Sebastian Seung, a neuroscience and computer science professor at Princeton University, was one of the researchers who helped create the first complete wiring diagram of a fly's brain. He has created a startup called Memazing to create the technology needed to reverse engineer the fly brain (and eventually more complex organisms) and create full recreations of the brain in software. The company's goal is to use an existing map of how nature has produced intelligence to create a new form of artificial intelligence. The startup is still in a very early stage and is in the process of raising funds, but the team has already begun work on the fly brain emulation and has started connecting a model to a simple robotics system.
Jared Isaacman, at 42 years old, is the youngest person to lead NASA. The agency has faced an extraordinarily difficult year. About 20% of the agency employees took buyouts or early retirements thanks to the Department of Government Efficiency. NASA is locked into a high-stakes race with China to return humans to the Moon, but the agency has to deal with an administration that sought to cut its budget by 24%.
213M+ AI prompts. 27.6B+ keywords. 17 years of search leadership. Semrush One [9] is built to give you total coverage of AI & SEO visibility in 2026. When you sign up by the end of 2025, you get 30% off an annual subscription. Claim your savings and make 2026 the year
Stack Overflow Developer Survey looks at the tools and technologies developers are currently using and the ones they want to use. This year's survey included questions about embedded technology tools and industry-sourced, community-vetted technology options. Python's adoption has accelerated significantly due to its ability to be the go-to language for AI, data science, and back-end development. Redis saw significant growth in usage, demonstrating the need for high-speed, in-memory caching and data structures. Docker is now a near-universal tool for cloud development. AI-enabled IDEs weren't able to topple the dominance of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code - both have maintained the top spots for four years.
Greptile's State of AI Coding report is a cross-industry study on recent trends in AI software development. It covers productivity gain across development workflows, AI tool adoption, model growth trends, performance across latency, cost, and tokenization, and recent papers on foundational models and applications. Code output has increased across teams. OpenAI is still the leading model provider, but the gap is closing.
The 101st Academy Awards will be hosted on YouTube starting in 2029 through 2033. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has signed an exclusive rights deal with YouTube that includes red carpet coverage, behind-the-scenes content, and access to the Governors Ball. The coverage of the Academy Awards will be available to YouTube TV subscribers in the US and for free on YouTube for viewers around the world.
OpenAI has held preliminary funding talks with investors to raise tens of billions of dollars at a valuation of $750 billion. The yet-to-be-profitable startup plans to spend trillions on infrastructure to support the development of AI technology. It has raised billions in recent years at ever-larger valuations. The startup was most recently valued at $500 billion in the fall.
Google is working with Meta on TorchTPU, a project that aims to make it easier for AI developers who use PyTorch to switch the hardware layer to Google's tensor processing units.
Warp just launched its biggest Agents update yet, propelling it to #1 on Terminal-Bench and #5 on SWE-bench Verified [4], ahead of Claude Code and Codex CLI.
Google has introduced Gemini 3 Flash, a fast, lightweight model designed to deliver frontier-level intelligence with lower latency. It's built to help users quickly learn, plan, and build across a range of everyday tasks and applications.
Google and Meta are working together on a new initiative to make Google's Tensor Processing Units better at running PyTorch. The move is aimed at weakening Nvidia's longstanding dominance in the AI computing market. TorchTPU will remove a key barrier that has slowed the adoption of TPU chips. It will make existing infrastructure built using PyTorch software fully compatible with TPUs. Google is considering open-sourcing parts of the software to speed uptake.
xAI has opened up the voice stack powering Grok in Tesla vehicles to all developers. The API ranks #1 on Big Bench Audio with sub-1-second time-to-first-audio at $0.05 per minute (half the cost of OpenAI's Realtime API).
Oracle is down 43% from its September high despite reporting $523 billion in "remaining performance obligations". About $300 billion of that comes from a five-year OpenAI contract, but analysts are skeptical that OpenAI, which only has ~$20B in annualized revenue, will be able to pay. Nvidia's stalled $100 billion OpenAI investment (announced in September but still unsigned) compounds the anxiety over the circular deals plaguing AI infrastructure.
Current models vastly underutilize hardware: DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-4 achieve only ~20% FLOP utilization during training, and inference runs at single-digit utilization because autoregressive models are bottlenecked on loading weights from memory, not compute. Models we see today are also lagging indicators, trained on last-gen hardware that's unoptimized for the massive size of modern clusters and the latest training methods.
AI agents, like those launched by OpenAI, threaten marketplace moats by taking over discovery, transactions, and supply workflows, thus collapsing traditional marketing funnels. Marketplaces must adapt by optimizing brand experiences, personalizing interactions, and integrating supply to maintain value. Founders should focus on high-frequency markets, fortify customer connections, and explore new monetization strategies like subscriptions or data licensing to stay competitive.
