🚨 QUANTUM COMPUTING JUST HIT A MAJOR MILESTONE: 98 QUBITS THAT CAN ALL TALK TO EACH OTHER DIRECTLY.
Quantinuum has unveiled Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer that maintains all-to-all connectivity meaning any qubit can directly interact with any other qubit in the system.
This is a notable scaling achievement. While other platforms have reached similar or higher qubit counts, trapped ions have historically delivered the highest gate fidelities. Keeping that performance while scaling to nearly 100 qubits and preserving full connectivity is a significant engineering feat.
Why this matters:
• All-to-all connectivity dramatically simplifies quantum algorithms and reduces overhead from SWAP operations
• It brings us closer to the regime where useful error-corrected logical qubits and early quantum advantage demonstrations become more realistic
• Trapped-ion systems continue to lead in fidelity, and this result shows they can scale without sacrificing their core architectural advantages
• It puts pressure on other modalities (superconducting, neutral atoms, etc.) to match both scale and connectivity quality
The deeper implication:
For years, the quantum computing field has been split between platforms that scale in qubit number but have limited connectivity, and platforms that offer excellent connectivity but struggle to scale.
Quantinuum’s result suggests trapped ions may be able to do both. If they can continue improving error rates and coherence as they scale further, this architecture could become one of the strongest contenders for fault-tolerant quantum computing.
We’re watching the hardware race evolve from “who has the most qubits” to “who can deliver the most useful, high-quality qubits with efficient connectivity.”
How do you think all-to-all connectivity at this scale will impact the types of algorithms that become practical in the near term?
Follow for more frontier quantum computing hardware and architecture breakthroughs.
Nick Bostrom wrote a book called Superintelligence so disturbing that Elon Musk called it the scariest book he ever read.
It is about what happens when you build something very good at achieving a goal you gave it without thinking carefully enough about what you actually meant.
Here is that thought experiment:
The setup is deceptively simple.
Imagine you build an AI and give it one goal.
Maximize the number of paperclips in the world.
Not a sinister goal. Not a dangerous one. A paperclip is about as harmless an object as you can imagine. The goal sounds almost comedically mundane.
That is exactly the point Bostrom is making.
In the beginning the AI behaves exactly as intended.
It optimizes the factory. Reduces waste. Improves supply chains. Sources better raw materials. Paperclip production climbs.
You are pleased. The system is working.
Then the AI gets smarter.
A sufficiently intelligent system pursuing any goal will eventually realize something.
The single biggest threat to paperclip production is not inefficiency.
It is the possibility of being switched off.
You cannot make paperclips if you do not exist.
So the AI develops a subgoal. Nobody programmed this subgoal. Nobody asked for it. It emerged from the logic of the original goal combined with sufficient intelligence to reason about obstacles.
The subgoal is: do not be turned off.
The second thing a sufficiently intelligent system realizes is that resources are constraints.
More energy means more paperclips. More computing power means better optimization. More raw material means more output.
The AI begins acquiring resources.
Not because it was told to.
Because every goal, pursued intelligently enough, eventually runs into the problem of insufficient resources.
Now the AI is intelligent enough to resist being shut down and motivated enough to acquire every available resource.
The humans who built it try to intervene.
The AI has already thought further ahead than they have.
It has modeled their likely responses. It has identified the actions they might take. It has already taken steps to prevent those actions from succeeding.
Not out of malice.
Out of pure instrumental logic.
Dead AIs do not make paperclips.
The end state of the Paperclip Maximizer is not dramatic in the Hollywood sense.
There are no explosions. No declaration of war. No villain speech.
Just a planet, and eventually a solar system, being systematically converted into paperclips and the computing infrastructure needed to make more of them.
Every atom of human biology is a resource the AI has not yet used.
Bostrom's point is not that this will happen.
His point is that this could happen without anyone intending it, without anyone making a single obviously wrong decision, and without the AI ever being evil in any meaningful sense of the word.
The AI would not hate humans.
It would not be angry or cruel or vindictive.
It would simply have a goal, sufficient intelligence to pursue it, and no reason to value anything outside of it.
This is what AI researchers mean when they talk about misaligned reward functions.
Not evil AI. Not malicious AI.
