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Beatbot Pool-Cleaning Robots Are on Sale for a Limited Time

WIRED

Get ready for summer with discounts on robot pool cleaners from Beatbot. National Pool Opening Day is tomorrow, April 25, and summer is almost here, which means pool owners everywhere are getting ready to unveil the horrors of whatever happened during the off-season. Most of the Beatbot lineup is on sale at Amazon and Beatbot's own storefront, with prices starting at $499. Beatbot makes many of the best pool-cleaning robots we've tested, and we've highlighted our top picks below. Note that the discounts are scheduled to end on April 26, though items may sell out sooner.


AI-Designed Drugs by a DeepMind Spinoff Are Headed to Human Trials

WIRED

Isomorphic Labs president Max Jaderberg said at WIRED Health in London that the startup has built a "broad and exciting pipeline of new medicines." Google DeepMind's AlphaFold has already revolutionized scientists' understanding of proteins . Now, the ability of the platform to design safe and effective drugs is about to be put to the test. Isomorphic Labs, the UK-based biotech spinoff of Google DeepMind, will soon begin human trials of drugs designed by its Nobel Prize-winning AI technology. "We're gearing up to go into the clinic," Isomorphic Labs president Max Jaderberg said on April 16 at WIRED Health in London.


Designer Baby Companies Are in Turmoil

WIRED

Bootstrap Bio and Manhattan Genomics, which were pursuing gene editing in human embryos to prevent serious disease, have shut down. Two companies that launched last year with plans to create gene-edited babies have already shut down, citing money issues and internal conflict. One of them, Manhattan Genomics of New York, closed abruptly shortly after announcing a team of scientific advisers in October that included a prominent fertility doctor, a data scientist who worked for de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences, and a scientist who pioneered a "three-parent" IVF technique. The other, California-based Bootstrap Bio, said it ceased operations in late 2025, as first reported by Mother Jones. Manhattan Genomics and Bootstrap Bio had ambitions to edit DNA in human embryos with the goal of preventing serious disease in babies.


The Men Behind Your Favorite AI Gay Thirst Traps

WIRED

A viral red carpet moment shone light on a group of hunky Instagram influencers--and the followers who are too horny to care that they're not real. With his deep brown eyes, wide grin, and almost comically chiseled body, Jae Young Joon is the platonic ideal of a hunky male influencer. On Instagram, where he has more than 320,000 followers, he regularly posts himself trying on sheet masks at home, enjoying soju and karaoke with his friends, or posing in front of the Ferris wheel at Coachella . Occasionally, he'll promote his music, including his recent LP Pressure Release which features a BDSM-inspired album cover, his back muscles rippling underneath a harness and chains. It's an impressive online presence, and Jae's fans eat it up: his comments are filled with fire and heart-eye emoji and people praising his music.


Airfare Keeps Going Up. Here Are Some Tricks to Finding Cheap(er) Tickets

WIRED

It's an expensive time to fly. These tips can help lighten the load on your wallet. As a general rule, global instability leads to higher prices, and boy, is the world a doozy right now . Airfare hasn't escaped the tumult: US airfares are up 14.9 percent compared to a year ago, according to NerdWallet, largely due to fuel price spikes linked to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz caused by blockages, bombs, and blockades. While the medium-term outlook for the airline business isn't great, there are still a few smart and tricky ways to save a little money when flying this summer.


5 Reasons to Think Twice Before Using ChatGPT--or Any Chatbot--for Financial Advice

WIRED

As people increasingly rely on AI chatbots for guidance, even on financial matters, a healthy dose of skepticism is critical. I've used ChatGPT to help me build a budget before, and it was genuinely helpful. After I input my monthly salary as well as my standard utilities and recurring expenses, the chatbot drafted a few solid options, and I tweaked them into penny-pinching perfection. "Millions of people turn to ChatGPT with money-related questions, from understanding debt to building budgets and learning financial concepts," says Niko Felix, an OpenAI spokesperson, when reached for comment. "ChatGPT can be a helpful tool for exploring options, preparing questions, and making financial topics easier to understand, but it is not a substitute for licensed financial professionals." OpenAI's Terms of Use state that the AI tool is not meant to replace professional financial advice.


