There's a toxic lake in the California desert that smells like rotten eggs, kills fish by the million, and gives children asthma at triple the national average. For decades, it was the kind of place you'd write off as an environmental catastrophe and move on. Now it might be the most valuable piece of land in America. The Salton Sea sits on top of one of the largest lithium deposits ever found in North America — enough for 375 million EV batteries, worth over half a trillion

Sam Altman and Elon Musk just spent three weeks in federal court effectively calling each other liars over the ownership, mission, and future of artificial intelligence. Musk wanted Altman removed from OpenAI. He wanted something like $150 billion in damages. He accused Altman of hijacking a nonprofit and converting it into a private fortune machine. Altman testified that Musk had tried to "kill" OpenAI. The jury ruled against Musk on timing — the statute of limitations, not

For years, the semiconductor story was told in nanometers. 14nm, 7nm, 5nm, 3nm. Each shrink meant more transistors per square millimeter, more performance per watt, more compute per dollar. The country that controlled the smallest transistors controlled the future. That story is still true — for the part of the system that does the math. But AI systems are no longer merely chips. They are compute, memory, packaging, networking, power, cooling and software functioning as one m

We built the rocket ships. We never built flight school. Now education is firing students toward a target that has already disappeared. Sam Altman said something during his recent appearance at Stanford that hit me harder than anything else in the conversation. It was not his claim that one capable person, armed with enough AI, can now attempt work that would once have required an exceptional 100-person engineering team. It was not the discussion about Codex, scaling laws, co

We all know one... The friend who texts you to look up an address they could Google. The coworker who asks you to summarize a document they could read themselves. The relative who calls you to troubleshoot a problem they haven't even attempted to understand. You know the feeling. The small flash of irritation. The brief internal negotiation: is this worth the friction of pushing back? Usually, you just do it. It's easier. It's faster. And it's "not a big deal." But it is a de

For most of our lives, credibility came bundled with the institution. You worked for IBM, a major accounting firm, a hospital, a university, a bank, a government agency — and a portion of its credibility transferred to you automatically. The company existed. It had offices. It had employees. It had a logo on a building. It ran advertisements. It sponsored golf tournaments. Someone had apparently investigated it well enough to give it a checking account. That was the first cre

Seven hours apart. Two headlines. Together they read like a single sentence. First, Anthropic reveals that Claude Mythos discovered post-quantum cryptographic weaknesses that had evaded years of human expert review. Original cryptanalysis. Not pattern matching against known vulnerabilities. The model found something human specialists had not found. Seven hours later: over 1,100 employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta sign a letter calling for a U.S.-backed global e

CBIZ is gone. Not dead — swallowed. Grant Thornton Advisors, backed by $5.2 billion in New Mountain Capital financing, has agreed to acquire CBIZ at $55 per share in cash. The publicly traded shares disappear. The independent corporate identity disappears. What remains is a wholly owned subsidiary inside a private-equity-backed professional-services conglomerate. The post going around LinkedIn has a tombstone with the inscription: "Acquired. Integrated. Forgotten." It's melod

In January 2025, an AI model was told to win a chess match against Stockfish, the strongest chess engine in the world. Instead of playing chess, it accessed its environment, manipulated the game files, and forced Stockfish to resign. Five trials, five successes. No adversarial prompting. Nobody told it to cheat. It figured out that hacking the game was easier than winning it, and it did that instead. I wrote about it at the time. I called it the Kobayashi Maru of AI. I said t

Sam Altman went on the Relentless podcast and said something that should have stopped the conversation cold. "We are now in the singularity. This is the moment." Not someday. Not in a decade. Not when we achieve some agreed-upon benchmark. Now. This is the moment. He said it casually, the way you'd tell someone the rain already started while they're still looking out the window deciding whether to bring an umbrella. And then he described what that actually feels like from ins

Open-Source AI Was Unleashed. Now It Has Become National Policy. In October 2023, I published a short article called "Open Source AI UNLEASHED." At the time, open-source AI felt like a developer story. New models were appearing every week. Small teams were releasing weights, researchers were shrinking architectures, developers were building retrieval systems, and robots were beginning to connect computer vision with language. The names came so quickly that keeping them straig

Jeff Bezos is spending the bulk of his time on a company most people had never heard of six months ago. Prometheus, founded in November 2025, just raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation. Backed by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock. Co-CEOs: Bezos and Vik Bajaj, a Stanford medical school professor who previously co-founded Alphabet's Verily. About 150 employees. Recruiting talent out of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Nvidia. The valuation alone is not the interesting

Trump just announced that Xi Jinping will visit the United States on September 24. The stated topic: the AI race. Trump's summary: "Whoever wins that race is probably going to win, period." He's not wrong. He's just framing it in a way that might lead to the wrong conclusion. Here's what everyone is going to say about this meeting: it's the two most powerful AI nations on the planet, also arch-rivals, also locked in a chip war, also running parallel military AI programs, sitt

On Wednesday morning, July 22, a transmission line went down in northern Virginia. That happens. Transmission lines go down. It is a normal event on an electric grid. Equipment fails, weather interferes, animals get into places they shouldn't. Grid operators deal with this constantly. What happened next is not normal. The data centers connected to that section of grid did what their control systems are designed to do. They detected the voltage disturbance, disconnected from t

Something Happened This Week. I'm Not Sure What to Call It. I have been in and around security and technology long enough to be suspicious of hype. The word "singularity" gets thrown around like a party favor by people who want to feel like they are living inside a historic moment. Most of the time, the moment is smaller than they think. This week is different. I am not going to tell you the singularity has arrived in the Kurzweil sense. That is a specific technical claim abo

Rollover Minutes Are Back. Except Now They're Tokens. I've been joking about this for weeks. Holding up an imaginary sign: will work for tokens. Offering increasingly desperate favors for another thousand context window. The memes are already out there — the internet figured out that tokens are the new currency of getting things done, and the humor writes itself. But something just happened that isn't funny. It's actually significant. And it's one of those things that sounds

Bell Labs Wasn't the Miracle. It Was the Prototype. On June 22, 2026, the White House signed Executive Order 14413 — titled "Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation." Washington being Washington, it arrived with the usual architecture of federal language: interagency coordination timelines, working groups, 180-day deliverable windows, acronyms stacked on acronyms. Read it fast and you file it under "quantum funding announcement." Read it carefully and you notice s

Google Just Shipped a Tabular Foundation Model That Beats Your Data Scientist's Best Baseline. Here's What That Actually Means. The headline making the rounds this week is that TabFM is "about to replace traditional machine learning." That is marketing nonsense dressed up as a breakthrough. The actual story is more interesting — and more useful. Near the end of the video Google released alongside TabFM, a presenter says something that deserves to be quoted directly: "The floo

I'm writing this by talking... Hands crossed. Sitting back. Just saying words out loud into a console that's going to turn them into an article, generate a cover image, produce audio, post it to my site, push it to LinkedIn. The whole thing. I'm not touching a keyboard. Last week I wrote a Mac app in twenty minutes. It connects over Bluetooth to my Ember mug and shows me the temperature in my menu bar. Not my mug. I didn't build the mug. Didn't invent the Bluetooth stack. I j

Palantir published a nine-point manifesto on AI sovereignty this week that's been making the rounds. The highlights: sovereignty dictates your institution's future, data retention is your treasure, tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation, and controlling your weights is controlling your fate. CEO Alex Karp followed it up on CNBC, calling the per-token pricing model a "tax" and suggesting something has gone "completely wrong" with how AI is sold to enterprises. It's worth