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Papa Johns Is Getting Into Drone Delivery--but Not for Pizza

WIRED

A new collaboration with Alphabet's Wing will only deliver sandwiches. It demonstrates the tricky parts of taking to the sky. Starting today, eager customers of the US pizza restaurant chain Papa Johns living in one corner of southern North Carolina will have the opportunity to receive their food from the sky, thanks to a new collaboration with Alphabet's drone company, Wing . But Papa Johns' signature pizzas won't be on offer. Instead, drone-loving North Carolinians will have to choose between three kinds of sandwiches, a newer product for the fast-food chain: Philly cheesesteak, chicken bacon ranch, or steak and mushroom varieties.


Cyber-Insecurity in the AI Era

MIT Technology Review

Cybersecurity was already under strain before AI entered the stack. Now, as AI expands the attack surface and adds new complexity, the limits of legacy approaches are becoming harder to ignore. This session from MIT Technology Review's EmTech AI conference explores why security must be rethought with AI at its core, not layered on after the fact. A prolific inventor and internationally recognized authority in knowledge representation, inference calculus, and AI planning, Tarique has spent his career applying autonomously collaborative AI to solve complex, ultra-high-scale challenges across cybersecurity, data security, and compliance -- with deep expertise spanning Data Classification, DLP, and DSPM industries. His groundbreaking innovations and multiple USPTO patents have earned him global recognition, including frequent invitations to deliver keynote addresses at prestigious international security conferences and forums. At GCCybersecurity, Tarique architected the core AI algorithms powering the company's 4th and 5th generation fully autonomous data leak protection and exfiltration platform -- among the most advanced platform of its kind.


How Shivon Zilis Operated as Elon Musk's OpenAI Insider

WIRED

Messages presented at trial reveal how Zilis, the mother of four of Musk's children, acted as an intermediary between him and OpenAI. As the first week of trial in comes to a close, one person has emerged as a critical behind-the-scenes manager of communications and egos in OpenAI's early years: Shivon Zilis. A longtime employee of Musk and the mother to four of his children, Zilis first joined OpenAI as an advisor in 2016. She later served as a director of its nonprofit board from 2020 until 2023 and has also worked as an executive at Musk's other companies, Neuralink and Tesla. When asked about the nature of his relationship with Zilis in court, Musk offered several answers.


This startup's new mechanistic interpretability tool lets you debug LLMs

MIT Technology Review

This startup's new mechanistic interpretability tool lets you debug LLMs Goodfire wants to make training AI models more like good old-fashioned software engineering. The San Francisco-based startup Goodfire just released a new tool, called Silico, that lets researchers and engineers peer inside an AI model and adjust its parameters--the settings that determine a model's behavior --during training. This could give model makers more fine-grained control over how this technology is built than was once thought possible. Goodfire claims Silico is the first off-the-shelf tool of its kind that can help developers debug all stages of the development process, from building a data set to training a model. LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. The company says its mission is to make building AI models less like alchemy and more like a science.


Sanctioned Chinese AI Firm SenseTime Releases Image Model Built for Speed

WIRED

With US restrictions limiting its access to advanced tech, SenseTime is doubling down on open source with a new model optimized to run on Chinese-made chips. SenseTime, a Chinese AI company best known for its facial recognition technology, released a new open source model on Tuesday that it claims can both generate and interpret images far faster than top models developed by US competitors. SenseNova U1 could help the company reclaim lost ground after it slipped from its place among the leading players in China's AI development race. The model's secret sauce is its ability to "read" images without translating them to text first, speeding up the process and reducing the amount of computing power required. "The model's entire reasoning process is no longer limited to text. It can reason with images as well," Dahua Lin, cofounder and chief scientist at SenseTime, said in an interview with WIRED.


When Robots Have Their ChatGPT Moment, Remember These Pincers

WIRED

From sorting chicken nuggets to screwing in light bulbs, Eka's robots are eerily lifelike. But do they have real physical smarts? It starts gingerly pawing around the table, as if searching for its glasses on the nightstand. It gently positions the bulb between its two pincers. The claw goes chasing it across the table. After a few nips, the bulb is back in its grasp. In more than a decade of writing about robots, I have never seen one move so naturally.


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.


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.



SpaceX secures option to buy AI startup Cursor for 60bn or partner for 10bn

The Guardian

Elon Musk speaks at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition II in Hawthorne, California, in 2017. Elon Musk speaks at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition II in Hawthorne, California, in 2017. Cursor is a Silicon Valley startup using AI to automate coding as Elon Musk's firm seeks foothold in the AI market SpaceX said it has secured an option to either acquire code-generation startup Cursor for $60bn later this year, or pay $10bn for their new partnership, as it pushes deeper into the lucrative market for AI developer tools. Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that has drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, a business where AI companies have found early commercial traction. The deal could give xAI, the Grok chatbot maker that SpaceX merged with in February, a stronger foothold in the AI coding market where it has so far lagged rivals.