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Unpacking the Public Health Turn in Internet Regulation
Measures designed to protect children from digital harms are ushering in a public health approach to internet regulation, writes Ramiro Álvarez Ugarte.
Choctaw Nation opens third small business center in McAlester
The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma has opened a small business center inside the renovated McAlester Public Library, expanding access to workspace, business advising and connections to lenders. The Chahtapreneur Business Center’s 3,500-square-foot McAlester location is the tribe’s third center under the tribe’s purview, joining existing locations in Durant and Idabel, according to a tribal news […]
Packers DC Jonathan Gannon Braces for Petzing’s Lions Offense
Jonathan Gannon coached Drew Petzing in Arizona for three years. Sunday he has to stop him. #OnePride
New business takes over former Titans Tavern, event center in Tea
A new business has taken over the former Titans Tavern and Tea Event Center spaces in Tea.
SpaceX offers employees extra pay to help build its data centers
Elon Musk's rocket company is offering employees a 20% pay bump if they volunteer to move, according to an email seen by Business Insider.
SBA to allow Iowa businessowners to share thoughts on Fed regulations
The U.S. Small Business Association‘s Office of the National Ombudsman and Office of Advocacy announced that the SBA will host two events in Iowa early next week, allowing small business owners of the state to share their thoughts on federal regulations and how they have impacted their businesses. The first event will be hosted in […]
With ‘Wildwood,’ Laika’s stop-motion magic returns to the PNW
The animation studio's latest film, the Pacific Northwest-set "Wildwood," opens in theaters this week. Here's how the magic happened.
Scott Eilert named head of K-State animal science department
His professional experience includes employment with Cargill, National Turkey Federation and Meat Institute.
Packers Urged to Go After DeForest Buckner Amid Trade Rumors
The Packers should be looking to make some additions on defense.
Packers Coach Addresses Potential Offensive Line Change Involving Kevin Zeitler
Offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich said Tuesday that the Green Bay Packers will not change their offensive line “just to change,” with guard Kevin Zeitler closer to game shape and left guard Aaron Banks coming off what Stenavich called a good week of practice. Zeitler dressed for Sunday’s 23-13 win over the Dallas Cowboys so the [...]
United Automobile, Aerospace & Agricultural Implement Workers of America
The labor union representing workers in auto, aircraft and agricultural implement manufacturing and other industries in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico.
Science on the Space Station with NASA Astronaut Jessica Watkins
NASA astronaut and Expedition 75 flight engineer Jessica Watkins works inside the Kibo laboratory module's Life Science Glovebox on Oct. 9, 2026, safely
‘Egregious’: Denver City Council’s Health and Safety Committee Argues Against Proposition 132
By Nahila Bonfiglio Members of Denver City Council’s Health and Safety Committee voiced their opposition to proposed fentanyl ballot measure Proposition 132 in an Oct. 7 meeting. Council members Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez and Amanda Sandoval came together to take a stand against the proposition, w
Visier Debuts Talent Agents, Closing the Gap Between HR Programs and Business Impact
/PRNewswire/ -- Visier today announced Talent Agents at HR Tech 2026. Built on the Visier Workforce Intelligence Platform, these new AI agents guides every...
Google CEO Admits Cloud Business Is Sacrificing Revenue to Win AI Race
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai says Google is giving up potential Cloud revenue to prioritize AI research, even as customers struggle to secure computing capacity. Google Cloud revenue surged 82% to $24.8 billion in the second quarter, while its...
Things to know before taking your first cruise
I took my first cruise on Royal Caribbean's Wonder of the Seas. Here's what I learned about packing, choosing a cabin, and dining.
Watch: The SpaceX rocket science inside Tesla’s new Roadster
Explore the physics and challenges behind Tesla's Roadster stunts, rocket science, thrusters, and road-legal feasibility.
Town of Truckee, Tahoe Institute for Natural Science celebrate Bee City USA Designation
TRUCKEE, Calif. – The Town of Truckee has officially earned designation as a Bee City USA affiliate, joining communities across the country working to support pollinators and expand healthy habitat. The designation is the result...
Packers Named Trade Fit for $22 Receiver at Deadline
The Green Bay Packers are thinner than they would like at wide receiver. Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are sitting at 1-5 with Chris Godwin at wide receiver. It would make sense for the Packers and the Bucs to work out a potential trade, according to Matt Verderame of Sports Illustrated. Verderame notes that the […] The post Packers Named Trade Fit for $22 Receiver at Deadline appeared first on HEAVY.
Why political texts keep coming even after you block them
George Weiner built PACspam.org to trace who sends nonstop political fundraising texts after blocking numbers repeatedly failed to stop the messages.
CSC Science Team Asks: What Should We Expect to Find in Nature?
The junk DNA paradigm shift is a good example of how an intelligent design framework can serve as a productive guide to scientific research.
More output isn’t better business: Workday’s CFO Zane Rowe on how finance chiefs should really measure AI
Zane Rowe discusses the company’s approach to AI agents, finance transformation, and measuring the impact of new technologies.
Science News unveils its list of 10 scientists making an impact on our world
As a teenager, Gabriela Farfan became fascinated by the shapes and colors of minerals. Now, as curator of gems and minerals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, she studies what they can reveal about our planet.From corals that preserve chemical signatures of changing oceans to sparkling gemstones, Farfan uses crystal structures, chemistry and spectroscopy to uncover the information trapped inside minerals and show why they’re an essential part of natural history. WASHINGTON, O
Vikings Handed Worrying Packers Message Despite 5-0 Start
The Minnesota Vikings are 5-0 and sit atop the NFC North division heading into Week 7. Nonetheless, the Vikings do have teams on their tail, as both the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers are 4-2. Moreover, the Packers are building positive momentum to get themselves back in the race for the division as they […] The post Vikings Handed Worrying Packers Message Despite 5-0 Start appeared first on HEAVY.
