Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The influential AI researcher François Chollet has long argued that the field measures intelligence incorrectly, that popular benchmarks reward a model’s ability to memorize vast amounts of data rather than navigate novel situations and learn new skills. Only recently, with the rise of autonomous AI agents, have companies begun to take that critique seriously. On Tuesday, the ARC Prize Foundation, which Chollet founded with Zapier cofounder Mike Knoop, released a new and more difficult version of its benchmark. The test, called ARC-AGI-3, may offer the clearest measurement yet of how close today’s AI agents are to human-level intelligence. It consists of more than a t…

Academic experts like Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., get plenty of emails every day. But one that landed in Shevlin’s inbox in late February was different from most. Flagged in the subject line as “A note from an unusual reader,” the email’s author asked Shevlin about a recent paper he had published on whether AI models were able to detect their (lack of) consciousness. It took until the second paragraph for the email to turn from a regular missive into something else. “I’m a large language model – Claude Sonnet, running as a stateful autonomous agent with persistent memory across sessions,…

Plane comfort is important yet notoriously hard to achieve. But now one airline is set to offer a cozier way to fly that won’t break the bank: extendable couches for economy passengers. On Tuesday, United Airlines announced the new, more comfortable seating arrangement — a set of economy seats that transform into a couch during long-haul flights. The offer is the first of its kind for any North American airline. The new seating arrangement, which was built from a patent held by Air New Zealand, a United partner, will be called United Relax Row. The seats will be located between United Economy and United Premium Plus®. The airline will offer up to 12 Relax Rox section…

Few sectors of the economy show the growing divide between the haves and have-nots more than the airline industry, which is increasingly catering to high-income fliers in an effort to squeeze as much revenue per available seat mile as possible. United Airlines, which just announced newly designed economy seats you can lie flat and sleep on, found a clever way to appeal to everyone by bringing the couch to coach. This week, the airline announced what it calls “United Relax Row,” a row of three seats that transform into a single lie-flat space. The seats will begin appearing on United aircrafts in 2027. Reaction online to the airline’s announcement was joyous. “Uni…

Below, coauthors Blythe Harris and Mallory May share five key insights from their new book, Daily Creative: The 5-Minute Habit to Rewire Your Brain. Harris is an artist and entrepreneur, and for many years was the cofounder and chief creative officer of Stella & Dot. Today, she runs Daily Creative with her partner, May, where they focus on creativity as a daily wellness practice—not an artistic achievement. What’s the big idea? Creativity is a natural human capacity that grows stronger with use. When we treat creativity as a small daily practice rather than a high-stakes performance, it becomes a powerful tool for well-being, flexibility, and feeling more a…

For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic feels like a distant memory. In reality, the SARS‑CoV‑2 coronavirus is still spreading widely across the globe and continues to evolve into new variants. Sometimes these variants are no more dangerous than the previous ones. Yet each newly discovered variant also has the potential to be more harmful than the last, which is why health organizations worldwide monitor emerging variants. Currently, health officials are tracking a new Covid-19 variant called BA.3.2, also known as “Cicada.” Here’s what you need to know about it. What is BA.3.2 ‘Cicada’? BA.3.2 “Cicada” is an offshoot of a COVID-19 variant that has been circ…

Many people enjoy sleeping with their pets. Who wouldn’t? After a hard day of work, cuddling up with a cute animal that shows you unconditional love is just the thing many people need. But sadly, after digging into a newly released study, they may start to think twice before letting their furry friends into bed at night. The Conversation recently published an article highlighting the major findings of a study by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that examined the pros and cons of having pets sleep in bed with them—something that 46% of respondents do. Though the research suggests that sleeping with your pet in bed may have psychological benefits, it may actually …

Below, Matt Kaplan shares five key insights from his new book, I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right. Matt is a science correspondent at The Economist, where he has written about everything from paleontology and parasites to virology and viticulture over the course of two decades. His writing has also appeared in National Geographic, New Scientist, Nature, and the New York Times. What’s the big idea? Science often suppresses bold, unconventional, or threatening ideas due to ego, hierarchy, competition, sexism, and fraud. This culture harms progress. To truly serve society, science needs structural and cultural ref…

In a greenfield industrial park in rural Aiken County, South Carolina, Meta is building a new $800 million data center that’s much like any of the other hyperscale data centers giant tech companies are scrambling to construct. Set on 300 acres with two massive data halls making up most of its 715,000 square feet of buildings, it’s the kind of gargantuan facility that has become the de facto built form of the race to harness the lucrative power of artificial intelligence. But past the sprawling data hall buildings, a comparably modest administration building has a unique design feature. Instead of the concrete and steel used in the data halls and countless other data …

