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The Download: a donor conception cap and world models for AI
Plus: Apple has sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets. Ties van der Meer doesn't know how many siblings he has. The 47-year-old was conceived at a private fertility clinic using sperm from an anonymous donor. He eventually tracked down one sibling, but he may have others he'll never find. Other donor-conceived people have found they have tens or even hundreds of them. "It does make you feel a bit mass-produced," said one who discovered they had 25 half-siblings.
The Download: Claude's inner workings and OpenAI's "super app"
Plus: OpenAI has unveiled its long-awaited super app. The AI firm Anthropic has got the clearest glimpse yet at what's really going on inside large language models as they answer questions or carry out tasks. What they found ranges from the mundane to the unnerving. Researchers at the company built a tool called the Jacobian lens (or J-lens) and used it to uncover a hidden area, which they named the J-space, inside its flagship LLM, Claude. The J-space contains words related to the response a model is working on but may not ultimately produce. If Claude were a person (which it is not), you might say these hidden words reveal what's on its mind before it actually speaks.
The Download: your stake in OpenAI, and the Treasury's AI warning
Plus: Samsung profits have jumped 1,800% on booming AI chip sales. Sam Altman's proposal that Americans should share in the wealth created by AI is back in the spotlight, with reports that he is discussing giving the US government a 5% stake in OpenAI. At the company's current valuation, that stake would be worth roughly $320 per American household. The idea is meant to address concerns that AI companies are benefiting from human-generated work without compensating creators, while also easing fears that AI will cause a collapse of the labor market by providing a safety net. The details, however, remain unclear. Indeed, the offer may be more powerful as a political narrative than as a policy plan.
The Download: a smoking "endgame" and a new Elizabeth Bear story
Plus: An EU lawmaker investigating spyware was hacked by that same spyware. The UK's generational tobacco ban might not work. As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from mine. The seven-year-old is learning about AI at school. The five-year-old is given internet-based homework every week. And they are both absolutely repulsed by the idea of smoking.
Achieving operational excellence with AI
As AI reshapes how work gets done, organizations with strong process frameworks are best positioned to lead and maintain operational rigor at scale. Frameworks like Lean Six Sigma and business process management (BPM) first gained traction because they promised clarity in the chaos--a structured way to bring order to messy, sprawling operations. Lean Six Sigma emphasized statistical rigor and quality control; BPM created end-to-end maps of how work should flow across departments. Both offered a repeatable way to embed habits of measurement, analysis, and accountability into day-to-day company culture. But today, those time-tested playbooks are evolving as companies seek to embed AI into established process excellence methodologies. By some estimates, the market for AI-powered process optimization is projected to exceed $113 billion within the next decade.
Roundtables: Longevity's Next Frontier: "Reprogramming" Your Body
Billions of dollars are flooding into efforts to reverse aging as scientists explore ways to return cells to a younger state. But how far off are these experimental treatments? Why "reprogramming" is the buzziest approach to reversing aging right now A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that's holding back LLMs Will Douglas Heaven Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI's models Michelle Kim China has approved the world's first invasive brain-computer chip--here's what's next The country wants to become a global leader in brain implants. Strong government support is expected to help accelerate that process. Researchers are decoding how signals move between body and brain, with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to anxiety. In an early step towards artificial wombs, a biotech company claims it's developed a "fully artificial" chicken egg.
The Download: metric weaknesses and AI elephant warnings
Plus: The US has allowed Anthropic to release Mythos 5 to "trusted" orgs. There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more that it can obscure or corrupt. Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires. I wanted to feel better physically and emotionally, get outside more, and bring order to the messiness and uncertainty of my daily existence. But external metrics and data can never capture what's truly important.
The Download: brain-melting heatwaves and unprecedented OpenAI restrictions
Plus: The Trump administration has asked OpenAI to limit its next model release. Scientists are trying to figure out why. It's been hot in London this week. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western Europe. On Wednesday, the UK recorded its highest ever June temperature at 36.1 C (about 97 F). But as the weather app on my phone confirmed, it 39 C. Much of Western Europe is suffering, bringing awful consequences for agriculture, infrastructure, and the health system.
The Download: record-breaking subsea tunnels and flexible data centers
Plus: SK Hynix has overtaken Samsung as South Korea's most valuable company. I'm under the iconic fjords of Norway to visit what will soon become the world's longest and deepest subsea road tunnel--an exceptional engineering feat that will carry drivers deep beneath the North Sea. I'm here to understand how you make a 16.6-mile highway that sits 1,280 feet below the sea at its deepest point. And also--at a time when it can feel hard to get anything done--to reassure myself that ambitious engineering is still possible. That we can still make things. Step inside Norway's Rogfast tunnel and see how engineers are making it happen .
The Download: AI bottleneck debates, and BCI trials take off
Plus: Amazon workers who backed data center limits face potential termination. A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that's holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had held back large language models for almost a decade. The purported breakthrough comes from slashing the number of computations transformers need to carry out to generate answers. The result is a faster and cheaper LLM that uses far less energy than any other model on the market. Many experts remained skeptical--but Subquadratic has started to share the receipts. They suggest that their approach might be worth paying attention to.