AI for Science in 2026: One Phase III Trial, Two Operational Weather Models, and Erdős Proofs Nobody Wants to Read
What has actually been validated outside the lab that made the claim: rentosertib's Phase III start, ECMWF and NOAA running AI forecasts operationally, Evo 2's viable phage genomes, the Erdős-problem scoreboard and its rediscovery problem, the GNoME and MatterGen materials that turned out not to be new, and the licence and pip-install status of every open model an engineer can run this week.
16 minSep 9, 2026AI Power in 2026: 485 TWh, a 0.3 GW Stargate, a 116 GW Turbine Backlog, and 1,800 MW That Dropped Off the Grid in Seconds
The electricity numbers behind AI, kept honest: IEA's 485 TWh for 2025 and 950 by 2030, LBNL's 4.7 percent of US power heading to 12, what a prompt actually costs (0.24 Wh at Google, 30 times more in reasoning mode), which gigawatt campuses are energised versus announced (Stargate Abilene at 0.3 of 1.2 GW), where the power comes from (a 116 GW gas-turbine backlog with 2031 slots, nuclear restarts in 2027, one SMR construction permit), what the grid operators are doing about 233 GW queues and 1,800 MW load-loss events, rack power from 132 kW to 600 kW, and a script to measure your own job's energy.
14 minSep 8, 2026Open Weights in 2026: Chinese Labs Ship the Frontier, the Licenses Grew Clauses, and Brussels Started Enforcing
DeepSeek V4, Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, Qwen3.8 and Xiaomi's MiMo are the open frontier now; Meta went closed and came back; the licences quietly acquired revenue thresholds; the EU AI Office got its enforcement powers on 2 August. What I found when I read every licence file, with the Hugging Face API calls that check them.
16 minSep 8, 2026Robot Foundation Models in 2026: 500,000 Hours of Human Video, 50-Step Action Chunks, and a Winning Score of 0.26
What vision-language-action models actually do, from π0's flow-matching action head to Gemini Robotics 2 and GR00T N1.7; who shipped humanoids (Unitree 5,500, AgiBot 15,000) and who didn't (Tesla, zero); the teleoperation behind the demos; and the benchmark numbers that say a home robot is not close. With a LeRobot dataset I loaded this morning.
14 minSep 7, 2026Stablecoins in 2026: $300B in Supply, 1% Real Payments, and Rails Being Rebuilt for Agents
GENIUS Act rules are still proposals, Visa settles $7B a year in USDC, Stripe launched its own chain, and x402 has 165 million transactions worth about $50 million. An infrastructure engineer separates the settlement layer that is real from the agent-payments layer that is mostly still a demo.
16 minSep 7, 2026No-Code Didn't Die. It Sold for 2.7x ARR While Its Replacement Raised at 27x
Airtable sold to Bending Spoons for about a quarter of its 2021 valuation on $480M of growing revenue. Lovable raised at $13.3B on $500M. Flowise archived itself and said why. What the 2026 numbers say about visual builders, prompt-to-app tools and agentic automation, and where every generated app still breaks.
13 minSep 6, 2026Seats Are Dying. What the 2026 SaaS Repricing Looks Like From the Compute Layer
A one-day 18% drop in Thomson Reuters, $1.50 per resolution at Zendesk, $15 per human at Microsoft, and a vibe-coding company at $500M run-rate with 200 people. The unit of software changed this year. Here is what it did to infrastructure.
13 minSep 2, 2026What Scale to Zero Cost Me to Build: 50s Sleeps, 14s Wakes
Hibernate took 50 seconds. Wake took 14, not the 1.3 I had reported. The measured price of building scale to zero on a Firecracker fleet, and every fix.
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