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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

Lambert's Hill briefing: Chinese open weights out-download US 2-to-1

The Frontier

Lambert's Hill briefing: Chinese open weights out-download US 2-to-1

Nathan Lambert's Hill briefing: Chinese open weights out-download US 2-to-1 Three stories about who sets the terms: the open-weight balance sheet Congress got briefed on privately, the banks trying to write the rules for shopping agents before a regulator does, and the clinics getting frontier medical AI for free. Chinese open-weight models now hold twice America's cumulative downloads and more than 80% of open-model usage on OpenRouter, according to the remarks Nathan Lambert prepared for a c

Alibaba opens cloud regions in Turkey and Finland as AI tensions bite

The Arena

Alibaba opens cloud regions in Turkey and Finland as AI tensions bite

Alibaba picked the week of a US–UK AI pact to plant its cloud deeper in Europe. The same conference where it announced the regions also carried its chip roadmap — and Japan's turbine makers are still selling the power behind all of it. Alibaba Cloud will open its first cloud regions in Turkey and Finland — plus one in the Netherlands — within the next 12 months, the company said at its Apsara conference in Hangzhou on Wednesday. The Netherlands was already announced at last year's Apsara and ha

Qwen's Personal Agent wants your health data and your portfolio

The Arena

Qwen's Personal Agent wants your health data and your portfolio

Alibaba spent its Hangzhou conference week talking about chips, gigawatts and ten-trillion-parameter roadmaps. The consumer half of the story is quieter and more consequential: what the Qwen app does next with your data. Alibaba is rebuilding its Qwen assistant as a "Personal Agent" that runs on authorised health and exercise data and, for some users, linked brokerage holdings — and it brought efficiency numbers to argue the plumbing is ready. Qwen product lead Zheng Sishou said at the Yunqi co

Malware outsourced its attack decisions to a panel of four LLMs

The Guardrails

Malware outsourced its attack decisions to a panel of four LLMs

Cisco Talos published a new way to hunt AI-integrated malware on Tuesday, and the first thing it caught is the part worth reading twice: a Windows implant that asks four commercial language models what to do next, and then does it. Talos says CLOSEDQUORUM is the first publicly documented Windows implant to hand tactical command-and-control decisions to a panel of commercial models — DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Google Gemini — and execute whatever the vote picks. The 16.4MB Go binary has no atta

Cognex buys Intel spinoff RealSense in a $600M physical-AI bet

The Arena

Cognex buys Intel spinoff RealSense in a $600M physical-AI bet

Three moves on the same Tuesday, all of them bets that the unglamorous layer is where the margin sits: the sensor that lets a robot see, the registry that says who owns an agent, and the data center that serves the tokens in between. Cognex will pay about $500 million in cash for RealSense, the 3D perception company Intel spun out 14 months ago, in a deal the two sides value at roughly $600 million once a three-year employee retention program is counted. The machine vision maker is funding it e

UK and US sign an AI pact — and fire a torpedo from a robot sub

The Guardrails

UK and US sign an AI pact — and fire a torpedo from a robot sub

Three guardrail stories landed on the same Tuesday, and only one of them came from a government interested in slowing anything down: a defence pact between two allies, a state cabinet in Illinois, and an independent testing institute for children's AI. The UK and the US have launched a joint AI and autonomy partnership to protect critical national infrastructure, in the same week the two countries fired a torpedo from an uncrewed undersea vessel for the first time. The UK government said its Mi

Leaked code names OpenAI's always-on coworker: Aeon

The Arena

Leaked code names OpenAI's always-on coworker: Aeon

Two scoreboards went public on Tuesday and a line of leaked code arrived the same week. Together they say something OpenAI would rather not hear: in the personal-agent race it started, it is now the one catching up. OpenAI is developing features aimed directly at SpaceXAI's Grok Bot, and leaked ChatGPT client code suggests the always-on coworker it is building may be called Aeon. The Information reported that OpenAI is working on features to compete more directly with Grok Bot — the AI teammate

Microsoft gives DARPA on-site access to its Majorana 2 quantum chip

The Arena

Microsoft gives DARPA on-site access to its Majorana 2 quantum chip

Microsoft's quantum bet picked up a federal referee on Tuesday, and the referee's job is to try to prove the company wrong. Microsoft said it will give DARPA direct, on-site access to its latest topological quantum hardware — including qubits built on its Majorana 2 chip — at a new 15,000-square-foot quantum research center in Maryland. The center sits in the University of Maryland's Discovery District near Washington, inside a building the state acquired and renovated with support from Governo

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