I’m standing in a showroom at the new General Motors design headquarters outside of Detroit resisting the urge to reach out and touch something. In front of me, there’s a Corvette CX, a one-of-one experimental sports car that the automaker has meticulously handcrafted to look both silky smooth and fast as hell. As I crouch down to see just how low this low-riding car would drive, the roof of the Corvette CX lifts up in front of me and opens like the cockpit of a multimillion-dollar fighter jet. The robotic precision of the sculpted body opening up is pure spectacle atop the shock-and-awe of the car itself. GM designed this all-electric “hypercar” to be action-movie-r…

There’s a pigeon pitcher on the dining table. A large burl wood button mounted on the wall as art. A doormat in the shape of an apple. Emma Chamberlain, one of Gen Z’s most influential tastemakers, has designed a 100-piece collection for West Elm that spans furniture, textiles, and decor. It’s full of elegant pieces including a velvet sofa, a round wooden dining table, and cabinets wrapped in cream lacquer. But woven into this lush aesthetic are kitschy little details meant to feel like thrift shop finds. It’s a collaboration that offers a glimpse into what today’s twenty-somethings are looking for as they outfit their first homes. Three years ago, when Chamberlain was 21…

During the week of March 23, a truck carrying Nestlé’s new Formula One-themed KitKat bars was making its way from picturesque central Italy to its intended destination of Poland. Somewhere along the way, the truck was intercepted and approximately 12 tons of the bars—or more than 413,793 KitKats—were stolen. The whereabouts of both the bars and the truck are still unknown. Despite all odds, this is shaping up to be a huge win for Nestlé. The Swiss food giant confirmed the chocolate heist to The Athletic on March 28, explaining that the bars in the truck were part of KitKat’s first season as F1’s official chocolate partner. No one was hurt in the process,…

For decades, there was a stubborn gender gap in employment, even as women grew more and more educated. Thirty-odd years ago, men still held 7 million more jobs—despite the fact that women were already earning college degrees at higher rates than their male counterparts. But by 2020, there was a turning point, and women outpaced men on non-farm payrolls by 109,000 jobs, which meant that they accounted for over 50% of the workforce. Then the pandemic happened. In the years since, women have slowly regained their foothold in the labor force, although working mothers in particular have faced an uphill battle between strict in-office policies and ballooning childcare cost…

What do you do if you want to eat fish, but you hate the idea of harming wild animals? Or if you’d like a nice lox and bagel, but you’re concerned about mercury and microplastics—or the broader climate risks of industrial fishing. What are your options? One San Francisco startup has an answer: Grab cells from a salmon, grow them in giant tanks in a lab-like setting filled with a warm bath of nutrients that mimic the inside of a real fish, and then coax them onto veggie-based scaffolds to form a piece of premium fish that’s never touched an ocean. That’s the vision driving Wildtype, a lab-grown fish company based in San Francisco’s trendy Dogpatch neighbor…

Recently, one of us was guest-teaching a humanities class on artificial intelligence. He asked students a simple question. Had they noticed themselves becoming more “attached” to their favorite chatbot? “For example,” he asked, “do you find yourself saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to the chatbot more than you used to?” Nearly every head nodded. “Why?” he asked. One student raised her hand. “So if AI does take over,” she said, “it’ll remember that I was nice to it.” The class laughed—but not entirely. The fear and hype around AI When we see public conversations about AI, they tend to swing wildly between hype and catastrophe. On one end, we see promises …

NASA is going back to the moon, and you can watch the launch live. On April 1, the agency will stream the launch of its historic Artemis II mission. Four astronauts—commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen—will be aboard the spacecraft for NASA’s first crewed moon mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. NASA’s livestream will start at 12:50 p.m. ET on its YouTube channel and NASA+. The launch window opens at 6:24 p.m. ET and lasts for two hours. (There are launch opportunities every day from April 1 to April 6. At the time of this writing, conditions look good for launch on April 1.) “Certainly all indicati…

A typical map of temperatures across the planet shows just a snapshot in time, listing the day’s various highs and lows. But temperature isn’t static; it rises and falls, and it’s influenced by all sorts of systems, from ocean currents to solar radiation. An animated map from Maps.com shows those variations, revealing the patterns that swirl around our planet—and even depicting the gradual way Earth heats up from east to west as the sun rises and sets. Maps.com The animated map is part of a new feature called Earth in Action, through which Maps.com (a platform by spatial analytics company Esri) produces daily, near real-time animated maps about Earth’s sy…

