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Kansas manufacturing business responds to candidates’ conflicting accounts of tariff effects
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The two major party candidates for U.S. Senate diverged in a debate Wednesday night on whether tariffs were helping or hurting a Salina manufacturing business they both visited. A spokesperson for the business, however, denied U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall’s claim that tariffs were contributing to its growth. Tim Henry, chief financial […]
'Biermann' Doc Film on German Political Singer for Trump Era: Viennale
Jens Meurer discusses his doc, screening at Austria's Viennale and showing Wolf Biermann narrating his life in various iterations of Germany, and how the outspoken artist inspired 'The Lives of Others.'
Smart people react to a growing wave of threats to the internet
Execs and analysts are warning that major cybersecurity threats could leave critical systems — from energy and water to healthcare — especially exposed.
Changing shape of healthcare careers: Medical AI, Bioinformatics and Health Data Science
Changing shape of healthcare careers: Medical AI, Bioinformatics and Health Data Science
City College’s computer science department adapts to AI technology
City College’s computer science courses and instructors have had to adapt to AI as they teach students how to use it properly and create a future curriculum for a potential AI major. Since 2022, schools have been concerned with the use of AI by students to cheat or plagiarize their assignments. In the last four...
Essay: 'Bridgers,' or the people quietly lowering the political temperature
In this contributed essay, Majority in the Middle Executive Director Shannon Watson explores the people who bridge people together, even in turbulent political times.
Bengals vs. Ravens Injury Report: Lamar Jackson limited again
Lamar Jackson remains a major question mark for Week 7.
The One Chart That Explains Why Netflix Cleaned House
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) Yeah, I’ll be honest: I went with a clickbait-y headline today. One chart? That explains everything? That’s as clickbait-y as it gets. But let’s be real. I’m analyzing a dataset that I’ve built over six years, and c’mon, I never write articles which feature just one chart! If you think this article—which includes a level of data detail unheard of in journalism twenty years ago—is clickbait, fine by me. Really, what I’m doing is using data to explain Netflix’s recent strategy changes, since the story of the month is the turbulence at Netflix. First, head of content Bela Bajaria was fired. Then head of film Dan Lin followed her to the unemployment ranks. (Along with, sadly, 1,000 other Netflix workers.) And then Netflix delivered a “sub-optimal” earnings report, which continued their year-long stock price slide. Then came a flood of articles explaining why all this is happening. (Mine’s coming shortly, rest assured.) I realized I had the perfect chart to explain Netflix’s woes. Specifically, Nielsen’s weekly top ten charts. Usually I focus on one or two weeks in my Streaming Ratings Reports, but sometimes it’s worth stepping back to look at the larger story. And hoo boy, what a story. This article is my annual (plus three months) follow-up to one of my most popular articles of last year. (And a topic I’ve been visualizing for the last half decade.) Subscribe Netflix’s Share of The Nielsen Charts Continues to Decline
2 major health insurance companies cancel Medicare Advantage plans covering 1 million people
The two companies are the largest private health insurance companies for older adults in the U.S.
UPMC Health Plan's Food as Medicine Pilot for Members With Diabetes
The pilot pairs grocery stipends and community health worker support with members who have unmanaged diabetes and unmet social needs.
Redesign Health, ARC Global merge in $2B deal to accelerate health system innovation
Redesign Health is making a major push deeper into health system-led innovation, merging with Sheba Medical Center’s innovation arm ARC Global. | The three organizations—Redesign Health, ARC Global and AVIA—work with more than 100 health systems on five continents, and the companies and products built across their networks have reached more than 100 million patients worldwide.
Feds allege $2 billion in California health care fraud, 15 charged
Federal authorities announced charges against 15 people, including six medical professionals, accusing them of health care fraud schemes worth $2 billion, including sham substance abuse treatment programs, unnecessary medical procedures and bogus hospice services.
Nintendo Switch 2 Gets Its First Software-Only Jailbreak, With Help From OpenAI Codex
Sammy Hajhamid, a security researcher who goes by pepsipu online, has released ns2jb, a software-only jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2 that runs on the latest 23.0.1 firmware. To show it off, Hajhamid modded Mario Kart World, a Switch 2 exclusive, and also dropped Peter Griffin, Hatsune Miku,...
