The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.

Gay men have long been rumored to run Silicon Valley. No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have dominated its upper ranks at least the past five years, maybe more. On platforms like X, the clues are there: whispers of private-island retreats, tech executives going "gay for clout," and the suggestion that a "seed round" is not, strictly speaking, a financial term. It is an idea so taken for granted, in fact, that when I call up a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his thoughts about what is sometimes referred to in industry circles as the "gay tech mafia," he audibly yawns. "This has always been the case." It had been the case, the hedge funder says, back in 2012, when he was raising money from a venture capitalist whose office was staffed with dozens of "attractive, strong young men," all of whom were "under 30" and looked as though they had freshly decamped from "the high school debate club." "They were all sleeping with each other and starting companies," he says. And it is absolutely the case now, he adds, when gay men are running influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with scarcely a straight man, much less a woman, in sight. "Of course the gay tech mafia exists," he continues. "This is not some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you do not have to be gay to join. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more." Ever since I started covering Silicon Valley in 2017, I've heard variations of this rumor--that "gays," as an AI founder named Emmett Chen-Ran has quipped, "run this joint." On its face, a gay tech mafia seemed too dumb to warrant actual investigative inquiry.

WIRED spoke with the Zoomer founders of a platform where AI agents hire humans to do real-world tasks. Their pitch: People would love to have a clanker as their boss. For centuries, people have catastrophized about robots taking away jobs. On February 1, the paradigm shifted: bots are jobs. Now, 518,284 humans--and rapidly counting--are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman . There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn't do.

Will the Gulf's push for its own AI succeed? That, and US tech giants' plans to spend more than $600bn this year alone. Can the Gulf states capture some of the US's tech dominance for themselves? I spent most of last week in Doha at the Web Summit Qatar, the Gulf's new version of the popular annual tech conference. One theme stood out among the speeches I watched and the conversations I had: sovereignty.

The recruitment website is jazzy, awash with pictures of happy young workers, and festooned with upbeat mini-slogans such as insane speed, infinite curiosity and customer obsession. Read a bit lower, and there are promises of perks galore: competitive compensation, free meals, free gym membership, free health and dental care and so on. But then comes the catch. Each job ad contains a warning: Please don't join if you're not excited about working ~70 hrs/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC. The website belongs to Rilla, a New York-based tech business which sells AI-based systems that allow employers to monitor sales representatives when they are out and about, interacting with clients. The company has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.

Founders used to be wedded to their companies. Now, anyone can be lured away for the right price. Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI "acqui-hires" in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and fold its cofounders and research teams into DeepMind; and Nvidia wagered $20 billion on Groq's inference technology and hired its CEO and other staffers. The frontier AI labs, meanwhile, have been playing a high stakes and seemingly never-ending game of talent musical chairs.

The new book explores the uneasy relationship between Chinese internet users and a government that is always watching. Let's play a game of two truths and a lie. Of the three following statements, which one would you guess is made up? China was once home to the world's largest gay dating app with more users than Grindr, and it later went public on Nasdaq. The app's founder was a Chinese police officer who didn't come out at work until after he had been running an online forum for gay men for a decade.

Signal's Founder Built a Chatbot That Can't Spy on You Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? What to Know: Signal's founder is working on encrypted chatbots Moxie Marlinspike, the cryptographic prodigy who wrote the code that underpins Signal and WhatsApp, has a new project--and it could be one of the most important things happening in AI right now. The tool, named Confer, is an end-to-end encrypted AI assistant. It uses smart math to ensure that even though the compute-intensive process of running the AI still happens on a server in the cloud, the only person who can access the unscrambled details of that computation is you, the user.

Elon Musk sits ahead of Google's co-founder Larry Page and the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, in the overall rankings of the world's wealthiest billionaire. Elon Musk sits ahead of Google's co-founder Larry Page and the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, in the overall rankings of the world's wealthiest billionaire. Elon Musk's net worth increased by nearly 50% to $645bn with founders of Google and Amazon also seeing huge wealth gains Fri 26 Dec 2025 08.42 ESTLast modified on Fri 26 Dec 2025 21.30 EST A stock market boom in artificial intelligence companies has added more than half a trillion dollars to the wealth of America's tech barons in the past year, data shows. The top 10 US founders and bosses of some of the world's largest technology companies saw their finances swell to nearly $2.5tn, up from $1.9tn, in the year to Christmas Eve, according to figures from Bloomberg. Elon Musk, already the world's richest man, has again proved to be one of biggest winners as the AI gold-rush has pushed US stock markets to record highs.