标签：#technology

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Your brain lives in the dark space of your skull. Yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs on your skin, when your heart is…

Earlier this week, Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on reversing age-related diseases, announced that it had dosed its first volunteer. A person with glaucoma has had an experimental treatment injected straight into their eyeball. The idea is to try to treat the disease—which can cause vision loss—by regenerating healthy nerves in the eye. But…

Testosterone. Methenolone. Nandrolone. Human growth hormone and EPO. Meldonium, modafinil, and mixed amphetamine salts. Clomiphene, anastrozole, levothyroxine, and liothyronine. Patches and capsules, creams and pills. A whole galaxy of steroids, metabolic modulators, and synthetic hormones coursing through the blood of a few dozen swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. And millions of dollars up for grabs for athletes…

The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has been predicting that one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger. Now MIT Technology Review has learned that he has plans to launch human tests of an oral “reprogramming” drug as part of a $101 million competition organized…

"# The AI Cost Crisis: How Startups Can Survive the Tokenpocalypse\n\n## Introduction\n\nThe artificial intelligence boom has brought unprecedented innovation, but it has also ushered in a era of spiraling costs. Training state-of-the-art models now requires millions of dollars in compute resources, while simultaneously, the cryptocurrency token market shows signs of a potential collapse—a \"Tokenpocalypse.\" For AI startups, this dual crisis presents an existential threat: how to sustain innovation when both traditional funding avenues and speculative token economies are under pressure? This post explores practical strategies for AI startups to navigate this landscape, focusing on cost optimization, alternative funding, and strategic pivots that can turn crisis into opportunity.\n\n## Understanding the Cost Explosion\n\n### The Compute Crunch\n\nModern AI models, particularly large language models (LLMs) and multimodal systems, demand vast computational resources. Training a single cutting-edge model can consume exaflops of processing power, translating to cloud bills that easily exceed $10 million for a single training run. For startups without deep-pocketed backers, these costs are prohibitive.\n\n### The Token Market Volatility\n\nParallel to the AI boom, the cryptocurrency space experienced explosive growth through token launches—initial coin offerings (ICOs), decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens, and utility tokens for AI-driven projects. However, regulatory crackdowns, market saturation, and declining investor sentiment have led to a sharp downturn. Many tokens have lost significant value, and launching new tokens has become increasingly difficult, removing a once-viable funding path for AI startups.\n\n## Strategies for Survival\n\n### 1. Embrace Model Efficiency\n\nInstead of chasing ever-larger models, startups can focus on efficiency techniques that deliver comparable performance at a fraction of the cost:\n\n- Model Distillation : Train smaller \"student\

Much is new about this month’s upcoming FIFA World Cup tournament, which will be held in the US, Canada, and Mexico. It hosts more teams than ever before. It’s the first to occur in three different host countries. And, like predecessor cups for over half a century, it will employ a soccer ball with a…

Today, June 8th, InfoQ celebrates 20 years. This is not a comprehensive history, but a deliberately selective look at the technologies and practices InfoQ identified early, where they sit on the adoption curve in 2026, and how that curve may evolve over the next five to ten years. By InfoQ

This week I’ve been at SXSW London. There’s been music, film, and a lot—and I mean a lot—of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to sit down with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies. Early…

CAP Theorem Explained: Choosing Between Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance in Databases Imagine you're trying to book a flight online, and just as you're about to pay, the website crashes. When you try to book again, you find that the flight is now sold out, even though the website initially showed available seats. This frustrating experience is a classic example of a database trade-off between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. The CAP theorem, first introduced by Eric Brewer in 2000, states that it's impossible for a distributed data store to simultaneously guarantee more than two out of these three principles. In this post, we'll delve into the world of CAP theorem, exploring its fundamentals, real-world database examples, and design implications. Introduction to CAP Theorem Understanding the Basics of CAP Theorem The CAP theorem is based on three primary principles: Consistency : Every read operation will see the most recent write or an error. Availability : Every request receives a response, without guarantee that it contains the most recent version of the information. Partition Tolerance : The system continues to function and make progress even when network partitions (i.e., splits or failures) occur. Importance of CAP Theorem in Distributed Systems In distributed systems, where data is spread across multiple nodes, the CAP theorem plays a crucial role in understanding the trade-offs between these principles. By grasping the CAP theorem, developers can design more resilient and scalable databases that meet the specific needs of their applications. Brief Overview of the Blog Post This post will explore the CAP theorem in depth, using real-world database examples to illustrate the trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. We'll discuss the fundamentals of CAP theorem, examine CA, CP, and AP systems, and provide guidance on designing for each combination. By the end of this post, you'll have a solid un