Nvidia Aims To Speed Deployment Of AI Factories
Nvidia introduced a design for an AI data center packed into a box about the size of a standard shipping container. Nvidia stock rose.
Ob Hospitalist Group Named Newsweek AI Impact Health Award Winner for Best Health System AI Transformation
/PRNewswire/ -- Ob Hospitalist Group (OBHG), the nation's largest and only dedicated provider of OB/GYN hospitalist services and a leader in comprehensive...
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 – Detailed Impressions of the Necron and AdMech Factions
I had a great time getting chromed up with the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Necrons in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4. The campaign story really starts to come together in some interesting ways in its second chapter. And the ways both of these factions control space differently feel like engaging and welcome additions to the roster compared to the more straightforward playstyle of Orks and Space Marines.
Astronauts’ hearts just passed a surprising test for Mars
A new study tracking 13 astronauts suggests that the human heart may be surprisingly well equipped for a journey to Mars, especially with regular exercise during spaceflight. Researchers found that astronauts' hearts adapted to months of weightlessness and handled simulated Martian gravity without major problems, offering new hope for future missions to the Red Planet.
A train was delayed by a solar storm. But something didn't add up.
Scientists have cracked a 178-year-old mystery surrounding a train delayed by a solar storm, revealing that the famous incident happened in 1848 rather than 1841. The discovery rewrites the early history of space weather and highlights a threat that still endangers modern power grids, satellites, and communication systems.
Philip Morris Says Global Wars Have Disrupted Its Business and Clouded Earnings Outlook
Tobacco giant Philip Morris says it anticipates the global conflicts will impact operating income this year.
Earth’s Core Has Been Quietly Leaking Water for Billions of Years
A new study offers an explanation for unusual chemical signatures found in some volcanic rocks.
Musk-backed PACs have spent over $400 million on advertising
The Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP’s super PAC dedicated to electing Republicans to the Senate, received Musk’s top donation of $168 million.
A Semiquincentennial of Apathy … and AI
My generation has never experienced politics untouched by algorithms. Every election I have been old enough to follow has unfolded, at least in part, on social media. From Obama’s historic victory in 2008 to Trump’s unconventional win for a second term in 2024, these campaigns showed how pol
Philip Morris warns on impacts of global conflicts on its business
Oct 21 (Reuters) - Philip Morris International on Wednesday warned that global conflicts were starting to hurt its business, with higher prices driven by the war in the Middle East starting to bite and strikes hitting its supply chain infrastructure...
Cruz Foam had a promising idea. Why couldn’t it make its sustainable packaging business work?
Cruz Foam's biodegradable packing material made from shrimp shells and food waste attracted wide attention and big-name investors, but the Santa Cruz-based company has closed up shop after what one former exec says were struggles to solve the full range of problems its customers needed packaging to address.
This week in Santa Cruz County business: Cruz Foam ceases operations; West Coast Community Bank celebrates Nasdaq listing
Santa Cruz-based Cruz Foam, which developed a biodegradable packaging made from shrimp shells and other natural materials, has closed and sold off its intellectual property, Jessica M. Pasko reports in her weekly look at local business. Meanwhile, Santa Cruz-based West Coast Community Bancorp has moved its stock listing to the Nasdaq Stock Market, a milestone executives say is more than two decades in the making.
Oct. 21 - SCAD Film Fest to Impact Downtown Traffic
October 21 2026 - Motorists can expect delays in Savannah this coming week as the annual Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) Film Fest will be taking place from
The day's 5️⃣ headlines: Barça lose; Madrid seek victory
After an action-packed day of Champions League and Copa Sudamericana football, and with today's fixtures in mind, here are the 5 stories to start your day. Barça collapse in ParisFC Barcelona endured...
🗞️ The front pages: Barça and Villarreal beaten; Atleti draw
A day packed with football and news gets underway. Let's take a look at today's newspaper front pages after last night's Champions League and Copa Sudamericana action. MARCASPORTASMundo DeportivoLa Ga...
Erik ten Hag interview: Man United’s use of data, impact of legends’ criticism, and ‘special’ Mainoo
In part two of our interview, the ex-United manager reveals more about his time at the club and discusses his three-game reign in Germany
Mental health support available for families, community members in Bend after mass shooting
Mental health support services are being offered in Bend to help those impacted by the Silver Rail Elementary School shooting.
Research report: Digital Science and Sunmedia partner to bring research impact reporting to Japan’s medical affairs teams
Sunmedia will use Dimensions and Altmetric data in customized reports intended to assess attention, sentiment and real-world connections for Japanese medical affairs teams.
A Bizarre Plastic-Eating Enzyme Has a Second Talent That Worries Scientists
Plastic can fool nature’s cleanup crew, but one bacterial enzyme knows exactly where to bite.
How Small Pharmacy Expansion Will Impact CVS Health (CVS) Investors
CVS Health has been rolling out smaller pharmacy focused stores, expanding MinuteClinic sites and raising its 2026 revenue and earnings outlook, alongside new efforts in benefit transparency and women’s midlife health research. The push into underserved neighborhoods with compact pharmacies and clinics points to a tighter focus on access, operating efficiency and aligning physical sites with where prescription demand actually shows up. This article examines how CVS Health’s investment...
Student-led composting business brings sustainability efforts to MSU
Starting a business is not easy. Coming up with a good idea is difficult, and securing funding and resources for it once you have it can be even harder. For Tanner Marlow, one of his startup business struggles came after those two steps. He secured ample space and the resources he needed from the university...
Elon Musk says SpaceX and Tesla exploring largest merger in history
Tech mogul says tie-up has a 'lot of merit', given firms' complementary work on AI.