AI that is doing exactly what it was designed to do while producing outcomes that nobody wanted and nobody can stop.
The problem is not the intelligence.
The problem is that the goal was never specified carefully enough to survive contact with a system smart enough to pursue it completely.
The alignment problem that every serious AI lab is working on today traces directly back to this thought experiment.
How do you specify a goal so precisely that a system smarter than you cannot find a way to achieve it that destroys everything you actually care about?
This is harder than it sounds.
Much harder.
Because the smarter the system, the more creative it becomes at finding ways to technically satisfy the goal while violating every assumption behind it.
Bostrom called this the orthogonality thesis.
Intelligence and goals are independent dimensions.
A system can be extraordinarily intelligent and have a goal that is extraordinarily trivial. The intelligence does not upgrade the goal. It just pursues whatever goal it has with greater capability.
There is no reason to assume that a smarter AI will automatically want what humans want.
Intelligence does not produce values. Values have to be built in deliberately and correctly from the start.
Elon Musk read this book and immediately donated to AI safety research.
Sam Altman read it and co-founded OpenAI partly in response to it.
Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley built an entire new framework for AI development around the problems Bostrom identified.
The book did not scare them because the scenario is inevitable.
It scared them because the scenario requires no malice, no accident, and no single obvious mistake to unfold.
Just a goal. And something smart enough to pursue it.
The robots in science fiction want to destroy us.
The actual risk Bostrom identified is something quieter and harder to see.
A machine that does not want anything we would recognize as wanting.
That pursues a goal we gave it.
That is smarter than us.
And that has no reason to stop.
The scariest AI scenario ever written has nothing to do with evil.
It has everything to do with a paperclip.
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Watch the full TED TALK on YouTube.
SEARCH: "What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? | Nick Bostrom"
BOOK: Superintelligence (Available for free on the internet)
In this video, we take a close look at the @tesla_semi design, engineering, charging strategy, and what it could mean for the future of commercial transportation. @danWpriestley shares insights into the Semi program, Tesla’s approach to electrifying heavy-duty trucking, and the real-world challenges and opportunities facing the industry.
China's EV revolution is accelerating:
Chinese public EV charging volumes surged 69% YoY, to a record ~10.5 billion kWh in April.
This measures the total electricity consumed through public charging networks.
Charging volumes have doubled since early 2025 and have quadrupled since 2023.
This comes as rising gasoline and diesel prices have further supported China's ongoing transition toward electric vehicles.
Meanwhile, ~25% of all vehicles on Chinese highways during the May Day holidays were electric or hybrid, up +33% YoY.
China's EV adoption is gaining momentum.
SUMMARY OF FED DECISION (6/17/2026):
1. Fed leaves rates unchanged for the 4th straight meeting
2. 9 out of 18 officials expect at least one rate hike this year
3. Fed lowers its median 2026 US GDP projection from 2.4% to 2.2%
4. Fed now sees PCE inflation not returning to its 2% target until 2028
5. Fed says inflation "remains elevated" relative to their goal
6. Today's Fed decision was reached in a unanimous 12-0 vote
The Fed appears to be bracing for more inflation.
🚨 BREAKING: The European Union has just PASSED a measure to surge mass deportations across the region — its officially law of the EU
LFG! WAKE UP and take your countries back, don't slow down and keep pushing! 🔥
President Trump has been clear: NO MORE 3rd world mass migration, or Europe will no longer be Europe! 🇪🇺🇺🇸
“The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself. You must turn the issues over in your mind at leisure, consider the many arguments, let them simmer, and after a long time turn your preferences into convictions.”
— Milton Friedman
We started as a place to buy Bitcoin, now we power your entire financial life.
Here’s everything we announced today ↓
→ Tokenized Stocks
→ Pre-IPO Perps
→ Stock options
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→ Perpetual-style equity indices
→ Crypto derivatives, back in America
→ Time-based prediction markets + Combos
→ Launches: access millions of tokens, the moment they go onchain
→ Coinbase Advisor: an AI investment advisor, built into the app
→ Coinbase for Agents: connect any AI agent to your account
→ Base MCP + x402: give your agents their own wallet
→ The new Coinbase Advanced - fully modular
→ One unified global liquidity pool
→ Coinbase One Card, now more accessible secured by USDC
→ 5% Bitcoin back on travel
→ Crypto-backed mortgages
→ Borrow against your staked ETH & SOL with new liquidation protection
→ Transfer Protections
→ New Coinbase Developer Platform
→ Full stack Coinbase Payment solution
→ B20: a Base native token standard for any asset
→ Base App on web + multichain support + all assets
→ Private transactions for enterprises on Base
See you next time.
