The FDA has now agreed to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine after the company held a formal meeting with the FDA and proposed a change to the regulatory pathways used in the application. Moderna hopes to make its vaccine available this year, pending FDA approval. The reason for initially refusing to review the application was based on the established flu vaccine Moderna used for comparison in its Phase 3 trial, which the FDA said did not reflect the best-available standard of care, but the agency ultimately signed off on the trial design. Moderna has agreed to add a comparison of high-dose vaccines to some older participants and provide the FDA with additional analysis.
Join New Relic customers and leaders for a free virtual event [13]. Be the first to see how Intelligent Observability takes you beyond dashboards to agentic AI with business impact. Join sessions on building your autonomous workforce, debugging multi-agent systems, and
GitHub Agentic Workflows is now in technical preview. It allows developers to build automations using coding agents in GitHub Actions to handle triage, documentation, code quality, and more. Developers describe the outcomes they want in plain Markdown, add it as an automated workflow to their repository, and it executes using a coding agent in GitHub Actions. This makes entirely new categories of repository automation and software engineering possible.
There is now practically nothing stopping people and their agents from pursuing all avenues that would have previously been cost- or time-prohibitive. The temptation to spend your day prompting is overwhelming. However, building great software was never about how fast code was generated. We still need good design decisions and engineers who say no to most product ideas, maintain conceptual integrity, and know when something is 'done'.
The taste thesis actually proposes a fundamental demotion of human agency. For most of human history, the concept of taste as we understand it didn't exist - there was patronage, an intimate relationship between capital and artistic labor. The patron commissioned work rather than selected from finished works on a wall. The taste thesis reverses this order and places man at the end of the chain of creation.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the average person only owned a few pairs of clothes, usually made by hand. Now, there are very few people who make clothes, but there are thousands of apparel companies for every type of activity. The Software Industrial Revolution will lead to an explosion of bespoke software across every industry and niche. The fact that we'll no longer build software by hand means that we will build and use much more of it. Everything in the economy that touches software is about to fundamentally and radically change.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says that the Pentagon is close to declaring Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a move that would sever ties between the company and the US military.
Apple is accelerating development on smart glasses, a pendant that can be pinned to a shirt or worn as a necklace, and AirPods with expanded AI capabilities. All three devices are being built around the Siri digital assistant. They will rely on visual context to carry out actions. Apple is also developing a range of AI devices for the home, including a smart display built, an updated HomePod speaker, and a compact indoor sensor for home security and automation.
Tesla's first purpose-built driverless vehicle has rolled off the Gigafactory Texas production line. The CyberCab is a two-seater coupe that comes without a steering wheel or pedals, fully relying on the company's Full-Self Driving software for control. Robotaxis are central to Tesla's plans and could unlock trillions of dollars in value. The CyberCab uses a production technique that is extremely hard, so the early production rate is expected to be 'agonizingly slow', but it will eventually scale up to produce up to five million robotaxis a year.
A team at the University of California Berkeley and collaborators have modified CRISPR-Cas9 to replicate and spread to other cells. The scientists added genetic instructions for cells to make a virus-like transporter that can encapsulate the CRISPR machinery, and once manufactured in treated cells, the CRISPR cargo ships to neighboring cells. The upgraded editor is roughly three times more effective at gene editing lab-grown cells compared to standard CRISPR. It increases the safety profile of gene-editing treatments and potentially expands the technology to tissues and organs that are more challenging to genetically alter than the liver.
The implications of understanding the brain's steering circuits go beyond AI. Many psychiatric conditions can be seen as failures of internal teaching. Answering how sophisticated, within-lifetime teaching actually works inside mammalian brains could link psychiatry, developmental neuroscience, and new ideas for AI alignment into a research program. Brains are architectures of internal teachers. We should try to find these teachers and learn from them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 features a full upgrade of the model's skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design. It has a 1 million token context window. The model has very strong safety behaviors, with no signs of major concerns around high-stakes forms of misalignment. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available now on all Claude plans, Claude Cowork, Claude Code, Anthropics API, and all major cloud platforms.
Different coding agents are good at different tasks - the best way to decide which to use is to choose based on time and whether it needs to run autonomously or collaboratively. Model performance and speed is governed both by the pure performance of the model and also how well it can manage multiple context windows and delegate to sub-agents or teams of agents. This article discusses several coding agents and how best to use each of them. Ideas, architecture, and project sequencing are becoming the limiting factors for building great products.
