastructure are getting nervous. Section 702 of FISA expires April 30, 2026. What’s playing out on Capitol Hill isn’t a routine renewal — it’s a fight over whether AI-enhanced surveillance should operate without meaningful oversight in a democracy. ...

Three bombshells in 72 hours. OpenAI launched GPT-5.5. China’s DeepSeek dropped V4 at 85% less cost. Google committed $40 billion to Anthropic. The AI industry didn’t just shift — it lurched into a new phase where billion-dollar moves happen simultaneously and the gap between cutting-edge and affordable collapses faster than anyone predicted. GPT-5.5: The “Just Let It Work” Model OpenAI’s latest isn’t about raw intelligence gains. It’s about how the model works. ...

The federal government is running a live experiment on 30 million Americans. An AI program called WISeR is delaying and denying medical care for seniors. The nation’s top health official says AI could make the FDA “irrelevant.” And somehow, nobody in charge sees the contradiction. The Quiet Launch That’s Ruining Lives In January 2026, CMS launched the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction Model — WISeR — introducing AI-powered prior authorization to traditional Medicare for the first time at scale. ...

Four days. That’s the gap between Meta announcing 8,000 layoffs and Reuters revealing that the company is recording every keystroke, mouse movement, and screen action its employees make — to train AI that does their jobs. You can’t make this stuff up. The Timeline That Says Everything April 17: Reuters reports Meta plans to cut 10% of its 78,865-person workforce starting May 20, with more cuts planned for late 2026. ...

AI beating humans at games is old news. Deep Blue took Kasparov in ‘97. AlphaGo stunned the world in 2016. But every one of those victories happened in digital environments with perfect information and unlimited thinking time. Table tennis is a completely different beast. And this week, Sony AI’s robot Ace became the first autonomous machine to defeat elite human players under official competition rules — earning the cover of Nature in the process. ...

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. ...

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. ...