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WITH AI YOU NEED TO THINK MUCH BIGGER!

AI is enabling developers to take on more complex projects that they previously would have given up on.

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ERIC SCHMIDT JOINS RELATIVITY SPACE AS CEO

Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt is now CEO of Relativity Space, a 9-year-old rocket startup - this is Schmidt's first CEO job since he left Google nearly 15 years ago. Schmidt has made a significant investment in Relativity Space and has a controlling stake in the company. Tim Ellis, co-founder and former CEO of Relativity Space, will continue to support the company as a director on the company's board. Relativity Space is gearing up for the launch of its Terran R rocket, scheduled for 2026. The company has so far struck nearly $3 billion in launch contracts with customers.

APPLE READIES DRAMATIC SOFTWARE OVERHAUL FOR IPHONE, IPAD, AND MAC

Apple is planning to transform the interface for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac for a new generation of users later this year. The revamp will fundamentally change the look of Apple's operating systems and make the company's software platforms more consistent. The company is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices. The new design is loosely based on the Vision Pro's software. Apple is betting that a breakthrough new interface will help spur demand after a dip in sales.

OZEMPIC'S NEW FRONTIER: THE WAR ON AGING

A growing body of research indicates that GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, show promise in preventing age-related conditions like Alzheimer's, osteoarthritis, and certain cancers. The class of drugs works by suppressing appetite and reducing inflammation, which may potentially contribute to their preventive health benefits. More robust studies are still needed to confirm the causal effects of GLP-1s on longevity and healthspan.

MICROPLASTICS HINDER PLANT PHOTOSYNTHESIS, STUDY FINDS, THREATENING MILLIONS WITH STARVATION

Microplastic pollution is significantly cutting food supplies by damaging plants' ability to photosynthesize. Between 4% to 14% of the world's staple crops are currently estimated to be lost due to the pervasive particles. The effect could get worse as more microplastics enter the environment. The world is already facing a challenge to produce sufficient food sustainably, and it is also facing crop losses due to climate change. These adverse effects are highly likely to extend from food security to planetary health - reduced photosynthesis may also cut the amount of carbon dioxide taken from the atmosphere.

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CLAUDE CODE IS EXPENSIVE, RECKLESS, AND WEIRDLY FUN

Cursor is the clear winner when precise context is crucial, but Claude Code excels in vibe coding. Vibe coding is when you interact more than you read or write code - it is a development mode that is somewhat reckless, but fun. This approach gets expensive, but it is far less cognitively intense. Claude Code excels at boring tasks and at extending features, but due to lower supervision by design, it suits smaller or less critical projects at best. It is relatively expensive compared to more comprehensive tools.

I QUIT MY FAANG JOB BECAUSE IT'LL BE AUTOMATED BY THE END OF 2025

The evidence points to a scenario where engineering and other pure knowledge works will soon be mostly done by AI agents. Those who formerly held jobs that AI took over will act as AI agent wranglers. There are still factors of production other than intelligence, many that are intrinsically tied to being a human, that should retain economic value. There are many jobs that, even if they could be done very well by AI systems, people wouldn't want to use AI systems to do them, for example, sales.

THE MODEL IS THE PRODUCT

Generalist scaling is stalling, opinionated training is working much better than expected, and inference costs are in free fall. Investors have been betting on the application layer, which is likely to be the first to be automated in disrupted in the next stage of AI evolution. AI companies that form a complete upstream and downstream industrial ecosystem will not need to make their own applications. Big labs will likely shift partnerships from API customers to contractors involved in the earlier training stage.

HOW THE AI TALENT RACE IS RESHAPING THE TECH JOB MARKET

The debut of ChatGPT was a turning point for the AI job market. Many more companies became aware of the power of integrating AI into products and workflows. New AI-related postings rose 68% between the time ChatGPT was released through to the end of last year while tech postings were down 27% over the same period. Engineers without AI skills can still fare well in the job market, but AI skills tend to fetch premium pay and job security.

DEVELOPER CONVICTED FOR “KILL SWITCH” CODE ACTIVATED UPON HIS TERMINATION

Developer Davis Lu faces up to 10 years in prison for deploying malicious code that sabotaged his former employee's network, allegedly costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.

IN ANOTHER CHESS MOVE WITH MICROSOFT, OPENAI IS POURING $12B INTO COREWEAVE

OpenAI has signed a five-year, $11.9 billion agreement with CoreWeave, a GPU-heavy cloud service provider.

INVESTORS WANT A PIECE OF DEEPSEEK. ITS FOUNDER SAYS NOT NOW

DeepSeek's founder has rejected investment proposals due to fears that outsiders would interfere with his company's decisions and that Chinese-government-linked investors could make it harder to win global adoption of its AI models.

WHAT WENT WRONG AT SAUDI ARABIA'S FUTURISTIC METROPOLIS IN THE DESERT

The dreams of the sci-fi-inspired project have collided with reality.

DOJ: GOOGLE MUST SELL CHROME, ANDROID COULD BE NEXT

The government will vet potential buyers to ensure that the sale doesn't pose a national security threat.