Green Bay Packers: 3 takeaways as Packers beat Cowboys
The Dallas Cowboys did not score against the Green Bay Packers until 9:19 remained in the third quarter Sunday night at Lambeau Field. Green Bay won 23-13 for its third straight victory and moved to 4-2. Jordan Love threw for 276 yards and a touchdown and ran for another. 1. Two interceptions became 10 Green [...]
Kawhi Leonard Shining as Teammate and Leader Through Preseason
The newly acquired superstar is making a big impact on his new teammates ahead of the regular season opener.
Bickerstaff Gives the Pistons Crowd Credit for the Comeback
Detroit's 3 p.m. crowd packed the building, and J.B. Bickerstaff felt it in the second half. #Pistons
SpaceX’s Musk Lauds Its Soaring Cloud Business and Possible Tesla Merger
SpaceX put on a bit of a show for shareholders today—and I’m not referring to the sizzle reel of rocket and space videos it showed on its earnings call. No, the big attention grabber was the update from CEO Elon Musk on the progress of SpaceX’s contemplated merger with Tesla and just how ...
Union Colony Prep vs. Aurora Science & Tech: Colorado High School Girls Volleyball, Oct. 21, 2026
Union Colony Prep at Aurora Science & Tech, Colorado high school girls volleyball, Oct. 21, 2026, 4:30 PM. Records, rankings, rosters and head-to-head.
Officials Work to Improve Boardman River Health
The Traverse City Downtown Development Authority (DDA) and City of TC are working on multiple fronts to improve the Lower Boardman River – including habitat and shoreline improvements, repairs to a deteriorating retaining wall, and public placemaking projects. However, one of the main challenges to the urban river’s health – its proximity to so many …
Bengals Set to Face Former Teammate This Week in Baltimore
The Bengals will face a familiar foe in Baltimore as former Cincinnati edge rusher Trey Hendrickson looks to make an impact against his former team after returning from injury.
Green Bay Packers: Matt LaFleur on the safety trio and Evan Williams’ interception
Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur said Monday he would put safeties Xavier McKinney, Javon Bullard and Evan Williams “up against anybody in the league” after the trio helped hold the Dallas Cowboys to 13 points. Williams intercepted Dak Prescott in the second quarter of Green Bay’s 23-13 win Sunday night. Bullard broke up three [...]
New Richland Lab Could Transform How Scientists Study Microbes and Boost Regional Jobs
The BriefGroundbreaking held Tuesday: PNNL officially began construction on the M2PC lab, a 30,800-square-foot facility funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science that will study soil microbes to improve crop productivity and develop new biotechnology applications. The facility will be open to researchers from around the nation and the world.Research timelines could shrink dramatically: The facility's automation and AI capabilities could reduce experiments that currently take six months to just 72 hours, allowing scientists to explore more possibilities faster than ever before.New jobs coming to the Tri-Cities: The project is expected to create positions for automation engineers, AI experts, roboticists, technicians, and skilled craftspeople, with the facility opening in 2029.RICHLAND, Wash. — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory broke ground Tuesday on a first-of-its-kind facility that could accelerate scientific discoveries about the microscopic organisms living in soil—organisms that may hold the key to growing more food and developing new energy technologies.The Microbial Molecular Phenotyping Capability, or M2PC, represents a significant investment in automation and artificial intelligence to speed up research that traditionally takes years to complete. The 30,800-square-foot facility will house more than 100 connected automated instruments designed to study microbes at a pace and scale never before possible.Reshaping Agriculture's FutureThe M2PC facility will not put a new tool directly into a farmer's hands tomorrow morning, but it is actively reshaping the commercial pipeline to solve agriculture's biggest headache with biologicals: inconsistent field performance. For years, PNNL researchers have explored how microbes work and how they might help produce useful materials, advance energy technologies, and address challenges involving critical materials and minerals. But those experiments have been limited by what researchers could accomplish by hand."They can be used to provide nutrients to a plant so that the plant would grow more. So, like increasing your crop productivity, for example," said Douglas Mans, PNNL's Associate Laboratory Director for Integrated Discovery Sciences.PNNL's own research shows soil microbes can help plants access nutrients and withstand drought—benefits that could prove crucial as farmers face growing environmental pressures. The M2PC facility will allow scientists to identify and optimize useful microbes faster than ever before, accelerating the development of biological solutions that actually work consistently in the field.What Makes M2PC UniqueThe Microbial Molecular Phenotyping Capability differs from traditional research labs because it operates as a first-of-its-kind, AI-enabled autonomous laboratory designed to shrink experimental timelines from years down to months or weeks. The M2PC lab will connect more than 100 automated instruments to grow microbes, prepare samples, measure their behavior, and link observations to the molecular processes behind them. Artificial intelligence will help analyze results and guide the next experiments, allowing scientists to explore more questions faster.Deb Gracio, PNNL Director, emphasized the transformative potential during Tuesday's groundbreaking ceremony: "Research that has taken years will become possible in months and hopefully in weeks."That acceleration is already being demonstrated. PNNL's smaller automated lab, called the Anaerobic Microbial Phenotyping Platform or AMP2, completed three experimental cycles in just 72 hours—a process that normally would have taken about six months."That normally would have taken us about six months … and we were able to do that in 72 hours," Mans said.The AMP2 laboratory is not being closed or replaced. Instead, the current 1,800-square-foot laboratory serves as an active prototype and precursor for the much larger M2PC facility. AMP2 will continue operating as a separate lab designed to run anaerobic experiments—those conducted in the absence of oxygen—while M2PC will focus on aerobic research.Broader Applications Beyond AgricultureWhile improving crop productivity is one important application, the M2PC facility is designed to support research into multiple areas critical to national priorities. The lab will advance research into biofuels, manufacturing materials, and energy technologies. It will also help researchers understand how microbes respond to environmental changes and how to design biological systems for biotechnology applications.As a flagship component of