DavidGM1
113 posts
@david_SR71
Christian, conservative, learning every day.
This just isn't accurate. No one has ever been nor will be fired for reporting on difficult subjects here. Blaze News has never shied from J6 coverage in particular. Serious coverage requires serious editorial and legal review. Steve no longer wished to submit his work to this and so we parted ways. I wish him the best.
LeBron James last night fell to the ground writhing in pain, replay showed that he hit nothing of significance despite him grabbing both arms, and screaming as if he’d been hit by a car. He then exits the game. Lakers go on a run, as they show a trainer working on his left arm. They cut the lead to 1, and LeBron suddenly gets worried that the Lakers look better without him, so he stops faking to reenter the game with a couple minutes left. Lakers momentum is instantly zapped, and the team doesn’t score another basket until there’s 7 seconds left in the game. After the game he said that he “hit his funny bone”. LeBron James isn’t a Top 10 NBA player— NEVER put his name in a sentence with Michael Jordan. (Video via @famouslos32)
In 2026, AI will move from hype to pragmatism | Rebecca Bellan & Ram Iyer, TechCrunch If 2025 was the year AI got a vibe check, 2026 will be the year the tech gets practical. The focus is already shifting away from building ever-larger language models and toward the harder work of making AI usable. In practice, that involves deploying smaller models where they fit, embedding intelligence into physical devices, and designing systems that integrate cleanly into human workflows. The experts TechCrunch spoke to see 2026 as a year of transition, one that evolves from brute-force scaling to researching new architectures, from flashy demos to targeted deployments, and from agents that promise autonomy to ones that actually augment how people work. The party isn’t over, but the industry is starting to sober up. Scaling laws won’t cut it In 2012, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton’s ImageNet paper showed how AI systems could “learn” to recognize objects in pictures by looking at millions of examples. The approach was computationally expensive, but made possible with GPUs. The result? A decade of hardcore AI research as scientists worked to invent new architectures for different tasks. That culminated around 2020 when OpenAI launched GPT-3, which showed how simply making the model 100 times bigger unlocks abilities like coding and reasoning without requiring explicit training. This marked the transition into what Kian Katanforoosh, CEO and founder of AI agent platform Workera, calls the “age of scaling”: a period defined by the belief that more compute, more data, and larger transformer models would inevitably drive the next major breakthroughs in AI. Today, many researchers think the AI industry is beginning to exhaust the limits of scaling laws and will once again transition into an age of research. Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist, has long argued against the overreliance on scaling, and stressed the need to develop better architectures. And Sutskever said in a recent interview that current models are plateauing and pretraining results have flattened, indicating a need for new ideas. “I think most likely in the next five years, we are going to find a better architecture that is a significant improvement on transformers,” Katanforoosh said. “And if we don’t, we can’t expect much improvement on the models.” Sometimes less is more Large language models are great at generalizing knowledge, but many experts say the next wave of enterprise AI adoption will be driven by smaller, more agile language models that can be fine-tuned for domain-specific solutions. “Fine-tuned SLMs will be the big trend and become a staple used by mature AI enterprises in 2026, as the cost and performance advantages will drive usage over out-of-the-box LLMs,” Andy Markus, AT&T’s chief data officer, told TechCrunch. “We’ve already seen businesses increasingly rely on SLMs because, if fine-tuned properly, they match the larger, generalized models in accuracy for enterprise business applications, and are superb in terms of cost and speed.” We’ve seen this argument before from French open-weight AI startup Mistral: It argues its small models actually perform better than larger models on several benchmarks after fine-tuning. “The efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and adaptability of SLMs make them ideal for tailored applications where precision is paramount,” said Jon Knisley, an AI strategist at ABBYY, an Austin-based enterprise AI company. While Markus thinks SLMs will be key in the agentic era, Knisley says the nature of small models means they’re better for deployment on local devices, “a trend accelerated by advancements in edge computing.” Learning through experience Humans don’t just learn through language; we learn by experiencing how the world works. But LLMs don’t really understand the world; they just predict the next word or idea. That’s why many researchers believe the next big leap will come from world models: AI systems that learn how things move and interact in 3D spaces so they can make predictions and take actions. Signs that 2026 will be a big year for world models are multiplying. LeCun left Meta to start his own world model lab and is reportedly seeking a $5 billion valuation. Google’s DeepMind has been plugging away at Genie and in August launched its latest model that builds real-time interactive general-purpose world models. Alongside demos by startups like Decart and Odyssey, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs has launched its first commercial world model, Marble. Newcomers like General Intuition in October scored a $134 million seed round to teach agents spatial reasoning, and video generation startup Runway in December released its first world model, GWM-1. While researchers see long-term potential in robotics and autonomy, the near-term impact is likely to be seen first in video games. PitchBook predicts the market for world models in gaming could grow from $1.2 billion between 2022 and 2025 to $276 billion by 2030, driven by the tech’s ability to generate interactive worlds and more lifelike non-player characters. Pim de Witte, founder of General Intuition, told TechCrunch virtual environments may not only reshape gaming, but also become critical testing grounds for the next generation of foundation models. Agentic nation Agents failed to live up to the hype in 2025, but a big reason for that is because it’s hard to connect them to the systems where work actually happens. Without a way to access tools and context, most agents were trapped in pilot workflows. