Cristian Ponce was wearing an Indiana Jones costume when he met his co-founder Theo Schafer. It was at a Halloween party in 2023 thrown by Entrepreneur First, a startup program that introduces founders to one another before they launch an idea. The two hit it off, Ponce remembers. Schafer had studied at MIT with a masters in underwater autonomous robots and worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab exploring Jupiter's moons for alien life. 'Crazy stuff,' Ponce grins. 'I was coming from Cal Tech, doing bioengineering' where he worked on E. coli. The two bonded over stories about the drudgery of being a lab technician. Ponce (pictured above left) especially complained about all the manual labor involved in genetic engineering. The lowly lab tech can spend hours with a scientific syringe 'pipette,' manually moving liquids from tube to tube. Attempts to automate the process have not taken off because the robots capable of doing it are specialized, expensive, and require special programming skills. Every time the scientists need to change an experiment's parameters ' which is all the time ' they'd have to wait for the programmer to program the bot, debug it, and so on. In most cases, it's easier, cheaper, and more precise to use a human....

Reasoning, reasoning, reasoning! This seems to be the driver of the next race for frontier AI models. Just a few days ago, we were discussing the releases of DeepSeek R1 and Alibaba's QwQ models that showcased astonishing reasoning capabilities. Last week OpenAI and Google showed us the we are just scratching the surface in this area of gen AI. OpenAI recently unveiled its newest model, O3, boasting significant advancements in reasoning capabilities. Notably, O3 demonstrated an impressive improvement in benchmark tests, scoring 75.7% on the demanding ARC-Eval, a significant leap towards achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). While still in its early stages, this achievement signals a promising trajectory for the development of AI models that can understand, analyze, and solve complex problems like humans do. Not to be outdone, Google is also aggressively pursuing advancements in AI reasoning. Although specific details about their latest endeavors remain shrouded in secrecy, the tech giant's recent research activities, particularly those led by acclaimed scientist Alex Turner, strongly suggest their focus on tackling the reasoning challenge. This fierce competition between OpenAI and Google is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in AI, propelling the industry towards a future where machines can truly think....

Until now, the phrase crypto winter meant that cryptocurrency traders were facing hard times: a period of tumbling and depressed prices that had to be weathered until the good times returned. Today, though, the cryptocurrency industry is enjoying an end-of-year season more akin to 'brat summer': This month, crypto prices hit previously unheard-of highs, with bitcoin trading above $100,000. In this new Era of Good Feelings'to borrow a phrase from early-19th-century American history'skeptics have become believers, and a digital-economic instrument that was designed to circumvent, if not replace, the traditional financial system is becoming more and more integrated into it. The catalyst for this boom, of course, was last month's election of Donald Trump. Bitcoin's price fell this week, but it's still up almost 40 percent since November 5, and other major cryptocurrencies, such as ethereum and ripple, have seen similar spikes. It's not hard to see why. Trump nominated Cantor Fitzgerald CEO and crypto enthusiast Howard Lutnick to be his secretary of commerce. He named Paul Atkins, also a crypto advocate, as the next head of the Securities Exchange Commission, replacing Gary Gensler, who became crypto's bete noire for bringing lawsuits against the biggest crypto exchanges and numerous other players in the industry. And Trump recently repeated his campaign promise to set up a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, which would require the Treasury Department to purchase billions of dollars' worth of the cryptocurrency and hold it as a 'permanent national asset.'...

Edward Hirsch didn't always write poetry for a living. He's been a busboy, a railroad brakeman, a garbage man; he's worked in a chemical plant and in a box factory. 'You never forget,' he once told an interviewer, 'what it means to punch a clock.' Perhaps for that reason, he's written frequently about labor: the quiet dignity of getting something done, the sense of purpose that pulls many of us out of bed each morning, the way that even straightforward little tasks can structure one's days'one's life. Work is strangely absent from much of contemporary poetry, he said in 2018, despite the fact that 'most people's lives are consumed by their jobs.' His corpus is something of a corrective. In 'The Custodian,' a synagogue's janitor performs his humble duties: dusting off scrolls, folding tallises, turning out the lights. The chores are mundane, but he does them respectfully and thoroughly'and in that sense he contributes to the congregants' sacred experience. A shomer'a keeper or guard'is an important role in Judaism, one that might involve staying with a body until its burial, or ensuring that the ingredients used in a kitchen are kosher. It's not so different from the more general meaning of custodian: a person who looks after something. What's really holy, Hirsch seems to imply, is not just a synagogue's glittering stained glass or the imposing notes of the organ, or even the words of the prayers. It's all the small acts of care that people carry out every day'simply because, as Hirsch once wrote in another poem, 'that's the job.'...