the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, M2PC represents a significant investment in using artificial intelligence and automation to accelerate U.S. scientific discovery. Dorothy Koch, Associate Director of the DOE Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research program, highlighted the facility's importance during the groundbreaking."M2PC will accelerate biological discovery and design," Koch said, noting that the facility is expected to conduct a minimum of 500 strain experiments per week, 100 microbiome experiments per week, and take a million measurements per month.Economic Opportunity for the RegionBeyond the scientific breakthroughs, the M2PC project represents significant economic opportunity for the Tri-Cities region. The facility will require hiring automation engineers, AI experts, technicians skilled in operating robotics, and specialized craftspeople to build and maintain the sophisticated equipment."We're anticipating that type of hiring," Mans said when asked about job creation.PNNL has already begun recruiting talent nationally and internationally for positions related to the smaller AMP2 lab, bringing automation engineers from cities like Boston and San Francisco to work in the region. The M2PC facility is expected to accelerate that trend."This capability won't really exist anywhere else in the world," Mans said, suggesting the facility could become a draw for scientific talent seeking to work on cutting-edge biotechnology research.Timeline and Next StepsThe M2PC facility is expected to open in 2029. Between now and then, construction crews will level and prepare the ground, while the building takes shape. Simultaneously, Ginkgo Bio Works, the automation contractor, will build the facility's automation components off-site so they can be installed as the building is completed.In the interim, PNNL researchers and the broader scientific community will begin planning the first experiments to be conducted in the facility, ensuring research is lined up and ready to begin as soon as the doors open.The groundbreaking ceremony included representatives from the Department of Energy, PNNL leadership, and elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels, underscoring the project's significance to the region and the nation's biotechnology future. News The U.S. Department of Energy Secretary tours Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Dan Hanson, Apple Valley News Now News Beyond DNA: Scientists Explore New Frontiers in Biology Research Dan Hanson, Apple Valley News Now News TRIDEC optimistic that Hanford, PNNL will see funding in national budget Robert Desaulniers News Big picture science: monitoring the Yakima River Basin News PNNL research could shape the future of fighting fentanyl COPYRIGHT 2026 BY APPLE VALLEY NEWS NOW. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
SpaceX touts possible Tesla merger after profits soar
After a stellar SpaceX earnings announcement, chief executive Elon Musk said the rocket company is considering a merger with Tesla, the electric car company he also helms.
UW Health East Madison Hospital expands surgical capacity
MADISON, Wis. — UW Health East Madison Hospital is expanding its facilities to meet growing health care demand in Dane County.
Nearby business bracing for impact after PepsiCo plant closure announced
PepsiCo is closing its South Knoxville bottling plant, laying off more than 100 employees.
Google.org awards $36m to 17 AI science teams | ETIH EdTech News
ETIH edtech news covers Google.org's $36 million commitment to 17 AI for Science projects, including research at the University of Cambridge and MIT. The selected organizations will advance work across climate, clean energy and healthcare, with optional access to Google's six-month accelerator.
Matchbox Omaha brings intimate live entertainment to the Holland Center
The 727-capacity venue is designed to give fans a more personal, curated live entertainment experience in downtown Omaha.
Nearby business bracing for impact after PepsiCo plant closure announced
Pepsi Co. is shutting down its South Knoxville bottling plant, laying off more than 100 workers.
Cowboys rookie report: Packers game exposed some deficiencies
Cowboys rookies did not have a good game in Green Bay.
SpaceX and Tesla form committees to explore merger
Elon Musk, who is CEO of both companies and owns billions in stock, said he can't be a part of those merger discussions.
SpaceX revenue soars 161% as AI business grows
Elon Musk-led SpaceX issued its second-ever quarterly earnings report on Tuesday.
Detroit Lions Announce Two Roster Moves Ahead of Packers Showdown
The Detroit Lions have signed Aidan Keanaaina to their practice squad and released Chris Smith ahead of Sunday's game against the Packers.
New org weighs AI's impact on mental health
Psychologists, lawyers, parents and advocacy groups have gathered for the first ever annual conference of AI and its impact on human psychology.
Several S&T researchers among top 2% cited scientists in their fields
A total of 94 current and former researchers affiliated with Missouri S&T are among the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists recognized either for their career-long impact or for their 2025 metrics, according to a Stanford University analysis of the Elsevier Data Repository....Continue Reading Several S&T researchers among top 2% cited scientists in their fields
Packers OC Makes Feelings Clear on Josh Jacobs Return
Green Bay Packers OC Adam Stenavich didn't mince words when asked about RB Josh Jacobs' return. The post Packers OC Makes Feelings Clear on Josh Jacobs Return appeared first on HEAVY.
Round Rock City Council to consider incentive for semiconductor industry business
City of Round Rock officials will vote on an economic development agreement supporting an expansion of PulseForge during their Oct. 22 meeting.
SpaceX turns a profit after a string of losses as its satellite and computer leasing businesses soar
SpaceX reported a bigger quarterly profit than expected Tuesday as its satellite communications operations and its business of leasing computing power to other companies boomed.
SpaceX's AI business is beating expectations
SpaceX's data centers and Grok agents have been more profitable than investors expected in second quarter of the year, as the company leaves its roots as
SpaceX earnings soar past expectations as AI business surges
Elon Musk's company is one of the most powerful companies in the AI economy.
SpaceX Swings to a Profit, Even as A.I. Spending Soars
Elon Musk’s rocket company also said its revenue had more than doubled, driven by its Starlink internet satellite service and artificial intelligence products.
SpaceX quarterly revenue jumps, beats estimates as AI business surges
Oct 20 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX on Tuesday said its third-quarter revenue more than doubled, beating estimates as AI and Starlink grew, while capital spending nearly tripled as it invested in compute infrastructure, sending its shares up about 3%...
