Alex Bores, a Democrat from New York vying for a House seat, during a'Get Out The Vote' rally on the first day of early voting for a primary election in New York City. Alex Bores, a Democrat from New York vying for a House seat, during a'Get Out The Vote' rally on the first day of early voting for a primary election in New York City. New York City House primary emerges as key battleground in'AI civil war' T he artificial intelligence industry is spending heavily in the 2026 midterms, hoping to secure influence over the technology's first generation of legislation - and New York City's primary has emerged as the key battleground. AI-focused Super Pacs have raised over $100m this cycle, of which $49m has been spent so far, in dozens of congressional races across the country. Half of all spending has converged on a single Manhattan race: Tuesday's Democratic primary in the district of NY-12.

The sequential nature of autoregressive next-token prediction imposes a fundamental speed limit on large language models. While continuous flow models offer a path to parallel generation, they traditionally demand expensive iterative integration. Flow Maps bypass this bottleneck by compressing generative trajectories into single-step mappings, theoretically enabling the generation of full text sequences from noise in a single forward pass. However, standard formulations rely on Euclidean regression losses that are geometrically ill-suited for discrete data. In this work, we resolve this conflict with Discrete Flow Maps, a framework that reconciles trajectory compression with the geometry of the probability simplex. We recast standard flow map training for the discrete domain, aligning the training dynamics with the discrete nature of language. Empirically, this strict geometric alignment allows our method to surpass previous state-of-the-art results in discrete flow modeling.

Silicon Valley's battle against AI regulation is already shaping the next US election cycle. Silicon Valley is already pouring tens of millions of dollars into the midterm elections taking place across the US in 2026, as the tech industry's war over AI regulation moves decisively into American politics. Technology executives, investors, and companies tied to the AI boom are funding a new network of AI-focused super PACS, which is poised to make AI a major issue in this year's state and federal elections races. The election spending marks a sharp escalation of the AI regulation debate that has divided Silicon Valley for years. In the absence of federal action, state lawmakers in New York, California, and Colorado have passed laws in the past year requiring large AI developers to disclose safety practices and assess risks such as algorithmic discrimination.

After Julia Dixon graduated from the University of Michigan in 2014, her family and friends asked for her help with the college application process. Dixon was happy to share her recently earned expertise about the world of higher education but soon realized how many parents and students in her community needed help and how hard it was for them to access that support. The ratio of college counselors to students in the US, according to the American School Counselor Association, is one for every 376 students. Many students don't have proper access to a college counselor to help them with admissions or pick which schools and areas of study might suit them best. Hiring a private college counselor is an option, but that can cost thousands of dollars.

Berkeley experts in artificial intelligence are studying how things like ChatGPT will transform everything from admissions screening and research to writing college essays. It passed the bar exam, first with a mediocre score and then with a ranking among the top tier of newly minted lawyers. It scored better than 90% of SAT takers. It nearly aced the verbal section of the GRE -- though it has room for improvement with AP Composition. In the months since the machine-learning interface ChatGPT debuted, hundreds of headlines and hot-takes have whirled about how artificial intelligence will overhaul everything from health care and business to legal affairs and shopping.

IN 1992, THE poet Anne Carson published a little book called Short Talks. It's a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects--orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicuña. Her "Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff" is what it sounds like. Her "Short Talk on Trout" is mostly about the types of trout that appear in haiku. In what passes for the book's introduction, Carson writes, with dry Canadian relatability, "I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime."

In 1992, the poet Anne Carson published a little book called Short Talks. It's a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects--orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicuña. Her "Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff" is what it sounds like. Her "Short Talk on Trout" is mostly about the types of trout that appear in haiku. In what passes for the book's introduction, Carson writes, with dry Canadian relatability, "I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime."

Nearly two-thirds of Americans want the U.S to regulate the development and use of artificial intelligence in the next year or sooner -- with half saying that regulation should have begun yesterday, according to a Morning Consult poll. Another 13% say that regulation should start in the next year. "You can thread this together," Austin Carson, founder of new nonprofit group SeedAI and former government relations lead for Nvidia, said in an email. "Half or more Americans want to address all of these things, split pretty evenly along ideological lines." The poll, which SeedAI commissioned, backs up earlier findings that while U.S. adults support investment in the development of AI, they want clear rules around that development.

Writing on the 50th Earth Day brings to mind the origins of U.S. environmental movement. DDT is, of course, Bis(4-chlorophenyl)- 1,1,1-trichloroethane, perhaps the most effective insecticide ever invented. DDT was used widely with remarkable effectiveness in the 1940s and 1950s to combat malaria, typhus, and the other insect-borne human diseases. Its efficacy was unsurpassed in insect control for crop and livestock production, and even villages and homes. In short, it was a wonder chemical.7

Public transport forms the backbone of any urban mobility system, enabling cities to be more dynamic and competitive while creating more jobs. However, most cities' public bus systems are hemorrhaging riders in recent years due to slow speeds compared to options such as ridesharing services. Not to mention the continuously rising threats of transit agency budget cuts, traffic congestion and public safety. Hayden AI – a company creating smart city solutions purposely built for modern traffic conditions and increased urbanization – asking the question, What can we do to reverse this? The answer isn't bulking up on traffic enforcement, but rather, to enable smarter, more scalable enforcement.