WE'VE BEEN WRONG ABOUT MATH FOR 2300 YEARS

There's no general consensus among mathematicians about what math is, but we may finally be in a position to fix this due to recent progress in neurology and machine learning.

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MANUS, A NEW AI AGENT FROM CHINA IS GOING VIRAL—AND RAISING BIG QUESTIONS

Manus is an autonomous agent that can analyze, plan, and execute tasks on its own. It is currently only accessible through invitation codes, which are in short supply - demand is through the roof as the AI community is raving about its capabilities. Many are now asking whether China has leapfrogged the US in AI. Manus likely achieved its impressive capabilities through innovative fine-tuning rather than core model innovation. A video introducing Manus is available in the article.

APPLE DELAYS SIRI UPGRADE INDEFINITELY AS AI CONCERNS ESCALATE

Apple is delaying updates to Siri for the foreseeable future. The company's engineers believe that the features introduced last June won't be released until next year at the earliest. Several executives have voiced strong concerns as the features didn't work as advertised in their personal testing. Apple may have to rebuild the features from scratch.

NATURAL ALTERNATIVE TO OZEMPIC BRINGS RESULTS WITHOUT SIDE EFFECTS

Stanford scientists have identified a naturally occurring molecule that works like semaglutide, producing weight loss and improved glucose and insulin tolerance, when tested in mice and minipigs. The peptide, named BRP, only works in the brain, as opposed to semaglutide, which has widespread effects. It specifically acts in the hypothalamus, which controls appetite and metabolism, which could be an improvement over semaglutide. The scientists intend to move to human clinical trials for BRP.

STARSHIP FLIGHT 8: SPACEX NAILS SUPER HEAVY BOOSTER CATCH BUT LOSES UPPER STAGE

SpaceX's eight Starship test flight last Thursday aimed for the third successful booster recovery and the deployment of a satellite simulator. While the Super Heavy booster returned successfully to Starbase's launch tower, the mission's upper stage disintegrated during its flight. SpaceX has been reviewing the data from the flight to better understand the incident's root cause. Video of the explosion is available in the article.

BUILDING AN AGENTIC SYSTEM

This site provides a practical deep dive and code review into how to build a self-driving coding agent, execution engine, tools, and commands. It focuses on the systems and design decisions that go into making agents that are real-time, self-corrective, and useful for productive work. The site provides documentation on every tool and command it covers, as well as implementation details. It covers the underlying patterns that make real-time AI coding assistants feel responsive, safe, and genuinely useful.

PG_MOONCAKE 🥮

pg_mooncake is a Postgres extension that adds columnar storage and vectorized execution for fast analytics. It ranks among the top 10 fastest on ClickBench. pg_mooncake supports loading data from Postgres heap tables, Parquet, CSV, and JSON files, Iceberg and Delta Lake tables, and Hugging Face datasets.

MICROSOFT'S RELATIONSHIP WITH OPENAI IS NOT LOOKING GOOD

More evidence has surfaced that Microsoft is looking to split with OpenAI. Microsoft is developing its own in-house reasoning models and has been testing models from xAI, Meta, and DeepSeek to replace ChatGPT in Copilot. Copilot has so far been received poorly in enterprise due to its high cost and limited results. OpenAI and Microsoft are quickly becoming competitors, so it makes sense that the companies would want to detach from each other. Microsoft has an interest in controlling the technologies and writing its own destiny.

META TAKES ANOTHER HIT AFTER REPORTS THAT IT BLACKLISTS EX-EMPLOYEES

Meta reportedly maintains a de facto blacklist of ex-employees - even some former workers with sterling track records have been blocked. The company uses multiple systems to track rehire ineligibility, but the exact mechanisms and number of affected employees are unclear. While the blacklist may not sit well with outsiders, it is not illegal. The routine banishment of ex-workers isn't exclusive to Meta, with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies purportedly maintaining similar lists.

AI AND THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF WORK

AI advancements may unlock powerful new tools for thought and enhance human cognition, resulting in technology that works with us and for us, preempts our requests and understands us, and gets out of our way.

WHY VCS GHOST FOUNDERS, OR REJECT DEALS AND NEVER SPEAK TO THE FOUNDER AGAIN

VCs might ghost founders because of a lack of time, red flags from the founder, and other founder behaviors.

WHAT I LEARNED BUILDING A FREE SEMANTIC SEARCH TOOL FOR GITHUB AND WHY I FAILED

User traction is king - it doesn't matter if your product has promising technical results, if your problem is simply too marginal, then you won't get enough users for a viable product.

ELON MUSK'S AI COMPANY, XAI, ACQUIRES 1 MILLION-SQUARE-FOOT PROPERTY IN MEMPHIS

xAI plans to use its newly acquired land to expand its AI data center footprint, hosting infrastructure to complement xAI's existing Memphis data center.

APPLE INTELLIGENCE VISION VIA AIRPODS CAMERA IS IN ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT

Apple is actively developing a product that combines AirPods with cameras - the cameras will provide data on wearers' surrounding environments to be used in AI features.

SO HOW WELL IS CLAUDE PLAYING POKÉMON?

