Author: Sam Allcock
A very strange-looking machine is taking shape somewhere in Chile’s Río Hurtado Valley on a dry hilltop at the El Sauce Observatory, where the skies are dark enough to show you things that really shouldn’t be visible to human eyes. It doesn’t resemble the telescope that most people envision. There are no graceful domes with a single, enormous barrel aimed at the sky, nor are there sweeping, curved mirrors. Instead, an array of thirty mounts with thirty-eight high-end Canon telephoto lenses each, for a total of 1,140 lenses operating together, is being installed. From a distance, it most likely resembles…
Three phrases. Elon Musk only made that offer. “Proceed with caution.” The response, which was posted on X in response to a cybersecurity researcher’s observation that Amazon had called a mandatory all-hands meeting to discuss AI-related outages, was succinct enough to be ignored but pointed enough to stick around. The warning carried a certain weight because it came from the man who stated that AI will completely replace human coding by the end of this year. It wasn’t alarmist or technical, but rather subtly serious in a way that the rest of the internet noticed right away. The circumstances that…
In early 2026, a joke has been quietly circulating among traders: saying the words “artificial intelligence” during an earnings call is the fastest way to move your stock price. It doesn’t matter what your business actually does. Whether the AI application is real, experimental, or merely a slide deck is irrelevant. Simply utter the words, allow the algorithms to recognize them, and observe the number turn green. In part, it’s a joke. But only in part. For the better part of three years, markets have been pricing in the AI revolution with an almost religious conviction. They have poured money…
They are present in practically every contemporary factory; it’s not the workers or the machinery per se, but rather the unseen thread that runs through everything. semiconductors. Fingernail-sized chips are found in everything from military drones’ guidance systems to the dashboards of mid-range sedans. For the majority of the past fifty years, the world has quietly consented to allow a small number of businesses in a small number of nations to produce these goods, believing that geography and economics would take care of themselves. Governments are genuinely alarmed by the way that arrangement is currently falling apart, first slowly and…
In 1996, Steve Bloom, a professor in the Department of Metabolism, Digestion, and Reproduction at Imperial College London, made a discovery that most people outside the scientific community are unaware of. He discovered that the hormone GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide-1, which is released in the stomach following a meal, influences hunger. It was a clear and significant discovery, the kind that remains in journals for years before anyone decides what to do with it. It took Novo Nordisk almost thirty years to transform the insight into Wegovy, one of the most popular medications in pharmaceutical history. Additionally, in October of…
The elevator ride takes ten minutes or so. It descends through the Homestake Gold Mine, which was tunneled, blasted, and carved out of South Dakota’s Black Hills until the gold ran out. The mine operated for a century before it closed. Instead of dropping miners, the cage now drops scientists, and when it stops about a mile and a half below the surface, the walls are close together and the air is cool. The smell of old rock is subtle. Industrial lighting is used. The netting used by the miners to line the tunnels is still present in some places,…
The discussions taking place in some investment circles at the moment have a certain feel to them. Not quite panic. It’s more akin to deliberate patience, the kind that results from having seen this before and experienced enough market cycles to understand the current situation even when the headlines are shouting otherwise. The AI stocks that characterized the past two years’ excitement are now declining. Some people are really depressed. Oracle has been reduced by half. Since its peak, Microsoft has lost more than 20%. However, the atmosphere is not one of departure in the offices and video conferences where…
Because it doesn’t make a good slide, there is a problem that is rarely discussed at AI conferences. This is how it works: a company develops an AI agent, runs it through a demo, observes that it performs flawlessly on a carefully chosen set of tasks, and then deploys it into their real production environment, where it begins to make decisions that no one can quite explain, fails in ways that don’t neatly map to anything covered in the test suite, and improves at no discernible rate because no one has a rigorous way to measure whether it’s improving at…
Imagine a retired Ohio suburban schoolteacher sitting at her kitchen table with a printed Medicare Part D plan summary. Late last year, she learned that a deal had been negotiated by the government. medications for losing weight. $50 a month. For years, she has been managing the cardiovascular risk associated with obesity, and her doctor has repeatedly brought up Zepbound, only to shrug about coverage. There was a number now. An actual, precise, reasonably priced figure. She began phoning. Depending on the plan she was enrolled in, what she discovered might or might not match what she was told. Eli…
A risk manager was staring at a screen displaying numbers that shouldn’t have been possible in late January 2021, somewhere on a glass-walled trading floor in Midtown Manhattan. In just a few weeks, GameStop, a physical video game retailer that had been steadily losing customers to digital downloads for years and that serious analysts had been convictively shorting, saw a 1,800 percent increase. What had started out as a textbook wager on a clearly failing company had turned into a disaster. One of the hedge funds with a sizable short position, Melvin Capital, would require a $3 billion emergency fund…