AI is compressing software development timelines by 100x, reshaping who gets to build—a quarter of YC startups now have 95% of their code written by AI, with some teams hitting $10M in revenue with fewer than 10 people. The binding constraints have shifted upstream: from writing code to knowing what to build, from compute to the power grid that runs it, from model capability to memory architecture that persists across sessions. YC's S26 batch reflects the new priorities, with a hard-tech pivot toward energy and AI-native service companies attacking trillion-dollar industries still running on human labor.
The billion-dollar ideology behind the violence finally produced what it always promised.
Waymo cleared every safety bar and got exiled to the Rental Car Center. Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft keep 800,000 monthly trips.
SB 1074 bans Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta from rigging their platforms against startups. The fight DC couldn't win lands in Big Tech's backyard.
Germany's nuclear phase-out is costing factories, workers, and the climate. The man who said it was wrong now says nothing can be done.
S7263 would ban AI from answering medical and legal questions, protecting billable hours while the people who can't afford doctors lose their only option.
A Polish mathematician spent two decades building a research-level problem no AI could touch. Run 11 proved him wrong.
The human writes a Markdown file. The AI runs 100 experiments overnight. The bottleneck isn't compute, it's your program.md.
A 2mm chip restored sight more than 80% of blind trial patients, built by a former cofounder of Neuralink.
A 2011 article about male birth control became a Founders Fund investment. That's what great journalism does. Wired forgot.
Paying $200/month and getting banned for using what you paid for isn't "abuse." It's a business model failure.