Open Your Mind

Can Quantum and Supercomputing Really Reshape the Future A Surprising Partnership Every once in a while, two big names in tech announce they’re teaming up, and you can almost feel the weight of the press release landing in your inbox. This week, it was IBM and AMD. On paper, it sounds huge: the companies say they’re joining forces to create something called quantumcentric supercomputing. That phrase alone is enough to make your head spin. It’s part marketing slogan, part glimpse into a possible future one where quantum computers and the kinds of highperformance machines AMD is famous for aren’t just running in parallel but actually intertwined. The basic idea is that IBM brings its quantum expertise, AMD supplies its CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators, and together they might build a system capable of tackling problems that today’s computers just can’t handle. But let’s slow down a second, because there’s a lot baked into this. What Makes Quantum Different Most of us are used to ...

Cats, Algorithms, and Cash: How LowEffort AI Videos Are Taking Over AI “Slop” Videos: Annoying, Addictive, and Surprisingly Profitable The Rise of Strange, Disposable AI Clips If you spend any amount of time scrolling through YouTube or TikTok lately, you’ve probably noticed something odd creeping into your feed. The videos don’t look quite polished, but they’re colorful, loud, and weirdly hypnotic. A kitten might be paddling through a pool of rainbow slime. Or maybe it’s flying on a pancakeshaped blimp. The voices are robotic, the animation a little clunky and yet, somehow, these clips rack up millions of views. Critics have started calling them “AI slop.” The label is not flattering, and it isn’t supposed to be. It refers to the flood of loweffort, AIgenerated videos designed less for storytelling or artistic value and more for sheer algorithmic traction. In other words, they’re not made for humans in the traditional sense they’re made for the machine that decides what humans ...

Jetson Thor: “Robot Brain” That Could Change Everything For Better or Worse A Decade in the Making Nvidia has been slowly shaping its Jetson platform for over ten years. At first, it was more of a niche projectthink robotics labs, early selfdriving car prototypes, or industrial automation experiments. But in 2025, the timing feels very different. With generative AI exploding into the mainstream, Nvidia seems convinced that a fullon “robotics renaissance” is about to hit. And their new release, the Jetson Thor, is pitched as the computer brain that will make it happen. On paper, the hardware sounds almost absurdly powerful. Based on Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU architecture, Thor clocks in at a staggering 2,070 TFLOPs . To translate that jargon into something meaningful: it’s more than seven times faster than its predecessor, the Jetson AGX Orin, yet it fits into the same tiny 100mm by 87mm package. The tradeoff, of course, is power. Thor consumes 40–130 watts, more than double Orin’s app...

Did Bigger Brains Grow Out of Better Thumbs The Strange Link Between Hands and Minds Every once in a while, a study comes along that makes you look at your own body in a new way. This one is about thumbsthe humble stub you use to text, twist a bottle cap, or pinch a screw that rolled under the couch. Researchers from the University of Reading claim that longer thumbs aren’t just handy for fine motor tasks; across primates, they also seem to go handinhand with bigger brains. At first, it almost sounds like a joke. “Big thumb, big brain.” But the analysisspanning 94 primate species, both living and fossilizedsuggests the connection is more than coincidence. When primates had relatively longer thumbs, they also tended to have larger brains. And not just any part of the brainthe growth was linked to the neocortex, the region that handles higher thinking and sensory processing, rather than the cerebellum, which is mainly about balance and movement. That distinction matters. It implies ...

The AI Industry’s Mounting “Credit Card Debt” Problem A Bubble in the Making? Not long ago, Sam Altmanthe CEO of OpenAI and arguably one of the most influential voices in artificial intelligencemade a comment that startled even people who have been following the industry closely. He admitted, quite plainly, that we might be in a stage where investors are “overexcited about AI.” That’s an unusual level of candor for someone at the helm of a company riding the AI wave. Usually, executives downplay talk of bubbles. Altman, though, leaned into it, even repeating the word “bubble” during his appearance. The effect was immediate. Investors, already jittery, reacted by pulling back from tech stocks, and the selloff added fuel to the uneasy suspicion that maybe this AI gold rush isn’t built on rocksolid ground. Failure Rates Nobody Wants to Talk About A big reason for that uneasiness comes from research, particularly an MIT study that found about 95 percent of generative AI business exp...

Making Quantum Computers Bigger Without Waiting for Perfect Hardware Building Bigger Smarter Quantum Computers Even When the Parts Aren’t Perfect Why Quantum Still Feels Just Out of Reach Quantum computers already sound futuristic enough that most people imagine them as something out of Tron or Doctor Strange . And in a way, they’re already here. Researchers use them for chemistry problems, simulating new materials, and even experimenting with cryptography. But here’s the catch: the machines we currently have are still tiny by the standards of what’s actually needed. They can solve interesting puzzles, yes, but they’re not yet powerful enough to tackle the massive, worldchanging problems people dream aboutlike cracking unbreakable encryption or modeling entire biological systems. The hurdle isn’t that quantum computing doesn’t work. It’s that the hardware doesn’t scale well. Making a single chip with a handful of working qubits is one thing. Building a system with thousands or mill...

A Better Way to Think About AI Beyond the Obsession With Automation Whenever people talk about artificial intelligence, the conversation almost always circles back to automation. You hear it everywhere: “What jobs will AI replace?” or “How long until machines can do this faster than us?” And yes, there’s truth in those anxietiesAI is absolutely reshaping the landscape of work. But framing the discussion only around replacement feels a little too narrow, even a little defeatist. No one seriously doubts that our future will contain more automation than the present. That’s already happening. Grocery stores are full of selfcheckout kiosks, cars practically drive themselves on highways, and software writes emails you might once have drafted. The real question is not if automation will expand but how we navigate the messy inbetween stage. Do we push relentlessly for machines to take over everything they possibly can, or do we pause and ask whether there’s another way? Why Imperfect Au...