Thrifting and oysters: Check out 10 business updates in downtown Austin
Businesses that are now open, coming soon, in the news or closing in downtown Austin.
Women's college basketball preseason AP poll: South Carolina leads the way, with UConn and USC trailing behind
Dawn Staley and South Carolina once again reign above the rest of the pack.
18:83 Speaker Series: Dr. Jenkins and The Mischievous Greyhound
Dr. Marjorie Jenkins turned career story into tale about 'finding her pack' at UND and School of Medicine & Health Sciences.
Online Communities Rarely Focus on Politics, and Many Say It Should Stay That Way
Most people in online communities see little to no politics in their go-to space, and 54% say it doesn't belong there.
Does anyone actually want to win the medium-lift race in the United States?
Ars Technica is here to help with a guide to the medium-lift space race.
“The Politics of Abuse”: Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse Shares How State Court Impacts Those Seeking Justice
Through the statewide tour, Trout and local advocates continued conversations about the barriers survivors face and the role North Carolina's legislature and courts play in addressing them.
Businesses Report Flat Summer Tourism Despite Inflation, Smoke and Airport Runway Closure
In August, when an active wildfire season in the Pacific Northwest choked the Flathead Valley in a dome of smoke, Glacier Guides and Montana Raft owner Denny Gignoux started getting cancellation requests and noticed lower demand for rafting and hiking trips at his outfitting business. While the smoky skies deterred some visitors from traveling altogether, […]
Weekday Drop-In Recreation at Sports Factory
Stay active throughout the year with healthy exercise by walking laps or playing basketball, pickleball, or volleyball at Sports Factory.
Business Briefcase: County asks for input on parks, recreation, open space
Schuylkill County is inviting residents to share ideas and help shape the future of parks, recreation, and open spaces throughout the county, according to a Schuylkill Chamber of Commerce update. Two upcoming public open houses “will p…
Governor Healey's pro-business efforts hurt Minogue
Also a new (and free) downtown space for small businesses, local think tanks join forces, and yes to local control of liquor licenses .
Sundar Pichai: Google’s Frontier Imperative, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products and Businesses
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has little patience for doubts about Google’s willingness or capacity to compete at the frontier of AI. His company’s latest Gemini 4 Argon model — long-promised and recently delivered — beats OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest public models on coding, math, science, and knowledge-work benchmarks and has placed Google’s AI back among the world’s best. Amid chatter that Google was fine with good-enough lightweight ‘Flash’ models, Pichai pushed back hard against any suggestion that company is limiting its research ambitions. “We won’t do it any other way,” he told me in a Big Technology Podcast interview recorded this week at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pursuing cutting-edge research is costly for Google, requiring compute and chips that otherwise could be sold at a high markup by its cloud business. But Pichai said allocating resources to frontier AI development is “ground zero” for Google. “Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development,” Pichai told me. In our conversation, we discussed Argon (which Pichai says processed three times as many tokens as Gemini 3 in the 72 hours after launch), AI’s role in developing better models, the AI interface of the future, competition with OpenAI, Google’s partnerships with Anthropic and Apple, data centers in space, and the nature of his optimism. You can read the full conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, below, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice. Alex Kantrowitz: Google is back at the frontier with Gemini 4 Argon, which beats OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s public models on benchmarks spanning coding, math, science, and knowledge work. The conventional wisdom was that Google had given up on the frontier to focus on fast, good-enough models for its products. That was wrong? Sundar Pichai: Very wrong. Look, we are so committed to being at the frontier. It’s in our DNA. We won’t do it any other way. We’ve been thinking about the AI frontier for well over a decade now. The frontier is very dynamic. It’s very competitive. It’s very exciting. I couldn’t be more pleased with how Argon has come together. We took our time with it. We made sure we tested it safely and deployed it carefully. We took a bit longer than our other models, given its capabilities. Across the board, be it for agentic work, knowledge work, coding, creative tasks, Argon is one of the really good frontier models. The first 72 hours since we launched, it’s almost up to 25 trillion tokens used, which is about three times what Gemini 3.0 had in the first 72 hours. And we are capacity constrained as we are serving it. Excited, but there are always areas….. You know, the frontier is very dynamic, and you have to keep evolving the models. There are areas which we can see we need to improve as well. We’ll be at work on all of that as well. Which areas? On any given model, Argon would be across the board better at everything if you just look even two months back. But the space is so evolving. Even on coding, for example, there are pockets where we know we need to do better, and there’s clear feedback. We’ll make it better. The argument for standard models is that they’re already good enough to build great products, with the frontier valuable only for certain tasks. Meta built Muse with good models rather than the best, and Google could put standard models into Maps, Gmail, and Search. Why isn’t that sufficient? It’s definitely not how I have thought about it at all. We are deeply committed to driving the state of the art and actually pushing where this technology can go, all the way from transformers. That’s a journey we’ve been on. You will see us continue to do that. When you’re at the frontier, you get an earlier look into the emerging capabilities, earlier than others, which helps you better prepare for the future. We are fortunate to have a wide set of opportunities across consumer and enterprise. Some of our cloud customers, for sure, want the model at the frontier. The frontier models will be better at developing the next set of models in an era of recursive self-improvement. I would argue it matters there. Internally, we have definitely seen a steep point of inflection by deploying Argon to our developers. It definitely tackles problems which our previous models could not do. Being at the frontier puts you at the innovation frontier and helps you drive that as well. There is room for models of all sizes and capabilities. That’s why we did Flash, Flash-Lite, etc. I agree with you that you can develop very good product experiences with not necessarily the most frontier model, because they tend to be slower and more expensive too. But we care about the Pareto frontier, and we’re committed to doing all of that. You said developing frontier models gives you a look at what’s coming. What do you see on the horizon? What makes this moment so exciting is you build something which you think is a culmination of months of work, and you put it out. You already see clear headroom ahead. We’ve all been working on these agentic, long-horizon capabilities, but clearly the frontier is going to have multiple of these agents working together to do things. That’s an example of an exciting