Senate Health Committee Holds Hearing on Impacts of H.R.1
Senate Health Committee Holds Hearing on Impacts of H.R.1 TRENTON – The Senate Health and Human Services Committee, led by Chairman Joe Vitale, held a hearing today on the impacts of federal House Resolution 1 (H.R.1) and how New Jersey residents can adapt to major cuts to programs like Medicaid. The committee heard from[...]
Funding Cuts Push Global Health Partnerships Toward Local Ownership
Speakers at IDWeek 2026 urged shifting global health partnerships from donor-recipient models to shared, locally led ownership as funding contracts.
BioNexus KC celebrates ‘regional backbone’ connecting science, talent, tech and momentum
The scale of opportunities within Kansas City’s bio health industry would’ve been challenging to imagine even just five years ago, said Dennis Ridenour, touting a streak of groundbreakings, collaborations, game-changing announcements, and major investments — all rallying together the right people and institutions.
Huntington startup creates landmark-inspired pajamas and gifts
Huntington-based Oyster and Arrow creates hand-illustrated pajamas and gifts inspired by Long Island landmarks. Founded by Emily Greany, the company emphasizes local coastal motifs and has grown to 25 retail partners, with wholesale driving most of its revenue. The brand aims to expand along the East Coast while maintaining personal connections.
76ers Have One Major Advantage Cavaliers Can't Prepare For
The Philadelphia 76ers' revamped roster faces a major test against Cleveland’s continuity.
Op-ed: Brooklyn’s small businesses can’t wait any longer on child care
Brooklyn is home to more than 74,000 businesses, and the vast majority are small. You cannot build a competitive workforce, or a healthy economy, on top of a broken child care system.
Republican Senate candidate Bert Mizusawa talks energy, immigration, AI, Trump at UVA Center for Politics
With less than two weeks until Virginians hit the polls for midterm elections, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bert Mizusawa took center stage at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics Thursday evening for his “Evening with Maj. Gen. Bert Mizusawa” event.
Mets Morning News: The quiet before the World Series storm
Your Thursday morning dose of Mets and Major League Baseball news, notes, and links.
How to watch Navarrete vs Foster and Smith vs Puello: Combat sports on DAZN this weekend
Find out how to watch Navarrete vs Foster, Dalton Smith vs Alberto Puello, RWS Muay Thai and Hitman Fight League on DAZN this weekend with fight dates, cards and viewing details.
Health department issues tips for return home after chemical leak evacuation
The Toledo - Lucas County Health Department has issued recommendations as evacuees from the North Toledo chemical leak return home.
Zero Republican political science professors found at 4 major Pennsylvania universities, research shows
(The College Fix) — Professors registered as Democrats outnumber colleagues registered as Republicans by a 28 to one ratio in […]
Minors account for half of complaints against 'academy-style' entertainment agencies
A total of 366 dispute resolution requests involving 'academy-type' entertainment agencies, those that train their clients, provide auditions or even guarantee certain opportunities for a cost, were filed between 2023 and June this year.
SIA in-flight entertainment to get major upgrade, including larger screens, Bluetooth pairing
SINGAPORE – Travellers can expect a personal movie theatre experience on Singapore Airlines (SIA) routes after upgrades to its in-flight entertainment system, which will include touchscreens measuring...
Glendale business shooting leaves 1 injured, suspect in custody
Glendale Police are investigating a shooting near 43rd Avenue and Bethany Home Road at a business that left one person seriously injured. The shooting prompted a major police response outside a Fry's grocery store.
Private business fortunes reveal overlooked source of wealth and inequality in America
A majority of Americans blame billionaires for the nation's ever-growing income and wealth divide. But economists Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar say there's a much larger but little-known cadre of very rich ...
El-Sayed’s loyalty to America, Rogers’ loyalty to Trump and other takeaways from Michigan Senate debate
The Michigan Senate debate between Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers was bitterly personal and ferociously contested — as befits a contest that could decide the chamber’s majority.