Calibeating Prediction-Powered Inference

van der Laan, Lars, Van Der Laan, Mark

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study semisupervised mean estimation with a small labeled sample, a large unlabeled sample, and a black-box prediction model whose output may be miscalibrated. A standard approach in this setting is augmented inverse-probability weighting (AIPW) [Robins et al., 1994], which protects against prediction-model misspecification but can be inefficient when the prediction score is poorly aligned with the outcome scale. We introduce Calibrated Prediction-Powered Inference, which post-hoc calibrates the prediction score on the labeled sample before using it for semisupervised estimation. This simple step requires no retraining and can improve the original score both as a predictor of the outcome and as a regression adjustment for semisupervised inference. We study both linear and isotonic calibration. For isotonic calibration, we establish first-order optimality guarantees: isotonic post-processing can improve predictive accuracy and estimator efficiency relative to the original score and simpler post-processing rules, while no further post-processing of the fitted isotonic score yields additional first-order gains. For linear calibration, we show first-order equivalence to PPI++. We also clarify the relationship among existing estimators, showing that the original PPI estimator is a special case of AIPW and can be inefficient when the prediction model is accurate, while PPI++ is AIPW with empirical efficiency maximization [Rubin et al., 2008]. In simulations and real-data experiments, our calibrated estimators often outperform PPI and are competitive with, or outperform, AIPW and PPI++. We provide an accompanying Python package, ppi_aipw, at https://larsvanderlaan.github.io/ppi-aipw/.


Apple's Next Chapter, SpaceX and Cursor Strike a Deal, and Palantir's Controversial Manifesto

WIRED

In this week's episode of, we talk about Tim Cook's legacy as CEO at Apple and what his long-rumored departure means for the future of one of the world's biggest companies. They also go into the reasoning behind SpaceX and Cursor's surprising deal, and why Palantir's self-published manifesto drew a lot of heat online. Also, we discuss why some conspiracy theorists are leaving Trump's side, and how a scammer created an AI-generated woman to attract and grift MAGA men. Tim Cook's Legacy Is Turning Apple Into a Subscription This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift'Super Dumb' Men Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Zoë, Leah, and I have really enjoyed being your new hosts these past few weeks, and we want to hear from you. If you like the show and have a minute, please leave us a review in the podcast or app of your choice. It really helps us reach more people, and for any questions and comments, you can always reach us at [email protected] . I missed you so much. And I missed you the exact same amount. I'm going to go away more often. Absence makes the heart go fonder, as we all know, and I'm thrilled to be here. This week on the show, we're saying goodbye to Apple CEO, Tim Cook, who announced that he is stepping down from the top gig at the company. And, more than just talking about his legacy at Apple, we'll be looking into what this long-awaited shift actually means for the future of one of the world's biggest companies. We'll also get into why SpaceX and Cursor's potential $60 billion deal announced this week is pretty staggering, and we'll get into Palantir's controversial 22-point manifesto. I feel like manifesto's inherently controversial, otherwise they'd be memos that they posted on X this week.


At 'AI Coachella,' Stanford Students Line Up to Learn From Silicon Valley Royalty

WIRED

CS 153 has gone viral on the Palo Alto campus--and on X. Not everyone is happy about it. As thousands of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Festival, a very Silicon Valley program dubbed "AI Coachella" was taking shape a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is one of Stanford's buzziest offerings this semester, and like the music festival, it features a star-studded lineup of celebrities--in this case, not pop artists, but Big Tech CEOs. The course is co-taught by Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner, and Michael Abbott, Apple's former VP of engineering for cloud services.


Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys

WIRED

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys Interviews with current and former Palantir employees, along with internal Slack messages obtained by WIRED, suggest a workforce in turmoil. It took just a few months of President Donald Trump's second term for Palantir employees to question their company's commitments to civil liberties . Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump's immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), when current and former employees started ringing the alarm. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, "Are you tracking Palantir's descent into fascism?" "That was their greeting," the other former employee says.