Vertical AI is a fertile ground for moats. These products share operational knowledge packaged as services. Customers stay because of their own experience of relying on the product under stress. Trust leads the customer to bring harder problems, harder problems generate deeper operational knowledge, and this deeper knowledge earns more trust. Any newcomer trying to enter the market starts at the bottom.
Warner Bros. Discovery is giving Paramount one more week to make its best and final offer despite officially still being committed to Netflix. The company has recommended shareholders vote for the Netflix merger. Netflix has provided Warner Bros. with a limited waiver that permits Warner Bros. to engage in discussions with Paramount until February 23. Netflix is set to pay $27.75 per share for an acquisition that includes HBO Max, WB Studios, and other assets. Paramount has offered $31 per share, but it wants to buy the entire company.
The SaaSpocalypse is stress-testing a $500 billion debt structure that private equity built on top of the SaaS business model during the most leveraged decade in financial history.
SpaceX and its wholly owned subsidiary, xAI, are competing in a secretive new Pentagon contract to produce voice-controlled autonomous drone swarming technology. While Elon Musk has been enthusiastic about advancing AI, he has previously argued for a ban on autonomous weapons that can select and engage their own targets and operate beyond meaningful human control. OpenAI is also working on the effort by supporting a successful submission from Applied Intuition. The company's contribution to the project will be limited solely to the conversion of voice and other instructions from battlefield commanders into digital instructions. Its technology won't be used for the operation of the drone swarm, weapons integration, or target authority.
Apple will be introducing an integrated video podcast experience to Apple Podcasts in the spring. The update will bring Apple Podcasts more in line with its competitors, which have increasingly leaned into video podcasting. There will be a picture-in-picture mode, and users will be able to download video episodes for offline viewing. The update will introduce support for HTTP Live Streaming, which features dynamic video ad insertion.
The fundamental problems that plagued Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) a decade ago are still here. While there is genuine, impactful progress in BCIs, this remains largely confined to severe medical conditions. These are highly specialized, medically critical applications, and there are severe engineering challenges that must be overcome before they can be extrapolated into consumer products. This article takes a look at the state of the BCI industry to provide a realistic look at where the technology currently stands and the path forward.
Vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT) occurred in roughly one out of 200,000 people who received adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccines. The condition occurred due to PF4 antibodies binding to rogue antibodies, setting off a dangerous cascade (PF4 is a protein involved in blood clotting). Researchers hypothesize that patients who developed VITT had previously been infected with an adenovirus, which primed their B cells to recognize an adenovirus protein in the vaccine, which kicked those cells into action, starting a mutation-generating process that produced a variant with a negatively charged amino acid, which ultimately led to VITT. In most parts of the world, between 40% and 60% of the population has the genetic background that makes people more prone to VITT, but in East Asia, the prevalence is only 20%.
Traffic skyrocketing? If you're on Microsoft Azure [10], there's no reason to panic. When user demand spikes, Azure adjusts capacity in the background. Performance stays steady with no manual intervention, no late-night firefighting, and no scrambling to explain why the site
Anthropic has changed Claude Code's progress output to hide the names of files the tool was reading, writing, or editing. Developers have pushed back, saying they need to see which files were accessed. The full details can still be accessed with a keyboard shortcut. Developers who want more details can also enable verbose mode.
Large language models generate code much faster than humans can read it. We can't expect humans to effectively review, understand, and approve every diff anymore. Humans should focus their efforts on specifications and tests while agents code. Rework is almost free, so there should be less effort put into preventing incorrect work from happening.
People mostly say that AI performance will plateau because they believe that performance increases have been driven by brute-force scale, and the trend can't last. However, there are also new innovations like reasoning and reinforcement learning driving improvements, so there's no real reason to believe progress will halt. The data centers being built now will likely be used productively. If the technology does actually work, it's reasonable to believe the industry will sort out any 'bubble'.
AI will likely become extremely helpful in the future, but right now, the everyday experience with the technology is awful. It may be helpful for programmers, but normal people tend to have more negative experiences, and none of the people behind the technology seem to care. AI continues to lower the barrier to entry for annoying, low-quality things. This is resulting in things becoming generally worse and is making the internet and social media and such increasingly unusable.
North Korean IT workers, who were generally sent back to Pyongyang every two or three years for roughly a month of 're-education', would hand over 90% of their earnings back to the regime.
Plaid achieved their best-performing direct buy to date, adding $382k in pipeline, earning 70 leads, and achieving 20.1x ROI. This case study breaks down their strategy, results, and example ads. Read the