Computing
New Fiber-Optic Record Allows 50,000,000 Movies to Be Streamed at OnceMatthew Sparkes | New Scientist ($)
“Faster speeds have been achieved before in highly regulated experiments, but this work crucially used existing cables that have been heavily used, have dirty connectors, sit underneath a bustling city full of traffic and noise, and represent a real-world test that shows it could be rolled out on existing infrastructure. The researchers say that commercial roll-out could happen within five years.”
Tech
AI Companies Shatter Fund-Raising Records, as Boom AcceleratesErin Griffith | The New York Times ($)
“OpenAI, Anthropic, Waymo and other artificial intelligence companies shattered fund-raising records in the first three months of the year with a $297 billion haul, according to data from Crunchbase, which tracks private investment. To put that sum into perspective: Last year was already record breaking, with technology start-ups raising $425 billion, up 30 percent from 2024. The first three months of 2026 put the industry on track to almost triple that amount.”
Energy
Battery Tech That Stores Over 9 Times More Energy Is Here and It’s Perfect for Your GadgetsPranob Mehrotra | Digital Trends
“This new design tackles [reliability problems] by making the batteries more stable. If it performs as expected outside the lab, it could remove one of the biggest hurdles holding Apple and Samsung back from adopting silicon-carbon batteries. It could eventually lead to smartphones and wearables that last significantly longer without compromising reliability.”
Robotics
Chinese Humanoid Maker Agibot Rolls Out 10,000th Mass-Produced UnitJuro Osawa | The Information ($)
“The new milestone comes just three months after the company announced the rollout of its 5,000th unit in December. Prior to that, it took AgiBot about a year to go from 1,000 units to 5,000 units.”
Future
How Did Anthropic Measure AI’s ‘Theoretical Capabilities’ in the Job Market?Kyle Orland | Ars Technica
“Digging into the basis for those ‘theoretical capability’ numbers, though, provides a much less chilling image of AI’s future occupational impacts. When you drill down into the specifics, that blue field represents some outdated and heavily speculative educated guesses about where AI is likely to improve human productivity and not necessarily where it will take over for humans altogether.”
Future
Facial Recognition Is Spreading EverywhereLucas Laursen | IEEE Spectrum
“Facial recognition technology (FRT) dates back 60 years. Just over a decade ago, deep-learning methods tipped the technology into more useful—and menacing—territory. Now, retailers, your neighbors, and law enforcement are all storing your face and building up a fragmentary photo album of your life.”
Artificial Intelligence
Caltech Researchers Claim Radical Compression of High-Fidelity AI ModelsSteven Rosenbush | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“AI’s future won’t be defined by who can build the largest data centers, but by who can deliver the most intelligence per unit of energy and cost, according to investor Vinod Khosla. ‘So this is not a minor iteration. This is a major technical breakthrough,’ Khosla said. ‘It’s a mathematical breakthrough, not just another tiny model.'”
Artificial Intelligence
AI Models Lie, Cheat, and Steal to Protect Other Models From Being DeletedWill Knight | Wired ($)
“The researchers found that powerful models sometimes lied about other models’ performance in order to protect them from deletion. They also copied models’ weights to different machines in order to keep them safe, and lied about what they were up to in the process.”