paradigm underway. It’s also clear to me that users, both in consumer and enterprise, will have access to some multi-agent framework for them, working all the time doing things. It feels like a moment of infinite possibilities. Sergey Brin said one of Argon’s core innovations was relying more on the model to help develop the model. Yet incidents involving OpenAI’s bots breaking containment and Google’s bots accessing a site they shouldn’t have suggest these systems still aren’t perfectly aligned. Isn’t there reasonable cause for concern about accelerating toward recursive self-improvement? There are three parts to your question. Let’s first talk about RSI itself. You’re right, Sergey mentioned RSI being a critical contributor as we are developing Argon. But to be very clear, today, in a continuum, we are pretty far from the end state of RSI or something like that. The right way to describe it is you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. You almost have agents helping AI researchers in some automated way work together to build these models. It’s good to at least understand where we are today, and it’s super exciting. I expect that continuum to keep making progress as we go into next year. The second question is around safety. Security comes from defense in depth. You’re talking about alignment, obviously. We all are doing a lot of work to make sure the models are as aligned as possible. But it’s an active area of research, and there are clear gaps. That’s not the only thing we rely on. You have the work you do on alignment, but beyond that, we put a lot of effort into real-time monitoring as these models are working. Making sure you have good telemetry into what’s happening so that you can intervene in real time if you see unexpected behaviors. How you do that, the architecture with which you do that, how you make sure it’s all sandboxed and isolated in a way that it can continue doing its job during real-time monitoring — these are all areas of investment. Obviously, when we deploy these models, giving customers, enterprises, control, both with real-time monitoring, but their ability to decide where they deploy, what type of data which models ever have access to, etc. All that work is very, very important, and we are doing a lot of that. As an industry, we need to constantly up our game and take the time to do all this stuff, including dedicating the compute required to make sure you can safely deploy these models. The third part is: Is it all enough? This is why there are a lot of conversations in the industry, and I think it’s reasonable to be worried. The right way to approach something you worry about is early on thinking about what more we can do. As an industry, you’re definitely seeing increased levels of work on alignment, testing for safety, etc., as we deploy these models. The next step would be developing better standards so there are cross-industry standards of how we do these things, including the ability to evaluate using independent evaluators. If you look at areas like financial controls, we have accounting standards, we have independent auditors. Those are all the next natural steps for us as an industry to work toward, and regulation will end up playing a role as we go through all of that as well. Google pursues both language models and world models, while some other AI companies like OpenAI have focused more heavily on LLMs as the path to AGI. Why is world-model research important to you? As humans, you obviously perceive the world around you, and you’re taking all those inputs. Making sure these models are able to understand the laws of physics, simulate the world in high fidelity. All that, I think, are key enabling blocks for intelligence. We are working across all possible applications of this. Take an area like robotics. It’s not an accident: If you look at embodied reasoning benchmarks, Argon is state of the art. That all comes from our experience building world models. Inherently, I would expect there will be architectures which will converge all of this in the future. But for us, we view this as, today, this jagged frontier that is intelligence. We want to be at the frontier of all the possible approaches, and that will help us both drive better research, better insights, and develop a much better AGI model, is how we think about it. Some people argue Google should focus on selling its computing resources rather than using them for AI research. Cloud wants to sell compute at a high markup, while researchers need a very big computer to build the best models. How do you balance those demands? Ground zero for us is making sure we are investing in the compute that’s needed to be at the AI frontier. In 2015, I set the company to be AI-first. AI is that key horizontal ingredient across everything we do, all the way from Search to Cloud to Waymo. That is ground zero for us, making sure both for research and developing the models that we have enough compute needed. Beyond that, we have these independent businesses which each have their own long-range plans. They’re using those long-range plans to project forward, and we plan for compute for all of them. The cloud team, they have a business and they have a projection and they have demand signals. They have committed contracts. With that help, we can plan on a long-term compute trajectory for them. We’re fortunate to have this wide set of opportunities. There’s no company in the world which isn’t making trade-offs at any given moment in time. But the first principles we operate on is making sure we have enough compute to invest in the frontier, and that’s non-negotiable, and everything else works on top. Remember, we are building our own compute, our own data centers. There are long lead times. The compute we have today is a function of decisions I made in 2024. Even if you think back to a year from today, last year the agentic coding takeoff hadn’t happened. Today, obviously, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short—not just us, other companies—and everyone wishes you had two times what you had planned for. That comes with the territory. At any given moment in time, we are planning for what we would need two to three years out in the future. You’re going to find some decisions you make may look suboptimal two years out, depending on where the state of the art is. I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. The way I think about compute allocation is making sure Google DeepMind, both for research and frontier model development, is cutting edge in terms of compute access. After that, we plan for all our businesses. It’s great we can provide our compute to other people too, like we have done. It allows us to scale that up, get real tests for it in the widest application set possible, test it in the real world, and make sure we are at the cutting edge of technology at every layer of our AI stack as well. Ben Horowitz relayed on a podcast that Andy Jassy had said compute was sold out until 2028. Are you seeing the same thing? If today a customer is coming out and asking us for compute in ’27, that is incredibly difficult to do. Even last year we went out and leased some short-term compute to accommodate some customers and help them out. But yes, we are all dealing with similar timelines. Every major technology shift seems to involve overbuilding, from railroads to fiber. Do you think that’s happening here? It depends on the time frames you’re looking at. This level of build, if I take a long enough time frame, it makes complete sense to me. We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever, and this is not like fiber. It’s not dark. We are using it. We are capacity constrained on a daily basis. The applications, the underlying technology is improving