Meta Buys AI Startup Manus =
for More Than $2 Billion (4 minute read)
Meta has agreed to acquire Manus, a Sin=
gapore-based company that conducts deep research and performs tasks for pay=
ing users. Meta will continue to operate and sell Manus' services while int=
egrating it into its suite of social media products. The deal will help Met=
a cement its position in the product segment of AI agents. It is one of the=
first times a major US tech company has bought a startup with Chinese root=
s.
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Nvidia spends $5B on Intel =
bailout, instantly gets $2.5B richer (4 minute read)
Nvidia locked in a purchase price of $2=
3.28 per share for Intel when the companies struck a deal in September. The=
deal had been under scrutiny by the US Federal Trade Commission, but was t=
hen greenlighted on December 18. The purchase of 214 million shares closed =
on December 26, and Intel shares closed Monday at $36.68, making Nvidia's $=
5 billion purchase worth $7.58 billion. The deal will involve the companies=
jointly developing multiple generations of chips for datacenters and PCs.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Researchers make =E2=80=9Cn=
euromorphic=E2=80=9D artificial skin for robots (5 minute read)
Chinese researchers have created an art=
ificial robotic skin that can sense pressure and locate input and injuries.=
The neuromorphic robotic e-skin (NRE-skin) is assembled from a collection =
of segments that snap together using magnetic interlocks, automatically lin=
king up any necessary wiring. Each segment broadcasts a unique identity cod=
e, so it is relatively easy to pop out the damaged segment and replace it w=
ith fresh hardware if the system identifies damage.
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Clinic-in-the-Loop (16 minu=
te read)
Biomedical progress has become less pro=
ductive for the last several years despite staggering advances in basic sci=
ence. One of the reasons for this is that institutional bureaucracy has bec=
ome harder to overcome. Increasing the number and efficiency of clinical tr=
ials would help create a faster feedback loop and result in better data to =
inform models and ideas. This could help decrease the cost of bringing new =
drugs to market and break a trend that has held since the 1950s.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Welcome to the Machine, a g=
uide to building infra software for AI agents (20 minute read)
The primary users of infrastructure sof=
tware are rapidly shifting from developers to AI agents. AI uses systems ve=
ry differently from how developers do, and it changes many long-held assump=
tions about how databases should be used. Many things developers took for g=
ranted need rethinking. The focus of engineers is shifting from perfected i=
ndividual systems to designing foundational capabilities that AI can use at=
scale, iterate on, and run cheaply.
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Clopus-Watcher: An autonomo=
us monitoring agent (8 minute read)
AI will likely make 24/7 on-call a thin=
g of the past. 24/7 monitoring is a lot simpler than the development proces=
s. There are often reference documents that engineers can follow to bring s=
ystems back up, and if they fail, there's always a backup and recovery plan=
in place. On-call jobs have always been more systematic. This post introdu=
ces an autonomous monitoring agent that does what an on-call engineer would=
do, but autonomously, forever.
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Capital in the 22nd Century=
(58 minute read)
Labor and capital have traditionally co=
mplemented each other. While wealthy people can keep accumulating capital, =
it becomes less valuable when there aren't enough hands to use all of it, a=
nd hands grow more valuable when capital is plentiful. However, this correc=
tion mechanism breaks in the world of advanced robotics and AI. A global an=
d highly progressive tax on capital (or at least capital income) may be the=
only way to prevent inequality from growing extreme.
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2025 in Review: Jagged Inte=
lligence Becomes a Fault Line (10 minute read)
The immediate AI risk comes from people=
overestimating AI's capabilities. A lack of reliability and trust is preve=
nting wide adoption. There is a growing AI perception gap between quantitat=
ive users and qualitative users. AI leaders aren't even attempting to expla=
in how AI works because it's complicated, and they're also incentivized to =
oversimplify and overpromise.
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