This article was originally published on davidohnstad.net . I cross-post here to reach the Dev.to community. { " @context ": " https://schema.org ", " @graph ": [ { "@type": "Person", " @id ": " https://davidohnstad.com/#author ", "name": "David Ohnstad", "url": " https://davidohnstad.com ", "sameAs": [ " https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidohnstad/ ", " https://orcid.org/0009-0007-9023-7456 ", " https://davidohnstad5.mystrikingly.com/ ", " https://github.com/davidohnstad40-netizen ", " https://hashnode.com/@davidohnstad ", " https://davidohnstad.com ", " https://davidohnstad.net ", " https://davidohnstad.info ", " https://david-ohnstad.com ", " https://davidohnstadminnesota.com " ], "jobTitle": "Senior Data Product Manager", "worksFor": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Veeam Software", "url": " https://www.veeam.com " }, "alumniOf": { "@type": "CollegeOrUniversity", "name": "College of St. Scholastica" }, "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "addressLocality": "Duluth", "addressRegion": "MN", "addressCountry": "US" }, "description": "Senior Data Product Manager at Veeam Software, MS and MBA from the College of St. Scholastica, based in Duluth, Minnesota. Specializes in data architecture, AI/ML integrations, and SaaS platform development." }, { "@type": "Article", " @id ": " https://davidohnstad.net/why-enterprise-ai-projects-fail-platform-first#article ", "headline": "Why Enterprise AI Projects Fail: Platform-First Thinking", "description": "David Ohnstad reveals why enterprise AI initiatives fail despite massive investment. Learn the platform-first trap and how successful teams build differently.", "url": " https://davidohnstad.net/why-enterprise-ai-projects-fail-platform-first ", "datePublished": "2026-05-29T14:06:46Z", "dateModified": "2026-05-29T14:06:46Z", "author": { "@type": "Person", " @id ": " https://davidohnstad.com/#author " }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "David Ohnstad", "url": " https://davidohnstad.net ", "logo": { "@type": "Ima

One day last October, sitting in the courtyard of his house in China’s Henan province, Dong Hui decided to see if he could hold a pen to write. Dong, 39, had sustained spinal cord injuries in a car accident six years earlier that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Slowly but determinedly, he wrote…

The alert was raised on May 5. Four health-care workers in the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had died from an unknown illness within four days. Rapid response teams were sent to investigate, and tests at a research center in Kinshasa revealed the culprit: the Bundibugyo virus, one of the viruses…

New mothers working in software development are staring down an AI-pilled workplace they barely recognize.

This Sunday, a group of 42 athletes will gather in Las Vegas to compete in a somewhat unusual sporting competition. Participants in the inaugural Enhanced Games are being encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs. The goal is to “push the boundaries of human performance.” The games’ organizers have said that competitors will only be taking substances that…

For a quarter century, the Google search box has been one of the most recognizable interfaces in computing: a thin white rectangle, a blinking cursor, a few typed words, and a list of blue links. On Tuesday, Google will formally retire that paradigm. At its annual I/O developer conference , Google announced a sweeping redesign of the search box itself — the literal text field where billions of queries begin every day — transforming it from a simple keyword input into a dynamic, AI-driven conversation starter that can accept text, images, PDFs, videos, and even open Chrome tabs as inputs. The company is also merging its AI Overviews and AI Mode features into a single, seamless search flow, eliminating the friction that previously forced users to choose between a traditional results page and an AI-forward experience. Liz Reid, Google's vice president and head of Search, called it "the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago" during a press briefing on Monday. The announcement arrived alongside a blizzard of other news — new Gemini models , a personal AI agent called Spark , an intelligent shopping cart , a reimagined developer platform — but the search box redesign may prove to be the most consequential. It is the clearest signal yet that Google views the future of its flagship product not as a place where users type fragmented keywords, but as an interface where they hold open-ended, multimodal conversations with an AI system backed by the entire web. The new search box expands, accepts files, and coaches you on what to ask The changes show a fundamental shift in how Google expects people to interact with the product that generates the vast majority of Alphabet's revenue. The box itself now dynamically expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries. Where the old interface subtly encouraged brevity — a narrow field suited to two- or three-word keyword strings — the new design invites users to fully articulate complex que

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs , needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers. The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid. That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital , Conviction , and Pear VC . The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews. "When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is." Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale. Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question... You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys.