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), a “USB-C for AI” that lets AI agents talk to the external tools like databases, search engines, and APIs, proved the missing connective tissue and is quickly becoming the standard. OpenAI and Microsoft have publicly embraced MCP, and Anthropic recently donated it to the Linux Foundation’s new Agentic AI Foundation, which aims to help standardize open source agentic tools. Google also has begun standing up its own managed MCP servers to connect AI agents to its products and services. With MCP reducing the friction of connecting agents to real systems, 2026 is likely to be the year agentic workflows finally move from demos into day-to-day practice. Rajeev Dham, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, says these advancements will lead to agent-first solutions taking on “system-of-record roles” across industries. “As voice agents handle more end-to-end tasks such as intake and customer communication, they’ll also begin to form the underlying core systems,” Dham said. “We’ll see this in a variety of sectors like home services, proptech, and healthcare, as well as horizontal functions such as sales, IT, and support.” Augmentation, not automation While more agentic workflows might raise worries that layoffs may follow, Katanforoosh of Workera isn’t so sure that’s the message: “2026 will be the year of the humans,” he said. In 2024, every AI company predicted they would automate jobs out of needing humans. But the tech isn’t there yet, and in an unstable economy, that’s not really a popular rhetoric. Katanforoosh says next year, we’ll realize that “AI has not worked as autonomously as we thought,” and the conversation will focus more on how AI is being used to augment human workflows, rather than replace them. “And I think a lot of companies are going to start hiring,” he added, noting that he expects there to be new roles in AI governance, transparency, safety, and data management. “I’m pretty bullish on unemployment averaging under 4% next year.” “People want to be above the API, not below it, and I think 2026 is an important year for this,” de Witte added. Getting physical Advancements in technologies like small models, world models, and edge computing will enable more physical applications of machine learning, experts say. “Physical AI will hit the mainstream in 2026 as new categories of AI-powered devices, including robotics, AVs, drones, and wearables start to enter the market,” Vikram Taneja, head of AT&T Ventures, told TechCrunch. While autonomous vehicles and robotics are obvious use cases for physical AI that will no doubt continue to grow in 2026, the training and deployment required is still expensive. Wearables, on the other hand, provide a less expensive wedge with consumer buy-in. Smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta are starting to ship assistants that can answer questions about what you’re looking at, and new form factors like AI-powered health rings and smartwatches are normalizing always-on, on-body inference. “Connectivity providers will work to optimize their network infrastructure to support this new wave of devices, and those with flexibility in how they can offer connectivity will be best positioned,” Taneja said. techcrunch.com/2026/01/02/in-…
Cancer vaccines 'could be available within just 10 years' in major breakthrough | Jerry Lawton & Matt Atherton, Daily Mirror A groundbreaking lung cancer vaccine will be tested on humans from summer 2026, with British scientists working on jabs for breast, ovarian and bowel cancers to follow A jab that could prevent cancer might be available within the next decade, according to British scientists. Clinical trials for a vaccine aimed at preventing lung cancer are set to commence next year. Efforts are already in progress to develop additional vaccines that could stop breast, ovarian and bowel cancers from developing within the body. The plan is for British researchers to combine these vaccines into a single anti-cancer jab that young people could receive free of charge on the NHS during a visit to their GP. This vaccine could potentially save up to 3.6 million lives globally each year from those who die from the most severe types of cancer, and could extend the average human lifespan. The project has received support from the NHS, Cancer Research UK, the Spain-based CRIS Cancer Foundation and major pharmaceutical companies. Sarah Blagden, a clinician-scientist and professor of experimental oncology at the University of Oxford, disclosed the significant progress made in the quest for a vaccine in the Channel 4 documentary series 'Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures'. But, she also revealed how the project could be a life-saving game-changer within a decade. She envisioned a future where a single vaccine could potentially stop most major cancers, akin to the jabs we receive to protect against measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough and tetanus. The idea struck her while she was listening to a podcast in her car. The podcast featured Professor