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America has turned against data centers — Pew finds 54% now call them bad for the environment

The Everyday

America has turned against data centers — Pew finds 54% now call them bad for the environment

Three stories about who absorbs AI's costs: the communities hosting the compute, the countries deciding whether to pick a superpower's side — or neither — and the creators being asked to like it. American opinion on data centers has swung sharply negative in eight months: 54% now say the facilities are mostly bad for the environment, up from 39% in January, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Tuesday. The nationally representative survey of 10,548 US adults, fielded July 20 thro

MIT's AI barcode finds 'zombie cells' without destroying them

The Frontier

MIT's AI barcode finds 'zombie cells' without destroying them

Aging research has a measurement problem: the clearest markers of a senescent cell are only readable after the cell is gone. MIT and Harvard have now shown a way around it — and the answer looks like a barcode. A senescent cell stops dividing but refuses to die, and the immune system gets worse at clearing those cells out as we age. When they accumulate they are linked to osteoarthritis, type 2 diabetes, tissue degeneration and cancer — though senescence also does useful work in embryonic devel

Open Source Radar — September 23: the agent's missing plumbing

The Stack

Open Source Radar — September 23: the agent's missing plumbing

Today's board is the three layers an agent needs before anyone trusts it with real work: a document surface it can actually edit, a runtime that keeps it isolated and cheap to wake, and a way to hand it tools without handing it keys. Univer (TypeScript, ~16,000 stars, Apache-2.0) — An office SDK that has spent three years being the open-source spreadsheet you embed in your own product, and has now repositioned itself, in its own README, as the Office Harness for AI Agents. Spreadsheets, documen

Smart glasses are causing havoc in India — and police wear them too

The Everyday

Smart glasses are causing havoc in India — and police wear them too

Consumer AI hardware is colliding hardest with the places that adopted it fastest: one story today about glasses that watch, one about a car that listens. India is turning into the stress test for what happens when cameras you can't see go mainstream — and the state is on the wearing side. A Delhi designer who goes by Shubnam learned this the hard way: a rage-bait creator recorded them at a protest on Meta smart glasses styled like ordinary Wayfarers, and the mocking reel that followed — millio

Europe's DARPA clones put €40M into AI that designs chips

The Guardrails

Europe's DARPA clones put €40M into AI that designs chips

Europe's answer to Nvidia just got a budget line. NADI, the Netherlands' brand-new DARPA-style agency, and Germany's SPRIND are putting €40 million into a challenge that pays small teams to let AI design the chips AI itself runs on. The program is the first outing for NADI — the National Agency for Disruptive Innovation — which the Dutch government only stood up this month with €500 million in seed funding announced on Prinsjesdag. Together with Germany's SPRIND, the federal leap-agency that no

Deep Dive — Inside the sandbox factory that trains DeepSeek's agents

The Frontier

Deep Dive — Inside the sandbox factory that trains DeepSeek's agents

This morning's brief covered the headlines; this is the machinery underneath. On September 19, DeepSeek published a systems paper with an unglamorous title — "DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale" — and an unusually revealing body. DSec is the platform that served every sandbox workload in the company's RL training and evaluation from DeepSeek V3.2 through V4.1. The byline carries well over a hundred names and ends with founder Liang W

DeepSeek shows the machine that trains its agents — and it runs 3 million sandboxes a day

The Frontier

DeepSeek shows the machine that trains its agents — and it runs 3 million sandboxes a day

While Western labs debate whether their agents are safe in theory, DeepSeek just published the factory floor. A new paper, "DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale" (arXiv:2609.22978), lays out the production system behind the lab's agentic reinforcement learning — and founder Liang Wenfeng is the last-listed author of the 162-author submission. The scale is the story: a single production unit spans roughly 160 nodes serving about 3 milli

Meta tested Muse calls that humans made, not the AI

The Guardrails

Meta tested Muse calls that humans made, not the AI

Internal Meta posts show the company quietly tested a "human concierge" feature for its Muse agent — real people in call centers placing the phone calls the assistant was supposed to make — then pulled it after employees pushed back. Reuters and 404 Media each saw the internal posts independently. Meta confirmed the test and the rollback, and framed it as feedback-gathering. The mechanics, per Reuters, which first saw internal company posts on the feature: when Muse enabled calling for half of

AI 101 — What is a TPU?

The Stack

AI 101 — What is a TPU?

A TPU — Tensor Processing Unit — is a computer chip Google built to do one thing: the enormous matrix multiplications that neural networks run on, done faster and with less electricity than a general-purpose chip can manage. It is the silicon underneath Search, Translate and Gemini, it is what Google rents to other AI companies through its cloud, and in 2026 it became collateral in some of the largest loans the AI buildout has seen. If you have read about a "$22 billion loan" or "a million TPUs"

Stanford ran a virtual biotech of 37,000 agents

The Frontier

Stanford ran a virtual biotech of 37,000 agents

A Stanford team ran 37,075 AI agents as a "virtual biotech" for a week, and the therapeutic strategy it proposed for lung cancer is one Merck and Daiichi Sankyo independently took to an FDA breakthrough designation last year — but no molecule came out of it, and nothing was tested. The paper, published in Science on 17 September by Harrison Zhang, Peter Eckmann, Jiacheng Miao, Andrew Mahon and senior author James Zou, points an organisation of more than 37,000 agents at 55,984 annotated clinical

Ex-Huawei Pangu CTO raises hundreds of millions for a physics model

The Frontier

Ex-Huawei Pangu CTO raises hundreds of millions for a physics model

Two of Huawei's best-known large-model people have a new company, and it isn't Huawei's. Shenzhen's XIRRA has raised several hundred million yuan to build a foundation model for the physical world — and the framing around it needs one correction. Li Yin, the former CTO of Huawei Cloud's Pangu large-model team, left to found XIRRA (Shenzhen Xirrang Kaiwu Technology), and the company has now closed seed and angel rounds worth several hundred million yuan in total. Dunhong Assets led, with Huakong

Shenzhen's AI court assistant has handled 600,000 cases

The Guardrails

Shenzhen's AI court assistant has handled 600,000 cases

Shenzhen put an AI assistant inside its courtrooms two years ago. It now has numbers to show for it — and foreign judges are booking flights to see the thing. Shenzhen's Intermediate People's Court says its AI-assisted adjudication system has helped handle more than 600,000 cases since going live on 28 June 2024, describing it as the world's first complete AI-assisted adjudication system and the first to span civil, administrative and criminal proceedings. It is not one model but four modules t

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