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Received — 11 July 2026 ⏭

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 11)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
11 July 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

Khosla-Backed Startup Claims Breakthrough With Largest-Ever AI Model on an iPhoneAaron Tilley | The Information ($)

“The largest AI models, which can measure in the trillions of parameters, are still far too big to run on mobile devices. But the model PrismML has working on an iPhone is capable of tasks like complex chat, reasoning, fully autonomous agents and software coding, the startup said.”

Robotics

Humanoid Robots Controlled by Surgeons Did World-First Operation on Live PigsJeremy Hsu | Ars Technica

“Humanoid robots have surgically removed the gallbladders from living animals in an unprecedented medical experiment—but not as autonomous machines capable of replacing human doctors. Instead, skilled human surgeons remotely controlled the robots’ movements in a new example of human-robot teamups.”

Biotechnology

mRNA Vaccines Clear Sweeping Global Review of Safety and EffectivenessBronwyn Thompson | Refractor

“An international team…reviewed data from laboratory studies, clinical trials, and real-world statistics to fully investigate this relatively novel class of vaccine, from design and manufacturing to its long-term performance. ‘After billions of doses, we now have an extraordinary amount of scientific evidence,’ says lead author Dr. Anna Blakney, assistant professor at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories and School of Biomedical Engineering.”

Tech

Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX Are Bigger Than the Last 25 Years of Tech ExitsRussell Brandom | TechCrunch

“SpaceX has already gone public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, and with both Anthropic and OpenAI pushing into the trillions it’s likely the trio together will land somewhere north of $4 trillion. By comparison, the US Securities and Exchange Commission counted just $70 billion in US-based IPO proceeds last year.”

Biotechnology

11% of Americans Are Currently Taking a GLP-1 Weight Loss Drug Like WegovyMatt Novak | Gizmodo

“Gallup notes that obesity reached a record high in the US in 2022 at 39.9% but has ticked down to 36.4%, according to the latest data based on self-reported height and weight. That dip has been credited to the large number of Americans now using GLP-1 drugs.”

Tech

The Mistrust of AI Labs Bubbles OverLiz Hoffman | Semafor

“Forward-deployed engineers, dispatched by AI labs to help customers implement their models, will come back to the mother ship with a deep understanding of how banks, consulting firms, retailers, manufacturers, and consultants operate. That customer support, to a suspicious eye, looks a lot like reconnaissance.”

Future

Microsoft’s Carbon Emissions Went Up 25 Percent Last YearStevie Bonifield | The Verge

“Microsoft says this was ‘driven primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure,’ as well as the company’s decision last February to stop purchasing ‘non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates.'”

Tech

China’s Answer to AI Sticker ShockMatteo Wong | The Atlantic ($)

“Having successfully persuaded corporate America to give their products a try, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are now struggling to prove that their tools are worth the money. …While it’s too soon to know whether GLM-5.2 is really capable of replacing America’s top-tier AI agents, any firm or developer who is balking at the costs now might have an alternative.”

Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic Found a Hidden Space Where Claude Puzzles Over ConceptsWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)

“The J-space contains individual words that are related to the words and phrases that the model is most likely to spit out in a response in the near future. If Claude were a person (which it is not), you might say that these hidden words can reveal what’s on its mind before it actually speaks.”

Artificial Intelligence

Hackers Can Use 9 of the Most Popular AI Tools to Assemble Massive BotnetsDan Goodin | Ars Technica

“A new attack the researchers have named HalluSquatting has the potential to assemble massive botnets, perform large-scale DDoSes, and infect devices at scale, a first for prompt-injection attacks. The attack works against AI coding assistants and agents, including Cursor, Cursor CLI, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, Cline, OpenClaw, ZeroClaw, and NanoClaw, which are all susceptible.”

Future

UN Secretary-General Seeks Ban on AI WeaponsTom Chivers | Semafor

“The UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a ban on ‘killer robots,’ saying the decision to take life ‘must remain forever human.’ …Guterres called AI-controlled weapons ‘morally repugnant,’ although not all ethicists agree: One roboticist argues they are more discriminate in their killing than scared human soldiers, while a philosopher said in 2022 that using robots will prevent young men and women bearing ‘the moral burden’ of wars.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 11) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 27 June 2026 ⏭

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 27)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
27 June 2026 at 14:00

Computing

IBM Has Unveiled Chip Technology That Could Help Extend Moore’s Law Another DecadeSophia Chen | MIT Technology Review ($)

“To fit more transistors on a chip, engineers across the industry are eyeing a pivot to an approach familiar to urban planners: build up. On Thursday, IBM announced it has created a chip that uses this strategy. The new architecture, known as a nanostack, vertically stacks transistors in two layers on a silicon chip.”

Artificial Intelligence

AI Is Designing Radio Chips That Humans Couldn’t Even ImagineKaushik Sengupta | IEEE Spectrum

“Some of the…chips look more like modern art than circuit layouts. Yet in many cases, the physical prototypes bested state-of-the art circuits in terms of performance. The real achievement, however, is that it took the AI orders of magnitude less time to conceive a working design than it would a human designer.”

Science

A Dark Dimension Could Link Two of the Universe’s Great UnknownsSteve Nadis | Quanta Magazine

“Even though scientists have assumed that dark energy and dark matter ‘don’t have anything to do with each other,’ said Tim Tait, a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, ‘you can imagine a case where one influences the other. And it would not be surprising if [they] were manifestations of a kind of unified theory of the dark universe.'”

Biotechnology

New Effort Will Get Genome Sequences for Entire Endangered Species ListJohn Timmer | Ars Technica

“Over 2,300 plant and animal populations remain on the [endangered species] list, requiring ongoing government intervention. On Thursday, it was announced that all of those species would see their genomes sequenced and tissue samples preserved to aid future conservation efforts.”

Future

AI Was Supposed to Kill Engineering Jobs, but New Data Suggests They’re the Most ResilientMarina Temkin | TechCrunch

“Software engineering, in theory, is the professional field most vulnerable to automation, given the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools. However, researchers at venture firm SignalFire say the hiring data tells a different story. ‘The rationale given for lots of layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically they’ll say AI with respect to code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job of however many engineers in the past,’ said Asher Bantock, SignalFire’s head of research. ‘What we’re seeing on the ground is a little inconsistent with that.'”

Computing

This Flying Solar-Powered Platform Could Deliver Better Internet From the AirRachel Courtland | MIT Technology Review ($)

“As soon as August, a giant silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to reach the coast of Japan. Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the New Mexico–based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean’s surface, in a wispy-thin layer known as the stratosphere. Then it will use a custom-built antenna to supplement Softbank’s 5G network, a test that will include beaming data straight to devices.”

Computing

A New Paper Argues Microsoft Exaggerated Its Quantum Claims a Year AgoSophia Chen | The Verge

“A critique published in Nature Wednesday calls the basic technology behind Microsoft’s ‘breakthrough’ quantum computing chip the Majorana 1 into question. …In a peer-reviewed article, Henry Legg, a physicist at the University of St. Andrews, reanalyzed Microsoft’s data on their device and argued that the company’s researchers did not conclusively demonstrate a working topological qubit in the first place.”

Artificial Intelligence

The AI World Is Getting ‘Loopy’Russell Brandom | TechCrunch

“‘Two years ago, we wrote source code by hand. We started to transition so agents write the code. And now we’re transitioning to the point where agents are prompting agents that then write the code,’ [said Claude Code creator Boris Cherny]. ‘As big as the step from source code to agents was, loops are just as important and as big a step.'”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 27) appeared first on SingularityHub.

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