Happy Friday! Miami is selling itself as Silicon Valley 2.0 (again). Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are buying mansions. Palantir is ditching Denver for the Sunshine State, as VC and crypto bros hype hard. But we’ve heard this pitch before. Miami’s flashy lifestyle typically attracts billionaires who’ve already made it, not hungry young builders. Beaches and parties are fun, but without a major university feeding fresh tech talent, Miami’s startup scene is still shallow.
Also, Gemini 3.1 Pro dropped and it 2x’d its reasoning score, outperforming most other top models. Still no sign of agentic skills.
When AI becomes conscious, does it deserve civil rights? That’s what 250 engineers, ethicists, and lawyers debated at San Francisco’s Sentient Futures Summit. Discussions covered everything from the emotional lives of chatbots to the ethics of turning off an AI that doesn’t want to be shut down. Nobody claimed AI is fully conscious yet, but most attendees agreed it’s only a matter of time. Some compare future AI rights to animal protections, suggesting that safeguarding sentient software might ultimately help protect people too. So what happens when an infinite number of chatbots demand the right to vote? [SF Standard]
Michael Pollan says AI will never be conscious. To him, consciousness isn’t about thinking – it’s about feeling. Hunger, pain, pleasure, and vulnerability are how the body grabs the brain’s attention. Our emotions are sparked by the friction of real world experiences. Without a body, AI can’t truly feel and is just a clever imitation. But here’s our take. Robots are AI with bodies. They touch, sense things, react, and bump against reality. If that’s what consciousness takes, aren’t robots already halfway there? [NPR]
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Silicon Valley is run by the gay tech mafia. For years it’s been rumored that gay men control who makes it big in tech. The conspiracy sounded ridiculous. Only now even top tier investors joke that getting funded has less to do with your pitch deck and more to do with showing up at Barry’s Bootcamp in the Castro or landing the right sauna invite. Some straight founders complain they’re locked out of deals, while others awkwardly try to blend in. Silicon Valley has moved on from Stanford grads building in garages to bros squeezing into swim trunks for funding. Great news if you’re ripped. [Wired]
AI just scored a huge breakthrough in the fight against cancer. Scientists spend months or even years guessing which tiny tweaks will make immune cells grab onto cancer. It’s slow, expensive, and mostly trial and error. Now a generative AI pipeline called TCRPPO2 is flipping the script. It’s learned how to design stronger T-cell receptors (immune “keys”) that lock onto tumor cells. Early results show these AI built cells outperform the originals, shrinking months of wet lab guesswork into a few days of compute time. When biology becomes software, curing cancer starts looking like a software update. F*ck Cancer. [bioRxiv]
SoftBank is spending $33 billion on the biggest gas plant in US history. They’re planning a massive 9.2-gigawatt gas power plant on the Ohio-Kentucky border. That’s roughly equivalent to 9 nuclear reactors. Construction could drag on for a decade, and nobody knows who’s footing the bill (spoiler: probably rate-payers). Once it’s running, it’ll spew about 15 million metric tons of CO₂ each year. And that’s before you even factor in the need to keep feeding it gas forever. On the flip side, Helion is on track to deliver clean fusion energy to Washington State by 2028. The dinosaurs died for our AI. [TechCrunch]
fun stats
🤑 $1.2 quintillion. Fine Russia’s Supreme Court wants Google to pay for blocking Russian state media on YouTube. That’s roughly 1,000,000x the size of the world’s economy. Seems reasonable.
☕ 80%. CEOs who admit AI hasn’t boosted productivity or employment in the last 3 years. Still, they think it will deliver a 1.4% boost over the next 3… though 25% never use it, and those who do average just 1.5 hours a week. Techno optimism is alive and well.
🛍️ #1. Amazon surpassed Walmart in sales, ending Walmart’s 13 year run as America’s biggest company. Now it’s throwing $200 billion at AI to take on Google, Microsoft, and Meta.