Tracking tsunamis triggered by extreme weather
As much of Western Europe faced record-breaking temperatures and extended drought this summer, Croatia experienced another weather event that could also set a worrisome precedent.Over the course of two weeks, a series of meteorological tsunamis (meteotsunamis) struck Croatia’s Adriatic coast, alarming both residents and tourists. Social media posts showed flooded seaside promenades and people walking through knee-deep water. Fortunately, no deaths or major damage were reported.In a world where natural disasters seem to be increasing, meteotsunamis — tsunamis caused by rapid weather changes – rarely make headline news. But warming sea temperatures and changing atmospheric conditions may help explain why these phenomena could become more common, especially in shallower seas and inland lakes with wide coastal shelves.“We have definitely become more aware of them, and there have been a lot more reports of these events in the last 10 years,” says Jadranka Šepić, an associate professor of environmental physics at the University of Split whose research focuses on efforts to track meteotsunamis in real time. She is also one of Croatia’s ambassadors for Science Comes to Town (SCTT), a European Commission-funded programme aimed at making research more accessible to the public.Šepić sees two possible reasons for the apparent increase in meteotsunamis. One is that photos and videos shared on social media are providing more empirical evidence, while rising air and sea temperatures could also play a role. The geophysicist “cannot say with certainty” that warming is a contributing factor because research is still ongoing. “But I can say that previously in Croatia we might have had one exceptionally strong event every 10 or 15 years, and one strong event every five years, and within 15 days this summer we had five strong events,” Šepić notes. “This is not typical.”‘A fist against the sea surface’Unlike tsunamis that are triggered by underwater earthquakes or volcanoes, meteotsunamis are caused by sudden changes in atmospheric pressure combined with other rapidly developing weather events, such as thunderstorms. The effect “is like pushing a fist against the sea surface,” Šepić explains. The resulting oscillation intensifies as it reaches shallower water, and “can be far more destructive than a wind-driven wave because meteotsunamis are accompanied by very strong currents than can penetrate much deeper inland.” The meteotsunami, she continues, “then behaves the same as a tsunami — they slow down and grow as the sea shallows, and then grow further in places like harbours due to further shallowing and narrowing. When they come ashore, they can be very destructive — taking everything with them out to sea and then taking it back.”Croatian research institutions have tracked such sea oscillations since the 1930s because the relatively shallow Adriatic Sea is prone to meteotsunamis. The strongest recorded so far was in June 1978, according to the Adriatic Meteotsunami Catalogue, which is supported by the European Research Council (ERC), Croatian Science Foundation and the country’s leading research institutions. During that event, six-metre-high waves flooded the coastal town of Vela Luka on Korčula Island, causing major damage.Other meteotsunami “hotspots” in Europe include the Mediterranean Sea as well the Atlantic coastal shelves off France, Portugal and Spain. In June 2006, a meteotsunami with five-metre-high waves swept through the harbour of Ciutadella in Spain’s Balearic Islands, causing widespread damage to boats. Several less powerful events were reported in the Balearics and off the coast of Spain this summer, leading to some beach closures.Forecasting is challenging because of how quickly meteotsunamis can develop and their uncertain trajectory. Šepić is involved in two ERC-funded research projects — SHExtreme and MeD-Track — aimed in part at strengthening monitoring and real-time data collection. Access to accurate and immediate information is essential for early-warning systems.Early exposure to meteotsunamisŠepić first learned about meteotsunamis from her parents while growing up in Croatia. She later had the opportunity to investigate these events during her master and doctoral studies in geophysics at the University of Zagreb. The geophysicist has also conducted research at the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries in Split, the University of the Balearic Islands in Palma de Mallorca and the Institute of Ocean Science in the Canadian province of British Columbia.Projects like SCTT are important to raise awareness about research and inspiring young people to pursue studies and careers in science, notes Šepić. She credits her colleagues at the University of Split and the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries for their community outreach and engagement in the European project, which includes partner universities and institutions in Brest (France) and Kiel (Germany). As an example of town-gown collaboration, Šepić highlights her own university’s ‘Oceanographers on the Island’ programme. This initiative offers workshops and hands-on learning for children living on numerous Croatian islands.“It is a great privilege for Split to be involved in a project like Science Comes to Town, which is the first of its kind in the European Union," Šepić says. As for encouraging new generations of scientists, “This is a great effort, and I hope that we will see an effect in a few years.”Science|Business, which connects policymakers, academics and industry through its news reporting, analysis and events, is an SCTT partner.
Transportation Secretary Addresses NBAA-BACE, Announces Major AAM Milestone
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy addressed NBAA-BACE in Las Vegas and announced a major AAM milestone: the first manufacturer approved to operate eVTOL aircraft with passengers aboard for market research.
