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Terence Tao has an IQ above 200. Youngest gold medalist in Math Olympiad history. Fields Medal winner. The greatest living mathematician by nearly any measure. And he just said something most people aren’t ready for. Tao: “This whole era of AI is teaching us that our idea of what intelligence is, is not really accurate.” We spent centuries building civilization on one assumption. That intelligence was sacred. Irreducible. Uniquely ours. The one thing that made the entire human story make sense. Then AI started solving things we swore only we could. Chess. Language. Vision. Math. And every time, we reached for the same defense. That’s not real intelligence. It’s just tricks. Just pattern matching. Just an algorithm. Tao: “You look at how it’s done and it doesn’t feel like intelligence.” So we moved the line. Again. And again. And again. Because intelligence was supposed to feel like something. Something deep. Something we could point to and say… this is what separates us from everything else. But AI kept solving the problems. And that feeling never arrived. Tao: “We were looking for some elusive, intelligent way of thinking and we don’t see it in the tools that actually solve our goals.” Here’s what makes it worse. Large language models work by predicting the next word. One word at a time. No grand architecture. No deep understanding. Just probability. And it works. Tao: “Maybe that’s actually a lot of what humans do as well.” The greatest living mathematician just told you human thought might run on the same machinery. Not some transcendent spark. Pattern recognition. Prediction. One thought, one decision, one word at a time. We built religion around intelligence. Philosophy around it. An entire species identity around it. And a machine running probability just held up a mirror. We didn’t lose intelligence to AI. We just finally saw what it always was. What haunts us isn’t that machines learned to think. It’s that thinking was never what we needed it to be.

This is insane. This Chinese battery can run on coal 🤯! China has developed a new kind of “coal battery” that generates electricity without burning coal. The system, called a zero-carbon-emission direct coal fuel cell (ZC-DCFC), was developed by a team led by Xie Heping. It converts coal directly into electricity using electrochemical reactions instead of traditional combustion. In this process, coal is pulverised, dried, purified, and fed into the anode of the fuel cell. Oxygen is supplied at the cathode, and reactions across an oxide membrane generate electricity directly without steam, turbines, or thermal conversion losses. At the same time, high-purity carbon dioxide is captured at the source and converted into useful products such as synthesis gas or mineral compounds like sodium bicarbonate, rather than being released into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels like coal still form the backbone of global energy systems. Current technologies such as Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle reach around 45% efficiency and emit over 800 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour. Traditional coal power plants are further limited to about 40% efficiency due to the Carnot cycle. By eliminating combustion and heat based conversion, the ZC-DCFC offers significantly higher theoretical efficiency 👀 The team has been working on this concept since 2018, making key advances in high-performance materials, fuel treatment, and electrode design. While the technology is still in early stages and may not become cost competitive until after 2045, it represents a major shift in how coal can be used. Acceleration is everywhere!