Author: Vidya Saras

America’s allies complain while quietly backing new U.S. policy.

Large language models (LLMs) have been championed as tools that could democratize access to information worldwide, offering knowledge in a user-friendly interface regardless of a person’s background or location. However, new research from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) suggests these artificial intelligence systems may actually perform worse for the very users who could most benefit from them.A study conducted by researchers at CCC, which is based at the MIT Media Lab, found that state-of-the-art AI chatbots — including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, and Meta’s Llama 3 — sometimes provide less-accurate and less-truthful responses to users who have…

Users love OpenClaw; attackers do, too OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbot) is a free, open-source, autonomous AI agent that launched on January 29 and almost immediately went viral. According to its developer, Peter Steinberger, its repo had more than 2 million visitors over the course of a single week, and it’s estimated that it has been downloaded 720,000 times a week. OpenClaw runs locally on a user’s hardware rather than in the cloud, and can perform autonomous, real-world actions on their behalf, such as reading emails, browsing web pages, running apps, or managing calendars. However, almost immediately after release, it…

Eric Dane starred on seven seasons of Grey’s Anatomy before his character, Mark Sloan, was killed in a fatal plane crash. Dane joined the ABC medical drama in 2006’s season 2 as plastic surgeon Mark Sloan. “I’m proud of [my career]. All of it got me to where I am today,” Dane recalled in a Famous Last Words interview, which premiered on Netflix hours after his death in February 2026. “There was a ton of experience in there. Life experience, personal, professional. I think when I really tried to be good and approached the craft with a certain amount of…

Aston Martin has issued another profit warning and agreed to sell the permanent naming rights to its Formula One team for £50m, as the British marque grapples with falling deliveries, mounting debt and the impact of US tariffs. The carmaker, majority-owned by Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, said earnings for 2025 would be worse than City forecasts, marking its fifth profit warning since September 2024. Analysts had expected the company to report a loss of around £184m when it publishes full-year results next week. Aston Martin delivered 5,448 vehicles last year, nearly 10 per cent fewer than in 2024, as sales…

The long-term vision for Ethereum is increasingly shifting beyond incremental upgrades toward a more fundamental transformation of its core architecture. As the network continues to scale and support a growing ecosystem of decentralized applications, developers and researchers are exploring whether achieving ETH’s ultimate goals of global scalability, security, and decentralization requires rebuilding elements of its base layer rather than simply refining existing systems. Rebuilding Core Infrastructure For Long-Term Growth Ethereum’s evolution has moved beyond incremental upgrades; it is entering a phase of structural reconstruction. The head of research at EigenCloud, Soubhik Deb, mentioned on X that the initiative often referred…

On-chain analytics firm Parsec is closing down after five years, as crypto trader flows and on-chain activity no longer resemble what they once did. “Parsec is shutting down,” the company said in an X post on Thursday, while its CEO, Will Sheehan, said the “market zigged while we zagged a few too many times.”Sheehan added that Parsec’s primary focus on decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) fell out of step with where the industry has now headed.“Post FTX DeFi spot lending leverage never really came back in the same way, it changed, morphed into something we understood less,” he said,…

Platform is a new team inside the EF with one goal: Deliver the strongest possible Ethereum platform, where L1 and L2s are best positioned to support users, apps, and all organizations building on Ethereum. This requires improving the L1 <> L2 relationship, so that we grow as a mutually reinforcing system across each layer. Since the rollup-centric roadmap was first proposed 5 years ago, an ecosystem of chains has grown up around the Ethereum L1. The early mental model of rollups has given way to a network of differentiated L2s, each with distinct and valuable economies, extending Ethereum’s core properties…

The race for the leading crypto to buy right now is intensifying, and three names are dominating serious buyer conversations: Solana, Hyperliquid, and BlockDAG. Solana continues to anchor headlines with strong transaction activity and resilient support zones. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid is carving out a niche in on-chain derivatives, with institutional attention slowly building.But BlockDAG (BDAG) isn’t simply riding market cycles; it’s engineering a launch sequence. With BDAG available at just $0.000125 during its Final Access window, and a 12-hour early trading advantage before global markets go live, the structure itself creates asymmetry. While established players fight to defend support levels and reclaim…

Code Metal, a Boston-based startup that uses AI to write code and translate it into other programming languages, just closed a $125 million Series B funding round from new and existing investors. The news comes just a few months after the startup raised $36 million in series A financing led by Accel.Code Metal is part of a new wave of startups aiming to modernize the tech industry by using AI to generate code and translate it across programming languages. One of the questions that persists about AI-assisted code, though, is whether the output is any good—and what the consequences might…