AI is all the rage, but are you really using it to your advantage? This practical guide from You.com [11] guides you through the process of identifying and prioritizing opportunities where AI can best serve your org. Explore where AI can drive the most impact in your organization, both internally and externally.
Plan mode is a feature in Claude Code that pauses execution until users approve of a plan. A plan in Claude Code is a markdown file written into Claude's plans folder by Claude in plan mode. Users can review and edit the plan before Claude executes whatever task it needs to. The tool brings in more complexity into the user interface, taking away some of the magic. It replicates something that natural language can already do, making the user experience a little less natural.
Opal is a tool for building AI-powered mini apps. It is now directly available in the Gemini web app. Users can use it to create experimental Gems to unlock even more customized Gemini experiences. The tool can be found in the Gems manager.
Peter DeSantis, SVP of Utility Computing at AWS, is taking two of his teams from AWS and putting them into a unit called 'AGI'. The unit will report directly to Andy Jassy, Amazon's Lead Product Market for GenAI and CEO. AI and AI-related compute is now an all-Amazon thing, not just an AWS thing. The unit is building things that are so important that Amazon is taking one of its most senior AWS leaders and putting him in charge of all of it.
Chinese scientists have built a working prototype of an EUV lithography machine, the $250 million tool that only ASML knows how to make and which the US has blocked from being sold to China since 2018. A team of former ASML engineers reverse-engineered the machines in a high-security Shenzhen lab, with recruits given fake IDs and signing bonuses up to $700,000. The prototype hasn't yet produced working chips, but sources expect it will by 2028-2030.
ChatGPT's daily active users in India surged 600% year-on-year to 73 million, more than double its US base, after OpenAI made its Go plan free for a year.
The SEC's Division of Trading and Markets indicate that a broker-dealer can treat itself as having possession/control when it has exclusive access to the private keys needed to transfer the token. It also requires written policies and systems to protect keys from theft, loss, or unauthorized use, plus preparedness for operational events like network attacks, blockchain malfunctions, and hard forks, and processes to comply with legal orders to freeze/burn/seize assets. Custodians must monitor protocol/governance developments and reduce exposure if there are material security or operational weaknesses.
Tempo Transactions is a new native transaction type designed for payments at scale. Core features include paying network fees in any USD stablecoin, batch + concurrent transactions, fee sponsorship, scheduled payments, and passkey-based auth (FaceID/biometrics). Tempo positions these as protocol-level primitives to support enterprise-grade workflows like payroll, payouts, subscriptions, neobanks/wallet UX, and commerce. Crossmint, Fireblocks, Privy, and Turnkey are among the ecosystem partners rolling out support.
Why pay to enter the trading arena? Move USDC from any chain straight into USDH on Hyperliquid with zero fees, zero slippage, and zero extra steps. Only on Across Protocol.
Fears of stablecoins causing immediate “deposit erosion” were overstated, as there is little evidence of deposit outflows tied to stablecoin growth because deposits are “sticky” because of the checking account's role as the hub for payroll, bills, credit, and mortgages. Rather than displacing banks, stablecoins can discipline banks into paying better rates and improving efficiency, expanding lending/intermediation and consumer welfare. The GENIUS Act addresses run/liquidity risk by requiring stablecoins to be fully backed by cash, short-term Treasuries, or insured deposits, with operational details left to regulators. The upside case is payments plumbing because stablecoins enable 24/7 atomic settlement, reducing cross-border delays and “trapped” liquidity.
Stablecoin ramps are the real adoption bottleneck as bank-funded ramping in the US/EU/UK can cost 0-0.3%, while parts of Africa can hit 15–20%. Global card on-ramp completion is ~21% (Africa ~6% and Asia ~7%), and cards are structurally mispriced for stablecoins because there's no product margin to hide MDR/chargeback risk.
TradFi's tokenization press releases hype 24/7 settlement and programmability, but they largely ignore the existential risk that permissionless onchain rails pose to their incumbent moats. These firms can't get the upside without meaningful cannibalization and mistakes along the way. If these firms fail, they'll use adoption carrots and regulatory sticks to push crypto toward permissioned, captured “crypto-like” systems.
Aave's 2026 strategy prioritizes three pillars: Aave V4 (hub-and-spoke liquidity to unify pools and bootstrap new markets), Horizon (institutional RWA lending market targeting the “next trillion” in assets), and the Aave App (consumer fintech-style UX plus “Push” zero-fee on/off-ramp to drive the first million users). Aave has historically done $3.33T in cumulative deposits and originated ~$963B in loans. It had a peak of $75B net deposits, has 59% DeFi lending share, and does $885M in annual fees.
Aqua has proposed a DeFi liquidity model where assets stay in the user's wallet and strategies get conditional access via smart contracts, meaning tokens only move during an actual swap or settlement.