Salesforce on Tuesday launched an entirely rebuilt version of Slackbot , the company's workplace assistant, transforming it from a simple notification tool into what executives describe as a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking action on behalf of employees. The new Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, is Salesforce's most aggressive move yet to position Slack at the center of the emerging "agentic AI" movement — where software agents work alongside humans to complete complex tasks. The launch comes as Salesforce attempts to convince investors that artificial intelligence will bolster its products rather than render them obsolete. "Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant," said Parker Harris , Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with Salesforce. "It's the front door to the agentic enterprise, powered by Salesforce." From tricycle to Porsche: Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot from the ground up Harris was blunt about what distinguishes the new Slackbot from its predecessor: "The old Slackbot was, you know, a little tricycle, and the new Slackbot is like, you know, a Porsche." The original Slackbot, which has existed since Slack's early days, performed basic algorithmic tasks — reminding users to add colleagues to documents, suggesting channel archives, and delivering simple notifications. The new version runs on an entirely different architecture built around a large language model and sophisticated search capabilities that can access Salesforce records, Google Drive files, calendar data, and years of Slack conversations. "It's two different things," Harris explained. "The old Slackbot was algorithmic and fairly simple. The new Slackbot is brand new — it's based around an LLM and a very robust search engine, and connections to third-party search engines, third-party enterprise data." Salesforce chose to retain the Slackbo

Anthropic released Cowork on Monday, a new AI agent capability that extends the power of its wildly successful Claude Code tool to non-technical users — and according to company insiders, the team built the entire feature in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself. The launch marks a major inflection point in the race to deliver practical AI agents to mainstream users, positioning Anthropic to compete not just with OpenAI and Google in conversational AI, but with Microsoft's Copilot in the burgeoning market for AI-powered productivity tools. "Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code," the company announced via its official Claude account on X. The feature arrives as a research preview available exclusively to Claude Max subscribers — Anthropic's power-user tier priced between $100 and $200 per month — through the macOS desktop application. For the past year, the industry narrative has focused on large language models that can write poetry or debug code. With Cowork , Anthropic is betting that the real enterprise value lies in an AI that can open a folder, read a messy pile of receipts, and generate a structured expense report without human hand-holding. How developers using a coding tool for vacation research inspired Anthropic's latest product The genesis of Cowork lies in Anthropic's recent success with the developer community. In late 2024, the company released Claude Code , a terminal-based tool that allowed software engineers to automate rote programming tasks. The tool was a hit, but Anthropic noticed a peculiar trend: users were forcing the coding tool to perform non-coding labor. According to Boris Cherny , an engineer at Anthropic, the company observed users deploying the developer tool for an unexpectedly diverse array of tasks. "Since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work: doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email,

Nous Research , the open-source artificial intelligence startup backed by crypto venture firm Paradigm , released a new competitive programming model on Monday that it says matches or exceeds several larger proprietary systems — trained in just four days using 48 of Nvidia's latest B200 graphics processors . The model, called NousCoder-14B , is another entry in a crowded field of AI coding assistants, but arrives at a particularly charged moment: Claude Code , the agentic programming tool from rival Anthropic, has dominated social media discussion since New Year's Day, with developers posting breathless testimonials about its capabilities . The simultaneous developments underscore how quickly AI-assisted software development is evolving — and how fiercely companies large and small are competing to capture what many believe will become a foundational technology for how software gets written. type: embedded-entry-inline id: 74cSyrq6OUrp9SEQ5zOUSl NousCoder-14B achieves a 67.87 percent accuracy rate on LiveCodeBench v6 , a standardized evaluation that tests models on competitive programming problems published between August 2024 and May 2025. That figure represents a 7.08 percentage point improvement over the base model it was trained from, Alibaba's Qwen3-14B , according to Nous Research's technical report published alongside the release. "I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour," wrote Jaana Dogan , a principal engineer at Google responsible for the Gemini API, in a viral post on X last week that captured the prevailing mood around AI coding tools. Dogan was describing a distributed agent orchestration system her team had spent a year developing — a system Claude Code approximated from a three-paragraph prompt. The juxtaposition is instructive: while Anthropic's Claude Code has captured imaginations with demonstrations of end-to-end software development, Nous Research is betting that open-source alternatives tr