Tech

There is a peculiar ritual on Hacker News: an obscure project surfaces, gathers a flurry of upvotes, and vanishes back into the depths of the internet by the next day. But every so often, one of those projects has staying power. Ü — the self-described “superior” programming language — […]

There are dozens of “ChatGPT for beginners” guides published every month, and ZDNet just released its 2026 edition. But most of them frame the question too narrowly. They ask “how do I type a prompt?” when the real question is: “what has this tool become, and how do I […]

Ted Chiang has a gift for making uncomfortable arguments feel inevitable. The science fiction writer — whose story “Story of Your Life” became the film Arrival, and who has spent the past several years writing incisive non-fiction about AI for The New Yorker and The Atlantic — published an […]

Microsoft released its first advanced reasoning AI model at Build 2026 on Tuesday, marking a major step in the company’s drive to reduce its dependence on OpenAI’s technology. MAI-Thinking-1 is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 35 billion active parameters out of approximately 1 trillion total — and it was […]

Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo, the company’s boldest attempt to reach price-sensitive buyers in years, has shipped 1.1 million units in its first quarter on sale — surpassing the launch quarter of the MacBook Air M1, historically Apple’s best-selling laptop. The data, reported by TechCrunch and corroborated by IDC, suggests […]

Microsoft’s long-running struggle with mobile platforms has produced many experiments — Windows Phone, Windows RT, Surface Duo — all casualties of the same problem: no apps. At Build 2026, the company unveiled a radical answer to that 15-year problem: eliminate the app model entirely and replace it with AI […]

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that asks AI companies to voluntarily submit powerful models for government review 30 days before public release — but explicitly prohibits creating any mandatory licensing or preclearance system. The order is a dramatically scaled-back version of the one Trump was […]

A small inference company has done what the major cloud providers couldn’t easily offer: running DeepSeek’s state-of-the-art V4 Flash model on AMD’s MI300X accelerators. The breakthrough — documented in a detailed worklog by Doubleword engineer Fergus Finn — suggests that AMD’s long-neglected first-generation AI silicon may be a viable, […]

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) committed up to $50 million to Moderna on Monday to develop an mRNA vaccine against Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV), as an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo shows no signs of slowing. A vaccine platform repurposed Moderna will apply the same […]

Google’s always-on AI agent, Gemini Spark, is rolling out to subscribers of the company’s $99-per-month AI Ultra plan — and early testing by The Verge’s David Pierce reveals an assistant that is simultaneously the most impressive and most unsettling AI product he has used. What Spark does Spark is […]