While Claude is pretty good at short term reasoning, which is great for Pokémon battles, it's bad at executive function and has a poor memory, which means it is getting stuck in loops.

GOOGLE CO-FOUNDER LARRY PAGE REPORTEDLY HAS A NEW AI STARTUP

Dynatomics is a new company by Google co-founder Larry Page that is focused on applying AI to product manufacturing. The company aims to create highly optimized designs for objects and then have a factory build them. The effort is being run by Chris Anderson, the previous CTO of electric airplane startup Kittyhawk. Other companies exploring the ways AI could be used to improve manufacturing processes include Orbital Materials, PhysicsX, and Instrumental.

SPACEX STARSHIP SPIRALS OUT OF CONTROL IN SECOND STRAIGHT TEST FLIGHT FAILURE

SpaceX's Starship spiraled out of control while in space during a test on Thursday - this is the second launch in a row that the vehicle has run into a fatal problem on its way to orbit. Flights into major Florida airports were briefly halted. The booster was successfully caught for the third time by the launch tower. SpaceX had made improvements to the lines that send fuel to Starship's engines, changed the temperature of the propellent, and added extra vents and a purge system ahead of the recent test flight.

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER THOUSANDS OF NEW MICROBIAL SPECIES THRIVING IN THE MARIANA TRENCH

The Mariana Trench Environment and Ecology Research Project has added over 6,000 new microbes to the number of species found at the deepest regions of the ocean. Its investigations have revealed two adaptations that allow the microbes to thrive under intense pressure and a mutated gene that could boost their ability to survive. The study of these organisms could yield new medications and information that could be useful for engineering pressure- or radiation-resistant proteins.

INTUITIVE MACHINES IS SET FOR LUNAR LANDING – WITH HOPPING DRONE, ICE DRILL, AND 4G

Intuitive Machines' Athena moon lander didn't crash, but it may not be upright. The lander was set to descend at Mons Mouton, a plateau near the lunar South Pole, at no earlier than 12:32 PM ET on Thursday. It contains a drill to search for ice, a 4G network test, three rovers, and a first-of-its-kind hopping drone. It is unclear how the imperfect landing may impact the mission. Athena launched last Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

MISTRAL ADDS A NEW API THAT TURNS ANY PDF DOCUMENT INTO AN AI-READY MARKDOWN FILE

Mistral OCR is an optical character recognition API that can turn any PDF into a text file. It is multimodal and can detect when there are illustrations or photos intertwined with blocks of text. The output is formatted into Markdown. Mistral OCR is available on Mistral's own platform and through its cloud partners - Mistral offers on-premise deployment for companies working with classified or sensitive data.

CHATGPT ON MACOS CAN NOW DIRECTLY EDIT CODE

The newest version of OpenAI's ChatGPT app for macOS can edit code in supported developer tools, including Xcode, VS Code, and JetBrains. Users can turn on an 'auto-apply' mode to allow ChatGPT to make edits without the need for additional clicks. The feature is available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers. It will roll out to Enterprise, Edu, and free users next week. The ChatGPT app for Windows will get direct editing soon.

A QUARTER OF STARTUPS IN YC'S CURRENT COHORT HAVE CODEBASES THAT ARE ALMOST ENTIRELY AI-GENERATED

While each of the founders that Y Combinator funded in its current cohort is highly technical and completely capable of building their own products from scratch, a quarter of the startups have 95% of their code bases generated by AI. Product builders who rely heavily on AI will need to be good at reading code and finding bugs. VCs and developers have been excited about AI-powered coding, with multiple startups raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding in the last 12 months.

THE HOTTEST AI COMPANIES RIGHT NOW ARE ‘APPS'

AI wrappers are all the rage today - startups are offering AI chatbots, research tools, and other software applications for coding, clinicians, and customer service, all built at least in part on large language models. Investors are eager to put money into these services. However, some have started to question the wisdom of AI companies powering billions into developing models as companies like DeepSeek have proven competitive options can be created for much less. One of the biggest concerns with AI app companies is that a large language model developer may decide to compete directly with them, but it is unlikely that AI developers will build verticalized apps for every single possible use case.

ASK HN: WHAT LESS-POPULAR SYSTEMS PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE ARE YOU USING? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Some of the languages developers are using other than C, C++, Rust, and Go include Zig, Odin, OCaml, and Nim.

DIFFUSION MODELS ARE INTERESTING

Diffusion large language models start all at once and then gradually come up with sensible words simultaneously - the technique is creating models that outperform similar-sized large language models in code generation.

ALIBABA SHARES SOAR AFTER CHINESE TECH GIANT UNVEILS NEW DEEPSEEK RIVAL

Alibaba's QwQ-32B operates with 32 billion parameters compared to DeepSeek R1's 671 billion parameters - while rivaling its performance.

SAM ALTMAN'S WORLD NETWORK UNVEILS NEW CHAT FEATURE TO CONNECT REAL HUMANS

World Chat will help people to discern bots from humans by giving World Network digital passport holders - people who have proof-of-personhood-verified accounts - blue chat bubbles and a unique World ID gem displayed in chats.