Charles Swanton, deputy clinical director at The Francis Crick Institute in London, discussing his team's research into how cancers evolve within the body and develop resistance to treatment. Sarah, 56, had an epiphany, realising that medical research might be better directed towards preventing cancer development rather than treating it as a fully-fledged disease. Fast forward three years, utilising the rapid vaccine development techniques refined during the pandemic, her team is on the verge of introducing an anti-lung cancer jab to the world. She said: "What we think we have is the first vaccine that could actually prevent cancer from starting in the first place. Even lung cancer takes probably a decade plus to develop in your lungs. So there's this thing called pre-cancer - it's the form that cancer goes through before it becomes proper cancer. "That is your cells are already undergoing this transition towards cancer. What we've done is design a vaccine to get your immune system to eradicate those cells. "I heard Charlie actually talking about it on a podcast. And I contacted him and said, 'Charlie, you should design a vaccine against those early changes'. Coming from Oxford we've got all these vaccine groups coming out of the pandemic. "We thought we can use the backbone of the vaccines that we've been working on and we can actually repurpose them to design them against cancer rather than Covid. "He got back to me and said, 'okay, I'll put you in touch with my team'. And that's how it started. "Everybody's got ideas - they're cheap. But it has been quite painful to get it off the ground because we had to convince people that this was a good idea. It took me three attempts to get funding for it because it's a bit out of the box. "But we've got the first batch of the vaccine made in Oxford and we're going to open the clinical trial in the summer next year. We're working on a number of different vaccines now preventing lots of different cancers. "What we'd like to do is pool them all into one vaccine that you give to the population - to your kids. Their cancer risk would go right down. That would be the plan. We'd like to imagine that we could do this within the next decade or maybe the next 20 years." Sarah highlighted that her team's efforts are causing a significant shift in the approach medical professionals take towards combating cancer. "Oncologists like myself, we're very fixed on treating established cancer," she said. "We're not looking underneath the iceberg at the moment. But this is an opportunity to actually go in with something to prevent it. "In the world no-one else is doing it like this. There are other people doing early work on vaccines but we're working in a much more coordinated, faster way and we're working across multiple disease areas. "So if we have five or six different vaccines we would then want to try and make one out of the best parts of those and we would want to give it to people in early adulthood. "It's going to be possible for the university to develop a vaccine that's going to be useful across the world. I know I sound like I'm going mad here but, you know, if it's good... I don't want to stop. "I don't want to have a long gap between us developing the lung cancer one to, say, the breast one. I want us to keep moving fast, fast, fast. "We're very lucky at the moment. We've got really amazing scientists, we've got really cool technologies, we've got patients supporting us, we've got an infrastructure and funders that agree with us. "I think this is kind of a one-in-a-generation opportunity to do this. So we just need to do it quickly and not waste any time." Sarah explained that her team was dedicated to demonstrating the vaccines were both safe and effective - a procedure which had accelerated thanks to lessons learnt from COVID. "I never really kind of wanted to sort of verbalise it because I thought everyone would think I was crazy," she said. "But in my dream I would like you to get vaccinated at a certain age and it protects you. And I can't see why we wouldn't want to do that. This comes from a good place. This comes from, you know, we've all got family members with cancer, we've all got our own experiences of how rotten cancer is, what a horrible disease it is. "And so this comes from us wanting to try and get rid of this disease. We're not in the hands of Big Pharma, it's come from our minds, it's come from our desire to make a difference, to make an impact. "I couldn't do this on my own. But I think we all feel that this is kind of really important. A lot of the scientists that have got involved are committing more and more of their days to doing this work because we all think, 'wow, this actually could be a big game changer'. "We've seen already from the experiments that we've done - let's just say that they look really, really promising. The data that's come through looks like it potentially could work. My message to cancer is, 'we're coming for you'." mirror.co.uk/news/health/ca…
Text conversation between Charlie Kirk and Frank Turek in days before Charlie’s murder CK: “Please pray for me, I’m under the gun on something right now. Prayers appreciated.” FT: “I hope you’ve increased your security detail.” CK: “I have. I know they want me dead.”
Top moments from President Trump and Zohran Mamdani’s time in the Oval Office today. 7. Trump defends Mamdani from people calling him a ‘jihadist,’ says he is a rational person. 6. Trump defends Mamdani after reporter asked him why he didn’t take a train. 5. Trump says he is fine with Mamdani calling him a despot because people have said way worse. 4. Trump says he would feel comfortable living in NYC with Mamdani as mayor. 3. Trump slaps Mamdani on the arm and says he can go ahead and call him a fascist. 2. Trump commends Mamdani for retaining a great police commissioner. 1. Trump says Mamdani has a chance to Make New York City Great Again.