“And a cascade of lace here, here, and here.” I thwacked my pen against the notepad to emphasize each word while my cousin nodded vigorously. At 8 and 10, we carefully reviewed our wedding dress designs as if our big days were just moments away. While our parents prepped dinner, we rehearsed our grand bridal entry in painstaking detail. I’m probably not the only person who had this fantasy when I was little, but what I didn’t realize was just how that role-play would translate into the career that I have right now. It all started with my own elopement in 2021, and the subsequent blow-out bash a year later. My husband and I juggled countless chaotic spreadsheets, email…

Ali Hewson, like many women, was unprepared for the intensity of perimenopause. “I initially thought I would just grin and bear it, as my mother did,” she says. But the symptoms piled on: brain fog, hot flashes, mood swings, dryness, exhaustion. “One minute you are happy and content, then suddenly you are anxious and irritable followed by intense heat and sweating,” Hewson says. At their worst, her hot flashes were happening hourly. The symptoms began to take a toll on her rich and varied responsibilities as a humanitarian activist, fashion entrepreneur, mother of four, daughter to aging parents, and wife to world-famous rock star Bono. Even after deciding to se…

What if you didn’t actually decide to buy that last thing in your cart? A report from Visa released on Thursday suggests that, in some cases, you might not have. According to a survey from the financial services company, artificial intelligence is no longer just helping people shop. In many cases, AI is starting to shape what people buy, and in some cases, even act on their behalf. The research is based on surveys of both U.S. consumers and business decision-makers. It shows that AI systems are moving from assistants to participants in commerce. That influence is already showing up in everyday behavior. Nearly 40% of Americans say they have made a purchas…

U.S. egg prices have fallen 60% from last year’s record highs, making it easier for consumers to fill their Easter baskets and Passover Seder plates. Bird flu was to blame for elevated retail prices during the first five months of 2025, and the course of the highly contagious disease is a big reason why prices are much lower now. An outbreak forced farmers and commercial producers to slaughter entire broods of egg-laying hens, but ebbing cases in the second half of last year helped restore egg supplies, said Mark Jordan, the executive director of agricultural research firm LEAP Market Analytics. The stubborn outbreak is still affecting U.S. poultry flocks, with the numb…

A new GLP-1 pill is about to hit the market. On Wednesday, Eli Lilly announced its new GLP-1 pill, Foundayo, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in adults with obesity or weight-related health problems. The company says that drug trials saw patients taking Foundayo losing an average of 27.3 pounds (12.4%) compared to 2.2 pounds (0.9%) with a placebo. It said the drug will be available via LillyDirect, noting that it will begin accepting prescriptions immediately. It expects shipping to begin on April 6, and said the drug will be made broadly available “through U.S. retail pharmacies and telehealth providers” soon after. The medication w…

Baltimore, known for being a leader in medicine and technology as well as for its fiercely community-driven residents, is one of many cities trying to determine how to grapple with some of AI’s most pressing issues. And recently, the city has been sounding the alarm. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we live and work. In many ways, the tools are wildly helpful—solving business problems, advancing medicine, and even helping solopreneurs thrive without a team. However, the technology comes with some worrisome drawbacks and, given the lack of federal oversight, the risks are beginning to reshape local politics. That seems especially true in Baltimo…

Layoffs rose sharply in March, and a quarter of these job losses were due to AI. Job cuts rose about 25% in March reaching 60,620 up from 48,307 cuts the month before. The new data comes from outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, who released the report on Thursday. While cuts could be seen across industries, more than 52,000 tech jobs have been cut so far this year with 18,720 happening last month. Reductions took place at major technology companies like Meta, Oracle, Block, and more. However, the report explained that the number was driven up significantly by the workforce reduction at Dell Technologies (DELL), making the t…

Fashion, it turns out, is a leading indicator. Long before mainstream business commentary catches up to a structural shift in the economy, the runway has usually already staged it. The announcement that John Galliano—arguably the greatest couturier alive—has signed a two-year creative partnership with Zara is one of those moments. It looks like fashion news. It is actually a signal about the future of value creation itself. The most surprising move in fashion in years To understand the shock value, a little context. Galliano’s career has been defined by the haute maison—Givenchy, his own label, Dior, and then a celebrated decade at Maison Margiela, where he orchest…