This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 31)

Future

It’s Not Your Imagination: AI Is Speeding Up the Pace of ChangeJulie Bort | TechCrunch

“Venture capitalist Mary Meeker just dropped a 340-page slideshow report—which used the word ‘unprecedented’ on 51 of those pages—to describe the speed at which AI is being developed, adopted, spent on, and used, backed up with chart after chart.”

Computing

Quebec Startup Shows Progress Toward Practical Quantum ComputingIvan Semeniuk | The Globe and Mail

“The company has successfully used one of its own quantum devices to encode a form of error detection for the first time. Bigger players, including Google, Microsoft Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., are working on the same problem as they seek to advance their own quantum systems. What’s different about Nord Quantique is that the hardware doing the checking is the same hardware doing the calculating.”

ROBOTICS

Want a Humanoid, Open Source Robot for Just $3,000? Hugging Face Is on It.Samuel Axon | Ars Technica

“Dubbed the HopeJR, Hugging Face’s robot has up to 66 actuated degrees of freedom. According to Hugging Face Principal Research Scientist Remi Cadene, it can walk and manipulate objects. As shown in a short X video, it has an accessible look that reminds us a bit of Bender from ‘Futurama.’ (It’s the eyes.).”

Energy

Quaise Demos Drill Bit That Will Go Deeper Than Humans Have Ever GoneJoe Salas | New Atlas

“The plan is to tap into Earth’s spicy deep layers like they’re a bottomless well of clean energy. Quaise wants to drill deeper and hotter than anything humans have ever attempted to do before—depths over 12 miles (20 km) below the surface, where Quaise expects temperatures to reach nearly 1,000 °F (500 °C).”

Artificial Intelligence

Less Is More: Meta Study Shows Shorter Reasoning Improves AI Accuracy by 34%Michael Nuñez | VentureBeat

“The research contradicts the prevailing trend in AI development, where companies have invested heavily in scaling up computing resources to allow models to perform extensive reasoning through lengthy ‘thinking chains’—detailed step-by-step trajectories that AI systems use to solve complex problems.”

Computing

Energy Dept. Unveils Supercomputer That Merges With AIDon Clark | The New York Times

“The system will use Nvidia chips tailored for AI calculations and the simulations common to energy research and other scientific fields. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory expects the new machine—to be named for Jennifer Doudna, a Berkeley biochemist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for chemistry—to offer more than a tenfold speed boost over the lab’s most powerful current system.”

Future

This Giant Microwave May Change the Future of WarSam Dean | MIT Technology Review

“Of course, this isn’t magic—there are practical limits on how much damage one array can do, and at what range—but the total effect could be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a death ray for electronics, or a force field that could set up a protective barrier around military installations and drop drones the way a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes.”

Artificial Intelligence

We Made a Film With AI. You’ll Be Blown Away—and Freaked Out.Joanna Stern | The Wall Street Journal

“How hard could it be? Very hard. Over a thousand clips, days of work and who knows how much data-center computing power later, we ended up with a three-minute film—about my life with a new kind of efficiency robot. Even if you don’t care about camera angles or storyboards, you might care about what this says about using AI in any job.”

Tech

The Downsides of Vibe CodingJon Victor | The Information

“Some businesses are waking up to the downsides of automated coding products. While most customers cite huge gains in developer productivity from tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Anthropic’s Claude, the code they generate sometimes doesn’t work as expected—or worse, it can make a business vulnerable to hacking or a data leak.”

SpaceX May Have Solved One Problem Only to Find More on Latest Starship FlightStephen Clark | Ars Technica

“SpaceX’s ninth Starship survived launch, but engineers now have more problems to overcome. …And the longer they have to wait, the longer the wait for other important Starship developmental tests, such as a full orbital flight, in-space refueling, and recovery and reuse of the ship itself, replicating what SpaceX has now accomplished with the Super Heavy booster.”

Tech

This Temporary E-Tattoo Is Like a Mood Ring for Your FaceEd Cara | Gizmodo

“Ever wondered exactly how much your job is stressing you out? Scientists have developed a temporary forehead tattoo that could one day give you the answer.”

Tech

Google’s New AI-Powered Search Has Arrived. Proceed With Caution.Brian X. Chen | The New York Times

“To help assess whether AI is the future of search, I tested the new tool against traditional Google searches for a multitude of personal tasks over the last week, including shopping for a toddler car seat, preparing for a Memorial Day barbecue, and understanding the plot twists of a popular video game.”

Computing

3D Is Back. This Time, You Can Ditch the GlassesLuke Larsen | Wired

“If there’s one thing that turns people off from adopting new tech, it’s being forced to look silly and feel uncomfortable for extended lengths of time. …Laptops, tablets, and even computer monitors have started embracing a new form of 3D technology that solves this problem entirely, without giving up just how compelling 3D can look.”