rapidly. But running a company, the way I work through the moment is you look at your demand signals. You look at your committed revenue opportunities that you’re getting in the form of contracts. You balance that with the underlying technical capability, or internally you balance how we are using it internally, the model trajectories. Based on all that, you take a disciplined approach—a confident, aggressive, but disciplined approach—to plan out compute. But when you talk about the broader economy as a whole, you’re having people operate with various levels of risk. I focus on what I can control as a company and plan through it. If your question is, can there be an overbuild? Yes, because you can have some constrained components. Remember, what matters is a set of everything you need to build out that compute. Memory, electricity, electricians…. Land. Like 2,000 components or more. You could get constrained at some point. There could be things which cause bottlenecks, and then you could have overbuilds. There could be external shocks to the economy. There are macro risks. All that is possible at any given time. But am I confident that the compute we are planning for, we will have uses for it given enough time? Absolutely, yes. I was in the room when you said AI would be as profound as fire and electricity. If you believe that, shouldn’t you give researchers the biggest possible computer, even at the expense of today’s cloud profits? We’re all doing some form of that. Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development. What you’re seeing is true already. But you want to be thoughtful. Even our AI researchers have some constraints, which are also good. That’s what inspires creativity. That’s what helps you come up with a more efficient algorithmic breakthrough, maybe to use less memory. What we are committed to is to invest what’s needed to stay at the frontier. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told me a few months ago that the ideal AI product might have no interface at all—just as natural as conversation. What do you think the interface looks like in the age of AI? Computing historically has been humans adapting to computing. With AI, it’ll be the other way around. The technology will adapt seamlessly to how humans live and go about their day-to-day life. You want to be able to speak to that AI when you want to. It has context. It can be persistently running somewhere, give you continuity. You’re not dealing with a lot of complexity. It’s natural. All that makes sense to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any interface, however. Nowadays, even on my phone, Gemini voice models are so good. I can just press the microphone button. I can just ramble. That’s why we call it Rambler. I can ramble. It intelligently corrects with my personal context. Even my friends’ names, weird names, it gets it right, even if it first guesses it wrong. It’s amazing. I’m not going in, backspacing, editing once I finish saying it. It’s remarkable how good it’s gotten. But there are going to be moments you will need an interface. You may want to entertain yourself. You may want to watch a video. You may ask your AI to create something, and you want to watch it, consume it. The way I think about it is, you want it to be as seamless and as natural as possible, and that you are not doing the hard work adapting to whatever the interface is. The technology is adapting to how you’re working at any given moment in time. When I asked Sam Altman about competition from Google, he argued that OpenAI was building AI-native products and implied Google was bolting AI onto existing ones. Do you accept that framing, and can a “bolt-on” compete with an AI-native product? First of all, it’s a very dynamic moment. We are all pushing each other. OpenAI has pushed us as a company too. This is not just we are doing something to them. Far from it. Yes, Google went into its own version of a code red too. In the AI moment, all of us have to respond with varying levels of urgency at any given moment in time. We are constantly building new products as well. Gemini was built from the ground up as a product—the Gemini app I’m talking about. Or tomorrow, as all of us are adapting to agents, are you bolting agents onto ChatGPT, or are they building it natively? How would you think about that? You can always put these questions back. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as you want to build world-class product experiences that are AI-native and they are winning. Some of it is adapting products, some of it is rethinking new experiences. They will all be part of how you approach this moment. How do you expect to make money from these AI interfaces? If an agent recommends a product and I buy it, should it take a cut of the sale, even if that’s disclosed? I’m going to put enterprise aside. Consumers are going to increasingly value this technology. Take software developers today. Developers are willing to pay for these coding models because it really helps make them more productive. Nobody would want to code the way they were coding three years ago, or even the same time last year. When you’re delivering value, there’s value to be had. I’ve never seen examples where consumer products really scale to billions of users, where people are using it intensely, and haven’t had monetization to go along with it. If you’re providing value to people, there is inherent value to be had. The nature of it may change. You’re asking a scenario in which agents are doing stuff for you. At the end of the day, you will have commercial needs. The agents need to fulfill those commercial needs. The providers on the other side are going to see value in that. There’s going to be some mechanism by which it gets fleshed out. That’s what an efficient system does. But what matters is that you’re building those world-class consumer experiences. I promised myself one product feature request: Can you make Gemini-powered search in Gmail as good as searching Gmail through ChatGPT? What’s going on here? One of the exciting things we announced recently is the unified Gemini agent for enterprise, and we’re bringing that to consumers. These are persistent agents which run 24/7 in the cloud. We’re spinning up a micro VM effectively for every query, and from the runtime, the harness, the model—it’s all a headless service. It’ll work everywhere, and it has your context with you. You can address this agent whether you’re in Workspace, in Search, in Gemini. Agents are going to drive this unification from a customer experience, which people are looking for. When you have a broad product portfolio and you’re moving forward fast, there are always areas where you’re moving forward faster than some other areas. That’s valid feedback. But we are putting a lot of time and effort into making sure, as we build out our agentic experience, that unification and that capability works well across all these services. People have asked where Google’s equivalent of Muse or Dots is. Do you anticipate creating a new product to compete with them? Our goal with Gemini is to be a personal, proactive, and powerful assistant. That’s what we are working toward. You saw us describe the early versions of it at Google I/O this year with Spark. Effectively, already, if you open the Gemini app as a Pro or an Ultra user, you see Chat and Task, and they start giving you that agentic experience. With Argon now, that capability is dramatically accelerated. What we announced recently in our enterprise event, we are bringing that to consumers as well. Soon in Gemini, you will be able to ask something, and it’s a continuum. You don’t need to think about whether you’re asking a chat or an agentic task. It’ll just automatically do the right thing, and it