Every edition of The Signal — our daily briefing on AI, gadgets, science, crypto, startups, and cybersecurity. Published weekdays since January 2026.
This week: OpenAI quietly shipped a model update that outperforms GPT-5 on coding benchmarks. We ran the tests ourselves. Plus: Apple's M4 Ultra numbers are in — and they're exactly as good as you'd expect. And a deep dive into Neuralink's quieter competitor that just raised $180M.
15 editions
Google's quantum team published a paper claiming error-corrected computation at scale — we asked three independent physicists what it actually means. Also: Tesla's 2027 battery roadmap leaked, and the biocomputing startup that's growing neurons on silicon.
We tracked every AI announcement from the past seven days and separated the real product launches from the vaporware. Spoiler: the ratio is worse than you think. Plus our analysis of the EU AI Act's first enforcement actions.
Apple Intelligence 2.0, visionOS 3, and a new Swift concurrency model that actually makes sense. We break down every announcement from WWDC 2026 and explain what developers need to know before the betas land.
The US Senate passed the Digital Asset Market Structure Act. We read all 312 pages so you don't have to. Plus: Ethereum's Pectra upgrade is live — here's what changed and what it means for DeFi developers.
Security researchers have documented a 1,200% increase in AI-generated phishing emails since 2024. We spoke to the teams trying to build defences — and the results are sobering. Also: the Chrome zero-day you need to patch right now.
We spent three weeks with both phones. Camera, battery, AI features, build quality — we tested everything. Our verdict might surprise you. Plus: the OnePlus 13 is still the best value flagship nobody talks about.
NASA confirmed the presence of liquid water beneath the Martian surface. We spoke to three planetary scientists about what this means for the search for life, future crewed missions, and the timeline for a permanent Mars base.
We ran Claude 4 Opus through 200 hours of real-world tasks — coding, reasoning, creative writing, and agentic workflows. Here's our full benchmark breakdown and where it still falls short.
Lightmatter just raised $400M to commercialise photonic computing. We visited their Boston lab and got a first look at the hardware. If it works, it could cut AI inference costs by 90%. Big if.
We've been using the MacBook Pro M4 as our primary machine since launch. Here's what held up, what surprised us, and whether the battery life claims are actually true in daily use.
OpenAI's latest funding round values the company at $300 billion. We break down the revenue figures, the competitive landscape, and whether the valuation makes sense — or whether we're in a bubble.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems confirmed net energy gain from their SPARC reactor — the first private fusion company to do so. We explain the physics, the timeline to commercial power, and why this is different from previous fusion announcements.
Dell's XPS line has had a rocky few years. The 2026 XPS 16 is a genuine return to form — OLED display, excellent keyboard, and battery life that actually lasts a workday. Here's our full review.
Both models are out. We ran the same 150-task evaluation suite on both. The results are closer than the marketing suggests — and the winner depends entirely on what you're using it for.
As AI-generated video becomes indistinguishable from real footage, we look at the companies building detection tools — and why the attackers are still ahead. Plus: the policy responses that might actually work.
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