The story truly begins in April 2024, but the background goes much further back. At the age of 23, Leopold Aschenbrenner was employed by OpenAI’s Superalignment team, which was entrusted with one of the most challenging issues in contemporary technology: how to manage an artificial intelligence system that might one…

There is a specific type of market moment that only makes sense in hindsight: when several smaller signals that everyone saw but no one really connected suddenly come together to form a clear picture. One of those times is currently occurring in the luxury market. Following a weaker-than-expected first-quarter sales…

Something that didn’t fit was discovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope early on July 2, 2025. Somewhere in the direction of the constellation Scutum, close to the crowded, dusty central plane of the Milky Way, a gamma-ray burst—the most powerful class of explosion in the known universe—had erupted. That…

Ships are currently waiting somewhere in the Persian Gulf. While one of the most important waterways in the world is essentially closed, hundreds of them—oil tankers, container ships, and freighters—are anchored offshore or hovering outside the Strait of Hormuz, immobile. In a matter of days, the conflict that started on…

You could sense the weight behind it as soon as the release date was announced at the EVO Awards, which are gaming’s closest thing to a championship ring ceremony and are held in front of an audience that treats frame data and rollback netcode with the same gravity that others…

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about the entrance to Bender’s Cave. This sinkhole is located in Comal County, Texas. It is one of hundreds that are dispersed throughout the Edwards Plateau, where the limestone bedrock has been eroding and collapsing for millions of years. As a result, the area is…

When you open the financial news on a Monday morning and discover that the US economy grew at a 4.3% annual pace in the third quarter of 2025—the fastest in two years—and then spend the remainder of the day observing people in your industry silently circling their LinkedIn profiles as…

When data comes in that doesn’t fit the theory, a certain silence descends upon a room full of astronomers. Not panic—scientists are usually too cautious for that—but a kind of focused silence that suggests we might need to reconsider something significant. As the James Webb Space Telescope continues to return…

Many PlayStation owners had been secretly dreading Sony’s blog update, which was released early on March 27, 2026. The PS5 disc edition would increase to $649.99 on April 2. $599.99 for the digital version. Additionally, Sony’s top-tier PS5 Pro, which debuted less than two years ago at a price that…

A similar discussion has been taking place in government offices, corporate boardrooms, and economics departments for a number of years: AI is obviously doing something remarkable in the lab, in the demo, and in the meticulously staged product announcement, but where exactly is it in the numbers? The expenditures are…

Millions of people open their Amazon apps every spring for a week in late March in search of a deal on an item they’ve been considering since January. AirPods. a speaker with Bluetooth. a stand for charging. If they’re feeling upbeat about the upcoming season, perhaps a yoga mat. The…

There is a version of this story that resembles a simple David vs. Goliath story, in which tenacious Epic Games charges at the gates of Steam’s massive, decades-old fortress with a lot of guts and a better revenue deal. The reality is much messier, particularly as of early 2026. Fortnite’s…