WHAT IS THE SINGLE BIGGEST STORY THIS WEEK? Technology's central tension in April 2026 is simple: machines are outperforming humans in physical and cognitive tasks while the institutions that bet against this reality — the metaverse, overhyped AI infrastructure, and analog regulation — are collapsin

Updated Apr 18, 2026, 2:01 PM GMT Employees inside the Voyager building at Nvidia headquarters in Silicon Valley Bloomberg/Getty Images A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter. A new side project, Lunches.fyi, takes the AI tooling craze in a lighter direction, ranking tech companies not by market cap, but by cafeteria quality. It was built by coding prankster Riley Walz in about an hour using voice-dictated commands into OpenAI's Codex (a task he says might

Updated Apr 19, 2026, 9:00 AM GMT Esther Wojcicki, known as the "godmother of Silicon Valley." Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED Esther Wojcicki, 85, is the subject of a new documentary called "The Godmother of Silicon Valley." Wojcicki, who was a Palo Alto teacher, raised daughters who became the CEOs of YouTube and 23andMe. Wojcicki says to question authority and embrace tech, not "move fast and break things." It seems unlikely that Silicon Valley, a place where "cracked" engineers brag

A once-booming market for virtual real estate left early believers holding assets with little demand. [Images: Meta, guteksk7/Adobe Stock] Five years ago, tech angel investor Chris Adamo and a few friends jumped on a burgeoning trend in the digital asset world: they used a virtual real estate broker to buy 23 parcels of property in a metaverse called The Sandbox. He doesn’t remember exactly how much he spent, but it was around $200,000 for the whole group. The real estate, to be clear, consisted

The scarcity of Apple’s littlest Mac comes at a time of high interest from AI power users and a potential product refresh

AI-generated “digital twins” of content creators and celebrities are popping up all over the place, and managing this revolution is a major priority for talent agencies like CAA. But will audiences truly respond to a digital facsimile of the star they think they know and love?

We urgently need to prepare for quantum computers that can break encryption

Yes and no. Here’s how to use it wisely. The moment I rise in the morning, I check my phone. Bad habit, to be sure. But I know I’m not the only one. There is a message from an editor marked “urgent,” there is an email from the school reminding me it’s parent-visit morning, and a text from a fellow soccer mom making sure I remembered the time change for Sunday’s tournament. (I hadn’t). The day had barely started, and I already felt hopelessly behind. This is the reality for working parents

The Phone Rings And For A Moment Everything Is Normal.

America Built The Ai Revolution. Openai, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia—Names That Define The Technology—Were Born In The United States, Nurtured By Its Universities, Bankrolled By Its Venture Capital And Celebrated By Its Politicians.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman wants to “de-escalate” the rhetoric around A.I. But if you tell people that your product will upend their way of life, take their jobs, and possibly threaten humanity, they might believe you.

As AI reshapes the industry, cybersecurity is now a fiduciary responsibility, impacting reputation, financial stability, and competitiveness.

Updated Apr 11, 2026, 8:11 AM GMT Illia Polosukhin, a coauthor of the seminal transformer paper, "Attention Is All You Need," runs his work with 12 agents, but he doesn't let them off leash. Courtesy NEAR Illia Polosukhin is a coauthor of the landmark transformer paper, "Attention is All You Need." Polosukhin uses 12 agents with a prompt that tells them to be like a "billionaire's chief of staff." The researcher is building a backend infrastructure to secure our agents' activities. On a given