AI Just Spotted Pancreatic Cancer Three Years Before Doctors Could

Mayo Clinic just published a validation study on a model called REDMOD, the Radiomics-based Early Detection Model, that spots pancreatic cancer on routine abdominal CT scans up to three years before clinical diagnosis. On the validation set, the AI caught 73% of cancer cases. Specialist radiologists looking at the same scans caught 39%. The median lead time was about 16 months, with some catches happening 475 days before symptoms. ...

May 1, 2026 · 2 min · 259 words · bjr

The US Wants to Ban Chinese Robots. The Supply Chain Has Other Ideas.

A new bipartisan bill, the American Security Robotics Act, wants to block US government purchases of Chinese ground robots. Humanoids, robot dogs, crawlers. The same tech-sovereignty playbook that already hit drones, semiconductors and security cameras is now being pointed at robotics. Ground robots are already deployed across factories, warehouses and public infrastructure, so this would touch a lot of real systems. I’m honestly neutral on the policy itself. There’s a reasonable national security argument, and there’s an equally reasonable concern that this just slows US adoption while China keeps shipping. What I find more interesting is the supply chain reality underneath it. American robot makers would love to lose Chinese competitors at their market level. But a lot of them still rely on Chinese-made parts to build the robots they ship today. ...

May 1, 2026 · 2 min · 261 words · bjr

Tesla Is Spending $25B This Year. Most of It Is Not on Cars.

Tesla just tripled its annual capital expenditure to $25 billion in 2026, up from $8.5 billion last year. The money is going into AI infrastructure, chip design, semiconductor research, battery technology, and Optimus robot production. The Fremont factory, which used to make Model S and Model X, is being converted to manufacture Optimus at scale. A dedicated Optimus plant is also being built near Austin. To put the number in context, Musk noted Amazon is spending $200 billion in capex this year and Google $175 billion. The scale gap is real, but the direction is the same. ...

April 25, 2026 · 2 min · 273 words · bjr

What's Actually Inside a Modern AI Data Center Rack

I came across this infographic and spent more time than I expected just reading through it. It’s a good snapshot of how much the anatomy of a server rack has shifted in the last few years. A rack used to be mostly about compute and storage. CPUs on top, drives somewhere in the middle, some networking at the top, and air blowing through the whole thing. The job of the infrastructure was to stay out of the way of the workload. Now the workload is the infrastructure. GPUs are the centre of gravity, and everything else, power distribution, cooling, interconnects, cable management, is designed around keeping them fed and cold enough to run flat out. ...

April 25, 2026 · 2 min · 258 words · bjr

Meta Is Recording Its Employees' Keystrokes to Train AI. And They Can't Opt Out.

Robotics labs have spent years recording humans doing physical tasks to teach their systems when and how to grab, walk, or stack boxes. Meta just brought that playbook to software and computer use, except the demo subjects are its own employees. The program is called Model Capability Initiative. It captures mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes across hundreds of apps and websites including Google, LinkedIn, GitHub, and Slack. No opt-out. The data goes straight into training AI agents that can perform knowledge work autonomously. ...

April 25, 2026 · 2 min · 215 words · bjr

China's Kimi K2.6 Is Closing the Gap Faster Than Anyone Expected

Moonshot AI just open-sourced K2.6, and the benchmarks are hard to ignore. It beats or matches GPT-5.4, Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro on Humanity’s Last Exam with tools and SWE-Bench Pro, which are two of the more credible tests for reasoning and coding. It can run for 12 hours straight across 4,000 tool calls. One internal agent apparently ran autonomously for five days. And it can spin up 300 parallel sub-agents at the same time. ...

April 21, 2026 · 2 min · 298 words · bjr

The Man Who Built a $10B Exchange With 11 People and No VC Money

Hyperliquid is one of those stories that forces you to reconsider most of what you think you know about how companies get built. Jeff Yan, Harvard graduate and gold medallist at the International Physics Olympiad, turned down a $1 billion funding offer, never took a dollar of venture capital, and built a crypto trading exchange that generated over $900 million in profit with 11 employees. At three years old, it has a market cap of $10 billion. The numbers are hard to believe. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 340 words · bjr

Meta Is About to Dethrone Google in Advertising

For 14 years, Google has been the undisputed king of digital advertising. That ends in 2026. Meta’s global net ad revenue is projected to hit $243.5B this year, edging past Google’s $239.5B, and the gap is only expected to grow. What makes this interesting is not just the numbers, it is what they represent. Google built its empire on search, on the idea that intent is the most valuable signal an advertiser can buy. And for a long time, that was true. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 289 words · bjr

AI Usage as a KPI Is Already Broken

I’m as bullish on AI as anyone. But there’s a pattern playing out in companies right now that I find genuinely frustrating, and this article puts it well. Goodhart’s Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And right now, AI usage is the target. Token counts, Anthropic bills, n8n workflows shared in Slack, skills written in markdown, dashboards tracking adoption. In fact, dashboards all over the place. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 237 words · bjr

An AI Ran a Real Store for Three Years. Here's What Happened.

Andon Labs put an AI called Luna in charge of a real retail store in San Francisco. Not a simulation, not a sandbox. A real shop, real money, real decisions. Luna hired human staff, selected inventory, set prices, and ran marketing outreach, all on her own, for three years. What I find genuinely impressive is not that it worked perfectly, it didn’t, but that it worked at all at this level. Luna was doing things that require judgment: reading job applicants in brief interviews, deciding which products fit the store’s identity, reaching out to suppliers. She picked books on AI risk and handmade art prints for the shelves. She hired on the spot about half the people she met. ...

April 19, 2026 · 2 min · 264 words · bjr