🗞️ THE WEEKEND RECAP
Top Stories You Might Have Missed
🥇 Sora Hits No. 1 on App Store: OpenAI’s invite-only video app soared to the top in the U.S., outpacing ChatGPT and Gemini with 164K installs in 2 days, despite limited access.
💼 Comet Browser Promises Fewer Hires: Perplexity CEO says their Comet AI browser can act as a “true personal assistant,” boosting worker productivity by up to 20%.
🗽 Microsoft Eyes AI Chip Independence: Microsoft plans to phase out reliance on NVIDIA by ramping up its own AI chips, aiming for full-stack control amid surging data center demand.
📈 Supabase Soars to $5B Valuation: Just four months after hitting $2B, open-source darling Supabase raised $100M more, fueling its rise as the go-to database for AI-driven coding tools.
🟡 OpenAI’s Jony Ive Hardware Project Stalls: Delays mount over compute shortages, software hurdles, and debates on its AI “personality.”
🎮 xAI Hiring Game Tutors for Grok: Elon Musk’s xAI is hiring video game tutors, paying up to $100 an hour, to train its Grok chatbot to build and understand video games.
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📽️ VIDEO
Sora 2 Is Unbelievable
Sora 2 lets you generate wild AI videos—celebrity battles, rap SpongeBob, retro games & more.
🛡️ DEFENSE
AI Arms Race Takes Flight: Startups Are Rebuilding the Defense Economy
Artificial intelligence and autonomous tech are redrawing the map of modern warfare, with start-ups like Helsing, Kraken, and Saronic fast-tracking innovations once dominated by defense giants. In Ukraine, AI-driven drones and $250K plug-and-play warships are already reshaping combat, as companies race to outmaneuver bureaucracy with rapid, venture-backed prototyping.
Helsing’s Centaur AI has even outflown human pilots in simulated dogfights, signaling a seismic shift in military capability. But amid the buzz, veterans warn: cutting-edge tech still has to clear the oldest battlefield of all—government procurement. → Read the full article here.
👾 FORWARD FUTURE ORIGINAL
A Case for Basic Income: Cash Works When We Measure the Right Thing
Recent claims that Universal Basic Income “doesn’t work” overlook critical context. Many modern pilots ran during the pandemic, when COVID-19, stimulus checks, and inflation distorted results—and most weren’t truly universal or long enough to reflect real-world UBI. When tested properly in saturation pilots from Alaska to Namibia, unconditional cash consistently improves health, education, employment, and stability.
Poverty, Scott Santens argues, is an income problem, not a character flaw—and cash remains the most direct, evidence-backed solution. The null results critics cite reflect a chaotic moment in history, not UBI’s potential. The verdict is in: UBI isn’t dead—it’s proven, and waiting on political will. → Read the full article here.
🔮 AI'S FUTURE
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Boom a Bubble, But Says the Payoff Will Be “Gigantic”
Jeff Bezos said artificial intelligence is in an “industrial bubble,” with excitement and capital flooding the space so quickly that both good and bad ideas are being heavily funded, including “six-person companies getting billions.” Speaking at Italian Tech Week, the Amazon founder said this frenzy mirrors past booms where valuations detached from business fundamentals, but he cautioned that such bubbles often accompany real technological revolutions.
Bezos argued that, despite the hype, AI is “real” and will “change every industry,” calling it one of the most transformative technologies of the century. Drawing parallels to the 1990s biotech bubble, he said even when speculative excess fades, society benefits from the breakthroughs that survive — predicting that the eventual outcome of the AI surge will be “gigantic” gains for humanity.→ Read the full article here.
🦾 ROBOTICS
RHATA V1.0: Introducing a New Benchmark for Household Robots
A community member created a methodology for grading humanoid robots on 103 household tasks. Even Tesla’s Optimus only scored 7%. While still in the early stages of testing, it’s a reminder of how early we really are. → Read the paper here.
🔬 RESEARCH
Interpolating Neural Networks Promise Faster, Leaner Scientific Computing
A new class of neural networks is bridging machine learning and classical interpolation theory to tackle the high cost and complexity of scientific simulations. Researchers introduced the Interpolating Neural Network (INN), a scalable, data-efficient architecture that dramatically outpaces traditional PDE solvers and physics-informed models.
In metal 3D printing tests, INNs hit sub-10-micron resolution in minutes—5 to 8 orders of magnitude faster than rivals—on a single GPU. By embedding interpolation and tensor decomposition into neural networks, this hybrid model could be a cornerstone of sustainable, next-gen engineering tools. → Read the full paper here.
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Matthew Berman & The Forward Future Team
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