On January 27, 2026, WIRED published a neat little reality check titled Where Tech Leaders and Students Really Think AI Is Going. It’s part of WIRED’s freshly sharpened “For Future Reference” framing, and it reads like what happens when you put AI CEOs, policy wonks, artists, and UC Berkeley students in the same room, then…
The Power of Sound in a Virtual World: Why Audio Is the Real MVP of VR, AR, and Online Meetings
On January 26, 2026, MIT Technology Review published (via its Business Lab channel) an episode titled “The power of sound in a virtual world”. The conversation is hosted by MIT Technology Review Insights’ Laurel Ruma and features Erik Vaveris (Vice President of Product Management and Chief Marketing Officer at Shure) and Brian Scholl (Director of…
Synthesia’s $4B Valuation and the New Normal: Letting Employees Cash Out While AI Video Goes Corporate
Synthesia just pulled off a very 2026 move: raising a huge round, nearly doubling its valuation, and simultaneously giving employees a real chance to turn paper wealth into actual, pays-the-mortgage money. If you’ve been watching the generative AI market wobble between “this changes everything” and “please stop emailing me about your AI pivot,” Synthesia’s latest…
Claude Cowork: How Anthropic Is Turning Claude Into Shared AI Infrastructure (and Why Teams Should Care)
When most people think “AI assistant,” they still picture a glorified autocomplete box with manners: you ask, it answers, you copy-paste, you forget where you put the answer, and then you ask again next week. That workflow has been remarkably popular for something that’s basically the digital equivalent of shouting questions into a canyon. Anthropic…
Chatbots for Health Are Here. So Are the AI Regulation Knife Fights.
On January 23, 2026, MIT Technology Review’s “The Download” put two stories side-by-side that, frankly, deserve to be in the same room: the rapid rise of health chatbots and the escalating U.S. political brawl over who gets to regulate AI. The item was published by MIT Technology Review (the original creator), and the specific “The…
Kubernetes AI Conformance: Why AI Infrastructure Is Finally Getting a Standard (and Why That’s a Big Deal)
For years, “AI infrastructure” has been an oddly specific form of chaos: expensive GPUs duct-taped to general-purpose clusters, YAML sprinkled with hopeful comments, and a shadowy layer of vendor-specific magic that only one engineer understands (and they’re currently “between opportunities”). On November 11, 2025, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Atlanta, the Cloud Native…
Everything in Voice AI Just Changed: What Enterprise Builders Can Do Next (and What Could Go Wrong)
Voice AI has always had a small PR problem: it’s been marketed like the future, but behaved like a bad conference call. You say something. A server far away thinks about it. A synthetic voice replies after a pause long enough for you to question your life choices. If you interrupt, it keeps talking like…
The Download: America’s New Digital-Rights Muscle Flex, and Why AI Companions Are About to Get Regulated Like a Nightclub
On January 19, 2026, MIT Technology Review’s The Download newsletter bundled two stories that look unrelated at first glance: a US government move against prominent European digital-rights figures, and the rapid rise of “AI companions” (chatbots people treat as friends, therapists, lovers, or all three at once). The connective tissue is power—who gets to shape…
Retailers Bring Conversational AI and Analytics Closer to the User: Why “Dialogue, Not Dashboards” Is the New Retail Operating System
Retail has always loved a good dashboard. It’s comforting: neat charts, tidy KPIs, and enough color gradients to make a PowerPoint feel like a work of art. But dashboards also come with an inconvenient truth: they’re often where insights go to… wait. Wait for a specialist. Wait for the next refresh. Wait for someone to…
Cutting Through the AI Coding Hype (Without Cutting Corners): What Developers and Biotech Teams Should Actually Watch in 2026
AI coding is now everywhere. If you can open an IDE, you can probably also open a dropdown full of copilots, agents, “plan modes,” and chat panes that promise to turn your backlog into a vaguely working demo before lunch. And yet, for all the hype, a stubborn reality remains: software engineering is still an…