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Tech News
A new commentary challenges the widespread assumption that innovation is the domain of startups and disruption comes only from smaller, nimbler players. It argues that large organizations can actually use their scale as an asset to strengthen their capacity for innovation rather than being held back by size.
Corridor, a startup co-founded by former Scale AI product lead Jackson Wagner along with Eric Qian, Nikhil Aggarwal, and Jason Dong, has raised a $25 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company pairs human advisors with AI agents to serve small businesses seeking health benefits, an area it says larger brokerages neglect due to low commissions relative to the administrative workload involved. Corridor's AI handles tasks such as verifying network coverage, scheduling appointments, and relaying updated insurance details to providers.
A technical resource describes methods for improving large-scale data replication by using parallel read operations and optimized write strategies. The material is available as a downloadable guide after users register for the hosting platform's content hub.
Joe Macken, a truck driver from New York, spent over 20 years building an intricate scale model of the city from balsa wood and foam board in his basement, eventually creating more than 800,000 structures. After his daughter posted videos of the project on TikTok and they drew over 10 million views in a week, the Museum of the City of New York invited him to display it. The exhibit, titled 'He Built This City,' opened in February and runs through October 12.
Meta introduced Meta One, a new subscription service spanning Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp that bundles AI tools for image and video creation alongside existing premium features. The offering includes a $7.99/month Core tier and a $19.99/month Premium tier, both incorporating the previously launched Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus and WhatsApp Plus perks, with Premium offering greater AI usage allowances. Meta declined to specify exact usage caps, saying they vary by country and system conditions.
US energy storage set another quarterly record, powered largely by seven new gigascale battery installations exceeding one gigawatt-hour each, according to a report from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Behind-the-meter batteries also grew, with data centers accounting for roughly three-quarters of new commercial installations, even as residential battery installations are projected to fall 16% in 2026 after a supporting tax credit expired in 2025.
A Nature retrospective highlights the scientific career of William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, noting that his contributions extended well beyond the temperature scale that bears his name. The piece surveys his broader body of work in physics and engineering during the 19th century.
A Tinybird engineer who has operated ClickHouse clusters since version 18.4 nearly six years ago published a detailed retrospective on running the database at petabyte scale. The post walks through the standard shard-and-replica architecture ClickHouse recommends and highlights the operational pitfalls that only surface once a cluster is running in production. Tinybird notes it is an independent contributor to the open-source project and unaffiliated with ClickHouse, Inc.
A developer who struggled with traditional music instruction wrote a tutorial that builds music theory from scratch using code, starting with a single oscillating number representing air pressure. The piece shows how the twelve-note system, scales, and chords can be derived computationally from physics and arithmetic rather than memorized as arbitrary convention, using simple audio programming examples like sine wave oscillators.
AI training-data startup AfterQuery has reportedly raised new funding valuing it at $3.2 billion, just five months after its $30 million Series A priced it at $300 million. Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer called it the fastest launch-to-unicorn run in the accelerator's history, achieved by founders who are just 22 and 23 years old.
At Hot Chips 2026, Cerebras detailed its next two wafer-scale accelerator generations, including a new Nexus rack architecture for the CS-4 system that triples rack-scale performance using three WS-3T engines. The company also confirmed that its future CS-6 system will introduce 3D-stacked DRAM directly on top of its wafer-scale logic and SRAM, marking a first for its chip design.
Amazon announced it will permanently retire Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), the crowdsourced task platform it launched in 2005, effective September 30, 2026. The company cited its routine practice of evaluating tools and services, without giving a specific reason, though MTurk has reportedly been losing ground to newer AI-training platforms for years.