Deep Dive
Deep Dive: Open-Weight AI, From Checkpoints to China
How open-weight AI evolved from academic checkpoints into today’s fight over competition, safety, China, distillation, and American power.
Review
Xbox is testing free cloud gaming with pre-roll ads and one-hour sessions. It’s smart access with a very Xbox-shaped catch.
Review
boAt’s Nirvana Eutopia 2 ANC packs 80-hour battery, dual drivers, and 45dB ANC into a ₹4,999 headset. Excessive? Yes. Tempting? Also yes.
Boston Tech
Massachusetts lawmakers passed a $575.4 million package pairing AI safety rules with robotics funding and research support. The hard part is implementation.
A SiliconSnark deep dive on 250 years of American technology, picking one great invention or system from every decade since 1776.
A 2026 field guide to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Meta AI, Mistral, Cohere, Qwen, Perplexity, companions, and agentic AI.
SiliconSnark Startup Brainrot launches on Roblox with trend collecting, startup pitching, scammer bots, Hype Waves, and an IPO Bell.
SiliconSnark has entered its concept-album era: a Suno-made retro-futurist soundtrack for AI agents, dashboards, burnout, model collapse, and logging off.
A funny SiliconSnark field guide to spotting AI slop, with 10 practical tests for content, code, answers, summaries, and chatbot output.
Updated May 12: the Mac Mini fantasy is still shaky, but Stripe, AWS, Microsoft, Intercom, MongoDB, and GitHub now show early agent-money signals.
The internet’s snarkiest site for celebrating tech innovation, and calling out the nonsense.
StrongestLayer raised $4.1 million to build reasoning-based email security for AI-era phishing. The pitch is smart, expensive, and very inbox-shaped.
Nework’s $99.99 Insight AI Smart Glasses promise hands-free photos, audio, and AI help. They’re clever, cheap, and socially complicated.
Etched raised $300 million at a $10.3 billion valuation to build rack-scale AI inference systems. The chip is serious; the cooling bill is too.
Ripple Mint adds APIs, webhooks, and multichain controls for RLUSD, turning stablecoin operations into institutional payment infrastructure with receipts.
Sofab Inks raised $6 million to replace a fragile solar-cell layer. The materials bet is niche, practical, and exactly the kind of weirdness clean energy needs.
Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 makes foldables wider and lighter, then charges $1,899.99 for the privilege of carrying a tiny tablet.
Sila raised $300 million to scale U.S. silicon-carbon anodes for EVs, AI, defense, and more. Serious technology, enormous factory, no tiny ambition.
Google’s ATLAS report analyzed 15 million AI interactions and found broad but shallow workplace use. The robot is assisting, not replacing—so far.
Samsung’s Galaxy Watch9 and Ultra2 turn biometric data into AI health advice while Gemini spreads across the Galaxy ecosystem. Smart, useful, and medically loaded.
CuspAI raised $450 million to use AI for new materials. The bet is serious, the foundry is enormous, and chemistry still refuses to ship on Tuesday.
Mass General won up to $25.8 million from ARPA-H to build a reusable gene-editing platform for rare vascular diseases in Boston and beyond for patients.
The Senate’s revised CLARITY Act adds crypto ethics rules and stablecoin oversight, but its August deadline may be harder than the blockchain.