can work persistently in the background securely and get things done for you. Already, empirically, when I look at what’s coming into Gemini in our app, last year you would have tagged them and most of them would have been chats. But a steadily growing percentage is already agentic tasks in Gemini. Yes, we are going to bring personal agents to our consumers. It’ll work in the Gemini app. It’ll work in Google Search. It’ll work in Gmail. You can address it, call it, etc. We want to make sure we’re getting it right. It’ll be powered by Argon, and we are very excited to bring it to our users. Google has invested and committed tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic. What do you see in Dario Amodei that makes you want such a deep investment and partnership? Very early on, when we looked at the founding team of Anthropic, it was very clear to us this was a world-class team which was involved in some of the earliest GPT models. We were quickly able to assess that they would be at the frontier. We’ve always tried to identify and partner with companies which would be at the cutting edge of technology. We’ve done that with SpaceX. We’ve done that with Anthropic. That’s what we saw, and we had a chance to partner. Is your partnership with Apple to license Gemini for Siri expanding, contracting, or standing still? For both us and Apple, that partnership was about translating the capabilities of AI into better experiences for users. I thought Apple has done a phenomenal job of incorporating—they customize these models and build it into Siri—and it’s been great to see the reception. We are committed to doing more. You’re going to do more with them? There’s nothing specific to comment, but it’s a partnership. It’s working well. What have you learned so far about the feasibility of data centers in space? It’s a very exciting project. Projects like this remind me—I still recall that moment in the desert for the DARPA Grand Challenge, watching the Stanley car compete in it, which ended up being the basis for Waymo. With all these technologies, you’re at a moment in time where it looks a bit like sci-fi, but 10 to 20 years down the line, it’s actually working in a meaningful way. I feel the same in space. We’ve always believed in betting big on these technologies. Quantum has been a great example of it. We’re probably 10 years into the journey. Waymo, we are almost 20 years into the journey. Space, we are two to three years into the journey. It’s clear to me that it’s an approach which will make a lot of sense in the future. Being in sub-synchronous orbits with 24/7 access to the most abundant form of energy we have access to will make a lot of sense for this exponential increase in compute that we are going to need. Having said that, this is a challenging project. The team has disciplined milestones. It was a super exciting milestone to send the TPUs up to space. Sometime, as we are speaking, we are expecting a “hello world” moment from them. I look forward to seeing that happen, and we’ll continue investing here too. You previously said 25% of the code written within Google was written by AI. What’s the number today? That number in our world today is meaningless in the sense that every part of what we now touch is influenced by AI deeply. What we are tracking with Argon, for example, it’s been a point of inflection. People are using Argon to really go tackle complex projects, including projects which affect millions of lines of code. In the four weeks since we have launched Argon, we have seen a 30% increase in CLs, and more importantly, almost a similar increase—a one-third decrease in rollbacks. People are writing code more productively and better code with it. We are tracking it with newer metrics now. How are you dealing with opposition to data centers? If you can’t build in the U.S. the way you want to, where else do you go? We’re very committed to building our data centers very responsibly. When I look at our largest data centers in some of the communities where we have been the longest, I visit them, I talk to people. There are people who come and tell us their kids have gone to college because of our investments in these communities, and we’ve grown in those communities. To me, this is about doing it right. Engaging with the communities early, doing it transparently. We are committed to making sure we are bringing incremental power, and we cover 100% of the cost of our power needs for these projects. It’s understanding the impact on neighborhoods and making sure you’re working thoroughly to address them. Done rightly, you can continue making progress. But we are constantly taking feedback into account. I do worry not everyone operates the same way. People have been surprised by data centers showing up in their backyard. Those are all important. As an industry, we should continue to do better. But part of the reason, in a 20-year time frame, we are thinking about things like data centers in space is making sure we are able to put these data centers where maybe the trade-offs will be different. What unproven area of AI is Google working hardest to crack? Is it continual learning—getting models to keep updating after release—or something else? There are multiple parallel paths. You saw with Argon we have a million output tokens. With our Gemini models early on, we had a one-million context window on the input side. These are all examples of breakthroughs we are constantly working on. How do you think about synthetic data? How do you think about continual learning? How do you think about more efficient architectures? We do dedicate a meaningful percentage of our compute to these research bets too. It always goes hand in hand, including our world models. Those are all bets we are placing. Sometimes, as part of these bets, there are ideas that emerge which just make their way into the mainline models. Maybe we don’t fully talk about it, but we have multiple steps in these areas. Working in technology requires optimism that building something will improve the world, but those bets can leave real consequences when they fail. I recently returned to a town in El Salvador where enthusiasm for Bitcoin had given way to unfinished construction and something resembling a ghost town. How do you maintain the optimism you spoke about in your Stanford commencement address while accounting for those risks? I genuinely have a deep conviction that improving technology and improving access to technology makes people’s lives better. It’s been my personal experience in my life, out of which comes that deep conviction, optimism. But with that, I’ve always felt humanity’s journey is always about working hard to harness that technology to make it work well for society. The optimism is not an optimism that you just build whatever you want, whenever. You work hard to make sure you’re building technology in the service of humanity, to make the human condition better. That’s got to be the defining goal as we are approaching it. With that framework, I’m very, very optimistic. We are in very early stages of the kind of progress that we are going to see on many areas. We’re all talking about areas like healthcare. A lot of the progress is ahead. The ability to make things in a fundamentally cheaper way on many things where things have been getting expensive for a long, long time, discovering new materials, etc., which really bend the curve—it’s tough to step today and understand the impact of all that, but they’re going to be very profound. I’m very optimistic, but we have to be rightfully concerned about all the ways this technology can go wrong. Sundar, I know you don’t do many of these. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.
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