A company says its polls were fake. Here’s what happened
A national polling organization revealed on Tuesday that the vast majority of its data had been fabricated, saying it was an “experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities" of the modern political polling industry.
Trump administration wants to reconsider permit for Massachusetts offshore wind project
The Trump administration is asking a federal judge to let it reconsider a major federal permit granted for a large offshore wind farm, making it the fourth project the Republican
Southern Ill. man arrested in check fraud case involving Paducah business
A multi-agency theft investigation in western Kentucky led to a southern Illinois man’s arrest.
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WKYC (Cleveland) is your source for breaking news, Northeast Ohio weather, traffic, and live coverage in Cleveland and across the region. Get the latest updates from the WKYC team — from major local headlines and investigations to severe weather, community stories, and the moments everyone’s talking about. Watch live newscasts, stream breaking coverage, and catch up on the top stories shaping Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and surrounding communities. Subscribe for: • Cleveland breaking news + live updates • Northeast Ohio weather forecasts and severe weather alerts • Investigations and accountability reporting • Community stories across the region • Major events, sports, and local explainers WKYC — Cleveland news and weather, live and on demand. 🔗 More: https://www.wkyc.com/
Johnson pitches election-year budget with focus on ‘fair share’ taxes on businesses
Johnson’s proposal doubles as his re-election message as he campaigns not only against a crowded mayoral field, but a majority of the City Council he has battled.
Minneapolis mental health crisis response program ‘thrown into chaos’
The program that sends unarmed mental health professionals to some 911 calls is in limbo after the council rejected a new vendor to do the work.
Modern industrial building near interstate interchange offers flexibility for businesses
A modern industrial building with exceptional access to two major interstate highways offers a desirable location in northwest Sioux Falls with the ability to adapt for various business needs.
BioWare Becomes First Major Casualty Of Saudi Arabia's EA Takeover
When news came out that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had taken a majority stake in Electronic Arts last September, it was clear to anyone familiar with Saudi Arabia, EA, private equity, or capitalism that the move would make an already terrible gaming company even worse. I wrote as much at the time, and though…
How GSN Doctoral Residents are Approaching Care for Military Women’s Health
A Navy nurse and GSN doctoral resident redesigned an Okinawa maternity unit, cutting off-guideline staffing from 18% to below 12%.
Seneca begins $8.9M sports lounge project at Niagara casino
The Seneca Nation’s gaming enterprise, Seneca Resorts & Casinos, has begun construction on an $8.9 million Seneca Sports Lounge at its Niagara location, adding another major project to a growing list of capital investments across its properties. The venue is being built on the west concourse near the Bear’s Den Showroom, in the former Blues […]
Anthropic adds former Harvard science dean to oversight body
Anthropic said on Wednesday that Christopher Stubbs, former dean of science at Harvard University, had joined its oversight body, which holds the power to appoint a majority of the AI startup's board.Here are some details:
How will World Series ratings fare for Rays-Brewers?
After riding high on the Los Angeles Dodgers for two consecutive World Series, Major League Baseball will likely fall down to earth a bit this season. The Tampa Bay Rays and Milwaukee Brewers will start their best-of-seven series on Friday in what could be MLB’s last hurrah for quite some time as the league and…
Jefferson County Health Department Pays $2.25M to Settle Data Breach Lawsuit
Jefferson County Health Department, a public health agency for Jefferson County in Hillsboro, Missouri, has agreed to settle class action litigation that Jefferson County Health Department in Missouri has agreed to pay $2.25 million to settle a class action lawsuit stemming from a 2022 data breach affecting almost 116,000 individuals.
Should the pulpit be political? 2819 Pastor Philip Anthony Mitchell shares his view.
AJC producer Najja Parker asks Philip Anthony Mitchell about pastors’ role in politics and what could be lost if the Black church label disappears.
Oregon to increase 2027 payments to care organizations for Health Plan members
Next year, Oregon will pay an average of nearly $630 more per member every month to the organizations arranging providers for the vast majority of Oregon’s 1.4 million Medicaid members […]
Canada wants to expand its LNG business. Critics raise red flags
As Canada’s LNG exports grow, critics raise concerns over human rights abuses linked to major corporate investors.
Yankees Reveal Major Update on Brian Cashman Future With Team
The New York Yankees have made a decision on general manager Brian Cashman.
