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After writing about Patrick Stewart last week I kept thinking about Star Trek, and about why that show still sits with me so many years later. It was never only about the ship or the warp drive. What kept me watching, and what keeps bringing me back now, was the writing. Some of those episodes are small philosophical essays dressed up as sci-fi. The one that comes up first is The Inner Light. A probe hits the Enterprise and Picard collapses on the bridge. Inside his head he wakes up on another planet, in another body, as a man called Kamin, with a wife named Eline who tells him he has been sick with a fever that took his memory. He does not accept it. He is Jean-Luc Picard, captain of a starship, and this village is not his life. He measures the room. He looks for proof the whole thing is an illusion. He is cold with Eline for a long time. Then at some point he stops fighting, and starts living. ...

Patrick Stewart has died. The actor who gave shape to one of my childhood heroes, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard. I grew up with Star Trek. I grew up dreaming of space at a time when there were barely any communications. Making an international call was an event. And at the same time, on Sunday afternoons, I was watching a ship where people talked to the computer and the computer talked back. They spoke to it like it was a person. They carried things around on pads that looked like notebooks. There were screens everywhere. ...

The FT just published an investigation into a tool called Heretic. It’s free, sits on GitHub, requires no specialist hardware, and strips the safety guardrails off open-weight AI models in under ten minutes. Since its release late last year, it has been used to produce more than 3,500 decensored models, downloaded over 13 million times. The creator stripped safeguards from Google’s Gemma 4 within 90 minutes of its release. ...

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, was released on May 25. It is entirely about artificial intelligence. The Pope issues encyclicals rarely, and the choice of subject for a first one is a deliberate signal. Dedicating it to AI tells you how seriously the Catholic Church is taking what is coming. Leo frames AI as the Industrial Revolution of our time, with the same potential to reshape labour, dignity, and the structure of society. The encyclical leans on two biblical metaphors: the Tower of Babel for unchecked technological ambition, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls for collaborative human effort. Its core position is that technology is never neutral. It carries the values of whoever builds, funds, and deploys it. ...

Nvidia announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot at GTC Taipei. It’s an open hardware and software stack for academic research, built around the Unitree H2 Plus chassis, dual Sharpa Wave tactile hands, multi-view sensing, and a Jetson AGX Thor T5000 onboard. The software side is the full Isaac suite: Teleop for data capture, Sim and Lab for training, open foundation models, ROS middleware, and on-device inference via Jetson Thor. Partner institutions include Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and UC San Diego. Available late 2026 from Unitree. ...

There is a quiet but very expensive bet being made across the AI compute layer right now, and I think it deserves more scrutiny than it is getting. The bet is that the best way to handle the growing demand for AI compute is to build silicon shaped around the architecture we have today. In practice, that means chips increasingly tuned for transformers. Etched is the clearest example, with hardware designed explicitly around transformer workloads. But the broader pattern shows up across the industry too: more memory bandwidth tuned for attention, more matrix throughput tuned for the operations LLMs actually use, and more interconnect tuned for the shapes of current models. ...

Robotic actuators have always forced a choice. You can have strength or sensitivity, power or mobility, but not both in one component. That’s why humanoids still rely on heavy motors, gearboxes, and external sensors stitched together to fake what a single muscle does naturally. Two new papers just hit, and together they look like the closest thing yet to an actual muscle analog for robots. The first, published in PNAS, introduces HARP, a Helical Anisotropically Reinforced Polymer actuator. It solves the mechanics side. Contraction ratios up to 75%, power density of 1.93 kW/kg, 29% energy efficiency. What makes it different is that the design is decoupled, meaning the same framework can be tuned for low-pressure actuation, abrasion resistance, or low hysteresis depending on what you need. That’s a versatile platform, not a one-off. ...

Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab has been quiet since launch, and this is their first real public release. They call it interaction models, and the idea is to design the model around how humans actually collaborate rather than around how long an agent can run alone. Audio, video, text all flowing continuously instead of turn-by-turn. 200ms time-aligned micro-turns, concurrent input and output, a separate background reasoning model for the heavier thinking. ...

Uber’s CTO let something slip at StrictlyVC last week. The plan is to outfit millions of human drivers’ cars with sensors and turn them into a global, always-on data collection grid for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies. They already have partnerships with 25 AV players and call the resulting library an AV cloud, a labelled sensor dataset for training AV models. The framing was generous: “Our goal is not to make money out of this data. We want to democratise it.” Right. Because if there’s one company famous for unprofitable acts of generosity, it’s Uber. ...

Anthropic just announced a new enterprise services company, backed by Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and a long list of other private equity heavyweights including General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo, GIC, and Sequoia. The company will staff Applied AI engineers from Anthropic and target mid-sized manufacturers, community banks, and regional health systems. The pitch is simple: small teams working hands-on with customers to find high-impact use cases and ship Claude-powered solutions into existing workflows. ...