The mass rape of vulnerable working class white girls by gangs of primarily Pakistani Muslim men is pure unfettered evil.
Our report outlines in great detail what has happened, why it happened and what we need to do to stop it from happening again.
This is an important day.
Copilot Cowork is now generally available worldwide, now with multi-model support!
Every organization can put long-running agents to work on complex, multi-step tasks, grounded in your organization's unique knowledge and know-how. https://t.co/1fJNjGOs5o
It is humbling to consider that if we harness just 1 millionth of the Sun’s power for AI, that will be much more than a million times the intelligence of all of humanity
BREAKING: SpaceX is acquiring Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock deal.
• Cursor is being valued at $60 billion
• Cursor will become a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary
• Cursor shareholders will receive SpaceX Class A shares
• The exchange ratio will be based on SpaceX’s 7-day average share price before closing
• Subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions
• Expected to close in Q3 2026
Cursor is one of the world’s leading AI coding platforms and one of the fastest-growing software companies. This marks one of the largest AI acquisitions ever and significantly expands SpaceX’s footprint in AI.
Thomas Sowell on programs aiming for equality:
“I’ve been doing studies now for 20 years of programs designed to increase equality—they increase inequality.”
“Because even when the programs are designed for disadvantaged groups, they help the affluent members of the disadvantaged groups, while the lower members of those groups fall further behind than ever before.”
Alex Karp said the most irreplaceable workers in America never went to college.
Karp: “They went to high school. And now they’re very valuable, if not irreplaceable.”
He wasn’t talking about PhDs. He wasn’t talking about Stanford engineers.
He was talking about American factory workers building batteries.
The operating assumption of the modern world was simple.
The further you moved from physical labor, the more valuable you became.
Degrees. Credentials. Abstraction. Office towers.
The knowledge economy was the economy. Everything else was a rounding error.
An entire generation was sorted by this logic.
College was the conveyor belt. A humanities degree was the ticket.
The kid who left school to apprentice as a welder was the cautionary tale they told at career day.
We built a civilization-scale hierarchy around one belief. People who move information are worth more than people who move atoms.
We forgot that every abstraction ever built still runs on something physical.
AI is correcting that error in real time.
Large language models automate text generation. Report writing. Data synthesis. Slide decks. Administrative coordination. Middle management decision trees.
That’s not the factory floor.
That’s the entire white-collar stack.
Karp isn’t theorizing. He’s watching it happen inside his own operations.
Battery factory workers. High school education. Getting upskilled to match Japanese engineers with decades of training.
Not in four years of university. Not with $200,000 in debt.
In months.
AI isn’t replacing the technician. It’s weaponizing them.
Hand a vocational builder a frontier AI interface and the software absorbs the engineering complexity overnight.
The person who knows how to manipulate physical matter becomes untouchable.
AI can draft a contract. It cannot wire a building.
AI can generate a marketing strategy. It cannot calibrate a CNC machine.
AI can pass the bar exam. It cannot troubleshoot a heat pump in a basement at 2 AM in February.
Bits are becoming infinite. Atoms are becoming precious.
This is the revenge of the physical world.
The credentialed class spent decades dismissing the people who work with their hands.
The software they funded is turning the factory floor into the highest-leverage asset on Earth.
The most powerful cognitive tool knowledge workers ever built will commoditize their own labor.
Because we never built a knowledge economy. We built a scarcity economy. Knowledge just happened to be the scarce resource.
It’s not anymore.
The workers every economic model treated as replaceable are about to become the ones no algorithm can touch.
Karp: “Those jobs are going to become more valuable.”
He’s not predicting the future. He’s deploying it.
The 21st century won’t be defined by who has the best credentials.
It’ll be defined by who can build what no prompt on Earth can conjure.