Xbox's Official Shakeup Continues Through 2027 with New Rounds of Layoffs
Xbox is continuing its major "reset"
Midterm Election Update: Medicaid Changes
Major federal changes to Medicaid eligibility and financing from the 2025 reconciliation law are coming, including new work requirements that will affect millions of Medicaid enrollees. KFF’s fact sheet provides an overview of what has changed, what is still ahead, and what the public thinks about Medicaid heading into the midterms.
Who you got in the World Series, Brewers or Rays?
The World Series kicks off in two days. And some number of days after that, we will have debutant champion in Major League Baseball. Yes, for the first time since 1980, the World Series is being contested by two teams that have never won it before. So who are you rooting for? This is an […]
National Business Capital Expands to West Coast, Appoints Veteran Investment Banker Eric D. Coonrod to Lead Institutional Partnerships
New California office marks a major milestone in National Business Capital’s continued expansion and investment in
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.
How knocking on doors can help beat measles
“As measles outbreaks spread in the U.S., it may be time to learn how other countries get their outbreaks under control,” writes Raj Panjabi.
UK approves new gas field in the North Sea amid concerns about energy security
The UK government has approved the development of a major new gas field in the North Sea amid rising concerns globally about energy security and the effect of climate policies on energy bills.
Hurricanes 6, Canucks 3
Nikolaj Ehlers, Logan Stankoven, and Nicolas Deslauriers each had two goals to lead the Carolina Hurricanes to a 6-3 win over the Vancouver Canucks at Rogers Arena on Tuesday night. The win gives Carolina eight wins in their last nine games and they also have a 2-1-0 record during this road trip. Deslauriers scored the […]
Carolina Hurricanes Dealt Major Dylan Larkin Trade News Amid Rumors
Per reports from The Detroit Free Press, Dylam Larkin has extended his trade list to 10 NHL teams, expanding on what was a group of three teams. The Dylan Larkin trade saga has been in full swing since the Detroit Red Wings star requested a trade from the organization amid several different rumors. Now, it […] The post Carolina Hurricanes Dealt Major Dylan Larkin Trade News Amid Rumors appeared first on HEAVY.
Zero Republican political science professors found at 4 major Pennsylvania universities, research finds
ANALYSIS: Democrat professors outnumber Republican colleagues 28 to 1 in Pennsylvania political science departments Professors registered as Democrats outnumber colleagues registered as Republicans by…
💪 Chivas beat Necaxa and snap at América's heels
Chivas de Guadalajara earned a valuable 1-0 win over Necaxa on Matchday 13 of the Liga MX Apertura 2026 tournament, a result that lifts them into second place in the overall standings. An own goal bre...
Several Santa Rosa County business owners report major damage or total loss of property
MILTON, Fla. -- Santa Rosa County estimates the storm caused more than $76-million in damages.
Justice Kagan says Supreme Court has damaged democracy with recent rulings
The liberal justice took aim at the conservative majority’s rulings on the Voting Rights Act, campaign finance and partisan gerrymandering.
Ohio State faces a major test without Julian Sayin
Who will be the Buckeyes' next signal caller in Sayin's absence?
White House officials fear a post-midterms Trump rampage
President Donald Trump still has two weeks to salvage his Republican congressional majorities and defy expectations of a midterm wipeout. But all around him, aides and allies are bracing for what happens if he fails. CNN’s Kristen Holmes reports.
Justice Elena Kagan accuses Supreme Court’s conservative majority of undermining democracy
The liberal justice took aim at various recent rulings, including one that paved the way for rampant partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts.
Nearly $1 million worth of Pokémon and sports trading cards stolen in FedEx truck theft
The truck was broken into on Oct. 13 outside a company called Professonal Sports Authenticator that verifies memorabilia.
Nearly $1 million worth of Pokémon and sports trading cards stolen in FedEx truck theft
The truck was broken into on Oct. 13 outside a company called Professonal Sports Authenticator that verifies memorabilia.
Nearly $1 million worth of Pokémon and sports trading cards stolen in FedEx truck theft
The truck was broken into on Oct. 13 outside a company called Professonal Sports Authenticator that verifies memorabilia.
Nearly $1 million worth of Pokémon and sports trading cards stolen in FedEx truck theft
The truck was broken into on Oct. 13 outside a company called Professonal Sports Authenticator that verifies memorabilia.
