Brian Buntz

While OpenAI charges $60 per million tokens for its flagship reasoning model, a Chinese startup just open-sourced an alternative that matches its performance—at 95% less cost. Meet DeepSeek-R1, the RL-trained model that’s not just competing with Silicon Valley’s AI giants, but in some cases running on consumer laptops in some configurations rather than in data…

Why can’t Big Tech’s billion-dollar AI stop making stuff up? Apple recently hit the brakes on its AI-generated news alerts after a BBC complaint pointed out a false and misleading headline. And as Apple has partnered with OpenAI push ChatGPT functionality into Siri, lawsuits over ‘hallucinated’ legal cases and viral confabulated ‘AI-enhanced’ search queries expose…

Despite another solid national jobs report in December 2024—256,000 new payroll jobs and a steady 4.1% unemployment rate—companies in research-intensive fields have continued to trim their workforces in early 2025. While the broader economy shows gains in health care and retail, our tracking indicates that biotech, advanced software, and other R&D-driven sectors are strategically realigning.…

Imagine a hospital spending millions on advanced imaging equipment yet relying on decades-old computers to run the software. That paradox propelled robotics and computer vision veteran Camilo Buscaron—a former systems engineer at NVIDIA and Chief Technologist for AWS Robotics—into action. In 2023, he set out to commercialize an open-source computer vision library known as Kornia,…

Quantum engineers at UNSW Sydney have placed a ‘Schrödinger’s cat‘—the famous paradox of quantum superposition where a system exists simultaneously in a quantum superposition, in this case being both dead and alive—inside the nucleus of a single antimony atom on a silicon chip. “Antimony is a heavy atom, which possesses a large nuclear spin—meaning a…

Who is leading in terms of U.S. patents? Asia. While U.S. patent grants rebounded by 4% in 2024 after a four-year decline, the real story is who’s driving innovation: Samsung Electronics maintained its crown for the third straight year with 6,377 patents, TSMC claimed second place with 3,989 patents, according to IFI Claims’ roundup of…

As tech giants use AI to automate traditional coding tasks, companies are simultaneously cutting lower-performing roles while competing for AI talent—creating a two-track job market where AI expertise increasingly defines career prospects. During a recent interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dished on the company’s plans for its continued push into…

Over a century after synthetic dyes first hit the scene, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has finally pulled the plug on one of their most notorious members: red dye No. 3. Known for lending a vivid crimson hue to a range of food products, this additive has been under scrutiny for decades—banned in…

Recent scientific evidence has brought increasing attention to microplastics—plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter—and their pervasive presence in our environment. While their ubiquity raises legitimate concerns, our 2024 analysis “Microplastics are bad—but ignoring science is worse” reveals that commonly cited statistics about human plastic consumption often lack rigorous scientific validation. Emerging research continues…

“The next frontier of AI is physical AI. Imagine a large language model, but instead of processing text, it processes its surroundings. Instead of taking a question as a prompt, it takes a request. Instead of producing text, it produces action tokens.” — Jensen Huang, CEO NVIDIA For too long, AI has been trapped in…

The past couple of years have delivered a paradox for STEM talent in the U.S. Despite macroeconomic headwinds prompting notable job cuts at employers from Big Tech to Big Pharma, science- and engineering-focused firms still struggle to find the specialized expertise they need. Recent Indicators reports from the National Science Board (NSB) describe an “accelerating…

The race to shape our wireless future just hit a major milestone. According to a new Wi-Fi 7 Patent Landscape Analysis from GreyB, the U.S. holds 1,300 patent families tied to the next-generation technology—outstripping China’s 786. Wi-Fi 7 promises blazing speeds (delivering theoretical maximum speeds of up to 46 Gbps compared to Wi-Fi 6’s maximum…

For decades, the Nyquist-Shannon theorem—a foundational principle of signal processing—dictated that fully sampling a signal at or above twice its highest frequency was essential for capturing critical information. Now, a Pennsylvania startup called Lightscline suggests we may be entering a “post-Nyquist era.” According to a recent Nature Scientific Reports paper, the company’s neural-network-based software, inspired…

It’s 10 p.m. on a Sunday when your lead researcher rushes onto an emergency video call. On screen are your CTO and CISO—both visibly alarmed—demanding the immediate deployment of an untested AI model to patch a critical security vulnerability. Their voices and mannerisms feel perfectly authentic. Except they aren’t real. They’re AI-generated clones. And with…

As 2025 gets underway, concerns are mounting about the stability of some high-paying STEM and R&D roles in an economy many once believed would remain recession-proof for engineers, software developers, and research scientists. A few bright spots include quickly-growing positions such as data scientists (36% growth, $108,020 median pay, according to BLS in 2024), computer…

Over the past couple of years, the world’s most powerful supercomputers have experienced a sizable leap in performance. The combined processing power of the computers on the TOP500 list surged from 5.24 exaflops in June 2023 to 11.72 exaflops in November 2024, representing a 123.7% increase. Meanwhile, the anticipated Colossus supercomputer from Elon Musk’s xAI—if…

For many workers, it pays to have a job in an R&D or STEM-heavy field. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts 10.4% growth in STEM jobs through 2033, more than double the overall employment growth rate of 4%. However, the technology sector has experienced significant restructuring in 2024, with approximately 150,000 job cuts across more…

The next frontier of surgical robotics may well be autonomous—or at least far more self-directed than current systems. Traditional platforms rely on joystick-like hand controllers, which keeps surgeons firmly in command of each movement. Yet recent experiments at Johns Hopkins and Stanford point to a significant shift: advanced imitation learning methods that enable robots to…

AI, pundits say, is on a path to becoming “invisible as electricity”—so deeply woven into daily workflows that we hardly even notice it. At the same time, AI agents may soon automate a steadily growing share of repetitive, tedious tasks while also extending the productivity of workers. One AI-enabled worker can “do what used to…

Pharma R&D has a reputation for glacial change, but AI could finally force the industry to pivot. According to Deloitte’s 2024 Global Life Sciences Sector Outlook released in late May, only about 16% of drug discovery efforts were using AI, though it projected triple-digit growth over the next few years. “It’s definitely early,” says AION…

A model that scored 87.5% on the ARC-AGI Semi-Private Evaluation set, OpenAI’s new o3 system has sparked conversation—and some controversy—about whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) might be near at hand. A growing number of observers frame the news as evidence that computing systems are poised to handle an increasing share of STEM-related tasks, particularly in…

The AI boom is sparking a potential energy crisis. Data centers, housing the powerful GPU-enabled servers that fuel AI’s growth, are projected to consume 12% of US electricity by 2028, as Reuters recently noted. Prominent tech firms like xAI, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI are pouring billions into GPU-based “mega-clusters” involving 100,000 or more GPUs. In addition,…

Working smarter, not harder has long been a corporate catchphrase, but it has taken on newfound importance in critical environment control. While traditional methods have relied on brute-force measures like continuously blasting high volumes of conditioned air to maintain adherence to cleanroom standards, that method has clear drawbacks. “Previously, especially 20–30 years ago, controlling a…

Long the stuff of sci-fi, humanoid robots are moving from prototypes toward practical use in factories and labs. AI is shifting from massive models toward smarter reasoning — and now Google is getting in the AI reasoning game while OpenAI is teasing the next iteration of its reasoning model. Meanwhile, biotech efforts like comprehensive epigenetic…