Remarkable 35
A new collection of remarkable stories
A self-improving superintelligence would trigger an intelligence explosion and signal the end of the human era. The AI singularity, as it is known, has been forecast since the dawn of the computing age, with debate ramping up since the arrival of ChatGPT and the wider boom of generative AI. Predictions for when the singularity might happen have ranged from renowned technologist Ray Kurzweil’s 2045 forecast, based on Moore’s Law – an observation about the rapid pace of technological development – to the more pressing timeline of 2027 set by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. But according to Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, it is already here. Speaking on a podcast this week, he said: “We are now, like, in the singularity, like, this is the moment.”
Are we already in the AI singularity?
If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history. With it you need no armies of typists and artists to spread your propaganda. It can enable mass surveillance and thereby put shackles on those who seek to resist you. Its lethal autonomous weapons systems can perfect and normalise remote killing. It will turbocharge inequality; it is already facilitating a breathtaking shift of power and wealth from the hands of the many to the hands of a tiny number of men who – to put it in terms for which I can’t be sued – seem to hold dangerously damaged views about the value and dignity of human life.
OpenAI on Thursday announced it is slashing the price of two of its latest artificial intelligence models, GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-5.6 Luna, roughly three weeks after their public release. The company is facing pressure to cater to a more cost-sensitive customer base, where enterprises have been less inclined to deploy expensive models without a clear picture of the return on their investments. It’s also working to fend off competition from Chinese startups and tech giants Google and Microsoft, which have been touting cost-effective models.
OpenAI launched three models as part of its GPT-5.6 series, including Sol, the most powerful offering, Terra, the mid-tier model, and Luna, its fastest offering. The company said Thursday that it’s reducing the price of Terra by 20% to $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens. It’s cutting the cost of Luna by 80% to 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. Sol’s pricing remains the same.
OpenAI cuts prices for two of its GPT-5.6 AI models as companies grow sensitive to costs
I have been really getting into running LLMs locally lately, and it has honestly become one of my newest hobbies. There are tons of cool things you can do once you get a local AI server set up. But one thing I keep noticing is that people get stuck before they even get started. Choosing your first model is the part that trips everyone up. But once you understand what you’re looking at, it becomes really easy.
Picking your first local LLM is easier than the internet makes it sound
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this month, Xi Jinping pitched China’s open-source AI as a global public good and promised training, infrastructure and co-operation for developing countries – all at a lower price than the costly models produced by the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. China is way ahead of the West when it comes to AI in the physical world and outside of a chat window. The International Federation of Robotics says China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, more than half of all the new robots installed worldwide that year, and now has more than 2 million working in its factories.
Responding to the needs of a changing world, China has also dramatically withdrawn or retooled the number of courses it offers students at university, pausing enrolment on 2,220 programmes and slashing another 1,428 entirely from its 62,800 undergraduate programmes in 2024. It also added 1,839 new programmes that year. Those new courses are specialising in what China sees as the educational requirements of the future: AI, integrated circuits, the digital economy, biotechnology, new energy and other sectors Beijing sees as strategically important.
China is preparing its citizens for AI upheaval in ways the West can only dream of
Fecal transplants - dubbed “poop pills” - from people without food allergies have proven to help people with peanut allergies tolerate the nuts months later, a small but groundbreaking new clinical trial of 15 adults shows. “This landmark study was the first to demonstrate that a microbiome-based therapy may improve food allergy in people while also revealing how gut bacteria, their metabolites and the immune system work together to influence treatment response,”
‘Poop pills’ transplant might be the answer in curing food allergies, scientists find
Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little Saigon and came upon a montage of human despair. An open-air drug market stretched along the intersection of 12th and Jackson: about 250 people, many smoking fentanyl or bent over in the thrall of the drug, tilting as if mid-fall. Three women lay passed out on the sidewalk, their chests slowly rising and falling, while fellow addicts stepped over them and dealers made sales. Young boys, schoolbags on their backs, stood on a far corner and watched.
The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs
Almost 1 billion people worldwide are living with obesity, and unhealthy diets are one of the main drivers of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Ultra-processed food (UPF) consumption is soaring and now makes up half the average diet in many countries, including the UK, the US and Australia. Governments around the world, waking up to the health and economic impacts of the obesity crisis, have begun introducing measures designed to curb junk-food intake and promote healthier diets. These include front-of-pack warning labels, marketing and advertising restrictions on unhealthy products, and taxes on junk food.
Publicly, the world’s biggest UPF companies insist they back the policies, want to help consumers make informed choices and are committed to being part of the solution. But an investigation by the Guardian, in collaboration with academics, the non-profit newsroom Lighthouse Reports and a coalition of media partners across four continents, found many of these same companies were taking governments to court to overturn, weaken or delay the policies. In total, 235 lawsuits were lodged over health policies targeting UPFs in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US and the UK from 2010 to 2025, the investigation found.
Ultra-processed food companies hindering health drives by suing countries, says WHO
One of the most persistent misconceptions about the current rally is that investors have simply been paying more for the same earnings. The Putnam report challenges that view with a set of data points that are difficult to dismiss or explain away. Roughly a year ago, consensus estimates for S&P 500 earnings stood at about $265 a share. Those estimates have since risen to nearly $340, representing a jump of close to 30% in just over twelve months of revised forecasts. During that same stretch, the index climbed from about 6,000 to more than 7,400 while the forward price-to-earnings multiple contracted. Earnings growth, not speculative enthusiasm, has been the primary engine propelling this rally forward over the past year, the report concluded.
The biggest myth about the S&P 500 run just got debunked
Iran’s strategy to counter military might with economic pain has exposed a vulnerability in one of the world’s most vital interests: AI data centers. Iran has aimed significant firepower at its neighbors’ refineries, oil exports and tourist attractions, inflicting economic havoc on the Gulf states and the countries that do business with them. Now data centers, which power the technology most crucial to the global economy’s future, are becoming targets. Iran has bombarded several of its neighbors’ data centers, and the United States responded by attacking one of Iran’s. Data centers have long been cyberattack targets, but physical attacks are unique to 2026. It’s a reckoning for governments that view AI as crucial to their national security and economic growth — and for an industry that has gone all in on building expensive data centers across the planet.
AI data centers have become sitting ducks in the Iran war
Immortality is generally considered the realm of the gods or science fiction, a fantasy that’s actively pursued by tech entrepreneurs in macabre experiments that include injecting “young blood”, cryopreservation, or resurrection in an AI afterlife. But one ethereal, thimble-shaped jellyfish has already cracked the code. As associate professor Maria Pia Miglietta, a marine biologist at A&M University, explains, Turritopsis dohrnii has an incredible ability to cheat death.
‘When you kill it, it doesn’t die’: the jellyfish that has cracked the secret of immortality
China has planted an estimated 66 billion trees since 1978 as part of the Three-North Shelterbelt Program, the afforestation effort more commonly known as the Great Green Wall, built to slow the advance of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts across the country’s north. A study published this year adds a specific and somewhat counterintuitive finding to that record: measured by satellite, the planted sections of that forest are increasing their leaf cover faster than China’s naturally occurring forests.