Founders Are Told to Chase Easy Markets. After 20 Years in Healthcare, I Think That Advice Is Backwards.
The hardest markets can offer the strongest competitive advantages to companies willing to understand them.
The Download: AI’s refusal problem and weight-loss drug side effects
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. We’re putting too much faith in AI’s ability to say no Today’s AI models are trained to refuse a vast number of prompts. If you ask your chatbot how to poison…
These Cats and Dogs Have the Best Job Ever: Taste-Testing Pet Food for a $17 Billion Industry
At a Royal Canin research center in France, hundreds of cats and dogs gobble kibble for science and business.
Xona’s commercial GPS alternative is about to go live
Xona’s precision timing and navigation service will enter beta testing after SpaceX launches six satellites designed by the company.
We’re putting too much faith in AI’s ability to say no
Ever since people first seriously contemplated giving machines an intelligence modeled on our own, there has never been any question that they would, like us, be able to say no. The sci-fi canon is full of stories of robotic disobedience. Most of these capers are, of course, cautionary. But recently, the idea that AI shouldn’t…
Job titles of the future: Delivery drone air traffic controller
The moment Trevor Wischnewsky heard that drones were delivering pizza and sushi around his Texas neighborhood, his mind was made up. “It was super fascinating,” he says. “I just immediately wanted to be a part of it.” Wischnewsky is now an RPIC, or “remote pilot in command,” at a company called FlyTrex. An RPIC is…
We’re still figuring out the side effects of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs
This week my colleague Antonio Regalado had an interesting update on GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. According to research presented at an aging meeting in Boston, these drugs seem to affect at least some measures of biological age. Overweight and diabetic people who take GLP-1s have a biological age around two to three years younger than similar…
Roundtables: A Conversation With the Creator of AI-Designed Viruses
Friday, October 16, 2026 Can AI design new life forms? In 2025, Stanford University PhD student Samuel King came up with a preliminary answer when he used a generative AI model to propose genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses. It isn’t yet an example of AI-generated life, but that could be next. Join senior AI reporter…
President Trump awards big tech donors with nation’s highest science prizes
On Thursday, President Trump awarded Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and AMD’s Lisa Su the National Medal of Science, the nation’s top science prize.
The Business Case for Slowing Down When Everyone Is Rushing
As AI accelerates the pace of business, leaders are under pressure to keep up. Here’s why pausing to think may be one of the most productive things business leaders can do.
Private Companies Have This Underrated Branding Advantage Over Public Rivals
For decades, becoming a public company represented the ultimate milestone for ambitious
businesses. That’s not always the case anymore.
businesses. That’s not always the case anymore.