Fears of a post-midterms Trump rampage spur ‘brutal’ internal jockeying
President Donald Trump still has two weeks to salvage his Republican congressional majorities and defy expectations of a midterm wipeout. But all around him, aides and allies are bracing for what happens if he fails.
Exclusive | Democrats Make a Million-Dollar Bet on Florida Governor’s Race
National Democrats have largely withheld major funding for Democrat David Jolly, but are seeing a late-race opportunity.
Xbox Game Pass Reportedly Getting 'Major Overhaul,' Will Feature 'À La Carte' Options
Microsoft is reportedly planning a substantial revamp of Xbox Game Pass that will allow subscribers to choose the features they want in an à la carte fashion. The report comes by way of a new Fortune profile piece on Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.
Former Netflix and Tubi Producer To Launch Shortee, A Vertical Streaming and Gaming App
Nelson Moses Lassiter, an Emmy-nominated producer known for his work on Netflix’s major international hits and for creating original films at Tubi, is launching his venture. Shortee, a mobile entertai...
Larry Gies Pledges Another $100 Million To His Namesake Business School
Larry Gies welcomes Illinois business majors during a signing day ceremony at Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (Photo by Fred Zwicky / University of Illinois Ur...
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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A note to readers: Science, accountability and elections
Dear readers, As early voting begins, I wanted to share some news — and why it connects to the decisions we make at the ballot box. I’ve been selected for the inaugural cohort of the South Atlantic Climate Journalism Hub mentorship program, hosted by Covering Climate Now. I’m excited to join this group, learn from scientists and fellow journalists, and expand my science reporting. Science directly ties to governance. Local officials make decisions about where development goes, how infrastructure is maintained, what emergency preparations receive funding, and how communities rebuild after disasters. Understanding the evidence behind those decisions helps us evaluate whether our government is serving us well. Here in western North Carolina, those connections are all around us, in Lake Lure and beyond. Flood maps inform decisions about property and development. Engineering assessments help identify risks at dams and bridges. Rainfall forecasts guide emergency preparations. Geological information helps explain landslide hazards. Water testing gives communities information they need to assess conditions. Meteorologists’ knowledge and public perception of weather events shape public safety. Each involves scientific or technical knowledge. Each also raises questions about public responsibility: What did officials know? How did they use that information? What did they tell the public? What did taxpayers receive for their money? A study can identify a problem. Elected officials still have to decide what to do about it, how to pay for it, and how to explain their choices. Reporting should examine both the evidence and the response. That is where I want to strengthen my work. My reporting on Helene recovery, infrastructure, flooding, public safety, and public spending has repeatedly brought me to questions that require scientific expertise alongside public records. This mentorship may help me better understand the research, ask more precise questions, and explain the answers clearly. I also bring the perspective of someone living with these concerns. I live downstream of Lake Lure Dam, and landslides affected my property during Helene. Those experiences bring urgency to my questions. Careful reporting helps establish the answers. Readers deserve to know what the evidence shows, where uncertainty remains, and whether officials accurately describe the information guiding their decisions. You also deserve scrutiny of proposed solutions: what they cost, what they are expected to accomplish, and what risks remain. Access to that information matters. As a mostly deaf journalist who relies on written communication, I will continue pressing for written public warnings, records, and explanations that people can read and use in real time. As you consider the candidates seeking your vote, consider how they approach evidence, preparedness, and transparency. Do they support local journalism, even when it’s not parroting a press release? Do they explain weather events clearly in plain English and explain their decisions after them? Make supporting records available? Acknowledge uncertainty? Follow through when a report identifies a risk? Those are practical questions about governing. Thank you for supporting Cops & Congress and the work that makes these questions part of the public conversation. I’m grateful to David Dickson and the CC Now team for this opportunity, and I look forward to bringing what I learn back to you. Annie DanceEditor & Publisher, Cops & Congress — Learn more about this newsletter, ethics policy, how you can help shape this work, and support it. Follow on X and Facebook. Send constructive criticism, fan mail, and tips with public documents for future stories: CopsandCongress@gmail.com ICYMI: View the Cops & Congress archive — Annie Dance is the publisher of Cops & Congress, a newsletter that analyzes what happens when crime, courts, disaster, democracy, and small-town policies collide. Views expressed here are covered by the First Amendment. Dance has a Bachelor of Arts from Manhattan University in Communication with a focus in Journalism and Government. She has been a journalist for over 20 years. Share Upgrade now or give a gift subscription
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