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

In November 1985, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev walked away from the Geneva Summit negotiations. Just the two of them and their interpreters, walking toward a lakeside cabin on the shores of Lake Geneva. The Cold War was at one of its most dangerous moments. The Soviet Union had walked out of arms control talks two years earlier. Reagan had just announced the Strategic Defense Initiative — "Star Wars" — a space-based missile defense system that was supposed to make nucl

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

We Ripped the Future Into MP3s I just spent about 45 minutes digging through old hard drives. The kind you keep for reasons you can no longer fully explain. Drives pulled from dead computers, copied machine to machine, carried through multiple offices and operating systems and stages of life. Digital junk drawers full of old projects, forgotten photos, obsolete installers, and files that seemed important enough to save at the time. I was looking for one specific MP3. That las

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

Base44 Put a Radio in the Vibe-Coding Machine. Now Give It a Brain. I want to be transparent about something before this article begins. I am dictating this into a Base44 agent right now. This agent is going to take my voice, turn it into text, shape it into an article, and publish it to my website. I paused my music to do it. Think about that for a second. I paused my music — the music I was listening to while building things in Base44 — to dictate an article about Base44 ad

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

VaporVault Got a Complete Makeover. Here's What's New. A couple of years ago I wrote about VaporVault as a concept. A private, offline, encrypted vault you physically own — no cloud, no subscription, no company holding a copy of your stuff. The idea was right. The implementation was held together with Arduino duct tape. Version 4.2.1 is a different product. Not an update. A rebuild. And I think it's finally at the point where I can talk about it without the asterisk. Let me s

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

The NASCAR-ification of Tech: When Every Product Is a Sponsorship Announcement I signed into Netlify last week because someone sent me a link and I figured I'd poke around. Standard drill — sign in with Google, free tier, new account I'll probably forget about by Thursday. But before I even got to the product, I noticed something. Right there in the onboarding: OpenAI Codex, Anthropic, Google Gemini. Wired in. Presented as features. That's three of the biggest names in AI, si

OpenProfile Update: The First Launch Proved It Worked. This Pass Makes It Trustworthy. There is a version of a product launch article I could write that focuses on the new feature count, the lines changed, the surfaces touched. I'm not going to write that one. What I actually did since the OpenProfile launch was less exciting and more important. I made the thing stable. When you launch something real — not a demo, not a pitch deck, but an actual product with real users openin

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

It's 12:30 a.m. on a Friday and I'm writing this instead of sleeping, which is apparently just what Beacon does to me. This started as a weekend experiment. A tiny Wi-Fi server. Wearable, sort of. Useful, maybe. I wanted to see what would happen if you could wear a Wi-Fi network the way you wear a name tag — except the name tag loads a webpage, and the webpage is you. That was the origin. Ankle monitors, a real estate agent's jaw drop at a networking event, a food truck disco

Three trillion parameters. 896 expert networks. A 17-place jump to number one in front-end coding overnight. I want to slow down on Kimi K3 for a minute, because the headline numbers are getting all the attention and the actual architecture story is more interesting than the leaderboard. Start with the benchmark reality. Kimi K3, built by Beijing-based Moonshot AI, is now sitting at number one in Arena's front-end coding rankings. First place across six out of seven domains —

The wall wasn't a wall. That's the thing worth sitting with after Kimi K3 dropped Thursday. Not the benchmark scores. Not the pricing. The wall. The six-to-twelve months of comfortable distance that American AI labs and their investors and the policymakers backing them had built an entire strategic posture around — it turns out it was more like a speed bump. Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based lab most people outside of China had never thought twice about, released Kimi K3 this week

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

Everyone has been staring at the benchmark leaderboards. Meanwhile, the real fight moved somewhere else entirely. Apple just filed a 41-page lawsuit against OpenAI. Not over AI. Over manufacturing. The specific targets are Tang Tan — OpenAI's hardware chief, formerly Apple's VP of product design — and a former Apple engineer named Chang Lu. Apple's allegation is a coordinated extraction campaign: employees being actively pushed to download confidential files on their way out

I want to say upfront that "I built" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What I actually did was look at my coffee mug, have a thought, type that thought into Glaze, and go do other stuff. About fifteen or twenty minutes later, I had a finished, working macOS application sitting in my menu bar. It connected to my Ember Mug over Bluetooth, showed me the temperature, and sent me a push notification when the battery got low. I'm not sure "I built" is even the right

I want to be clear about something upfront: I claim zero talent or skill in what I'm about to describe. This is a broken clock story. The clock just happened to be right at a useful moment. Labor Day weekend 2024. Raining in South Florida. Bored enough to do something stupid. I grabbed a Xiao ESP32-C3 — tiny little microcontroller, about $5, probably the smallest ESP32 package I've ever seen — and eight buttons. Wired four of them to standard shortcuts: copy, paste, cut, ente

GPT-5.6 Sol launched today, July 9, 2026. Technically it's three models — Sol, Terra, and Luna — but let's be honest about what actually happened. OpenAI shipped one flagship model that everyone is going to talk about, and two supporting tiers designed to give developers options without sending their API bills to the moon. Sol is the thing. Terra and Luna are pricing strategy. Here's how I found out about it in the most anticlimactic way possible: I was already using i

Let me explain what happened... I found a vibe-coding tool for Mac called Glaze. I had 120 free tokens....I had a mildly annoying workflow problem involving prompts and clipboard management and too many browser tabs and about eight thousand open Notes documents I never look at. I told the AI to build me a small floating window. That’s where things got away from me. Here’s How the Evening Actually Went The original ask was pretty simple. Make me a floating sidecar window that

On July 7th, Norm AI closed a $120 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation. Khosla Ventures led the round — the same firm that was the first institutional investor in OpenAI. Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, Vanguard, Craft Ventures, and New York Life all participated. So did Jeff Hammes, the former Chairman of Kirkland & Ellis — one of the most powerful law firms on earth — and Fenwick LLP, investing directly as a firm. The company has raised more than $260 mi