IBM has shown that one of the most complex parts of quantum computing can now run on ordinary hardware. In new research to be published Monday, the company reports that its quantum error correction algorithm operates successfully on chips manufactured by AMD.

Quantum error correction is a longstanding challenge in the field. Quantum bits, or qubits, are unstable and prone to rapid data loss. Correcting those errors in real time is essential for any quantum processor to become practical. Until now, that process required specialized and expensive hardware.

IBM’s team demonstrated that a widely available AMD field programmable gate array chip could handle the task, and do so ten times faster than necessary. The company’s director of research, Jay Gambetta, said the result marks a rare instance where a theoretical solution is now functioning in live conditions.

“It shows that the algorithm is not only real but runs efficiently on accessible hardware,” Gambetta said.

The experiment also offers a glimpse into how quantum systems may evolve. Rather than building everything from the ground up, developers may pair quantum processors with conventional chips to handle the computational support around them. The result would be a hybrid model that brings quantum into the same orbit as classical computing.

IBM has committed to building a commercial quantum computer called Starling by 2029. The algorithm work revealed this week was reportedly finished a year ahead of schedule. Following the announcement, IBM’s stock rose nearly eight percent, and AMD gained over seven percent.

The development signals more than a technical milestone. It reflects a shift in how the quantum race is being fought,  not just through isolated breakthroughs, but by making quantum-compatible tools part of the existing hardware economy.

If conventional chips can manage parts of quantum workloads, the timeline to usable quantum computing may be shorter than once believed. The boundaries between what is classical and what is quantum are beginning to blur, one algorithm at a time.

Once a symbol of speculation, the Bored Ape Yacht Club is stepping back into the public eye. Its creator, Yuga Labs, has announced the official launch of Otherside, a metaverse project that turns the fading NFT brand into something closer to a virtual community experiment.

Otherside began as an idea in 2022, when Yuga Labs raised 450 million dollars to build what it called an open, interoperable digital world. After years of quiet development, the company revealed that the platform will open to the public on November 12.

Visitors will be able to enter through a browser, join virtual spaces, and use digital avatars tied to NFTs or other collections. Yuga Labs says anyone can participate, even without owning a token. The goal, according to chief product officer Michael Figge, is to make the experience accessible first, and blockchain-based second.

The design resembles gaming worlds like Roblox or Fortnite, but with digital ownership at the center. Players can explore themed environments such as The Swamp and The Nexus, interact through voice or text, and create custom experiences. Some early examples include a shooter game called Bathroom Blitz and a zombie survival space named Otherside Outbreak.

For creators, Otherside promises more control over the economics of what they build. Assets made inside the world can exist independently of it, moving between platforms through blockchain records. That idea, long promised by metaverse advocates, is now being tested by a company that once defined NFT excess.

At launch, Otherside will also feature new avatars developed through a system called Voyager. Collaborations include a digital art series by Daniel Arsham and a collectible project with Amazon called Boximus. These items will be sold directly online, with the option for resale through open marketplaces.

The experience itself remains early. Reporters who previewed the alpha described vast virtual spaces that feel more like experiments than finished games. Many environments are empty, echoing past attempts at social virtual worlds. Yuga Labs believes that will change as creators begin to populate the platform.

The relaunch of Bored Ape Yacht Club through Otherside is more than a business move. It is an effort to transform what was once a speculative community into something that resembles a digital society. Whether that vision succeeds will depend on whether users see value beyond the collectibles that made it famous.

For now, Otherside stands as a reminder that blockchain culture is still searching for permanence. The metaverse, once a buzzword, is being quietly rebuilt around the same question that started it all: what does it mean to own a piece of the internet?

Crusoe, known as “the AI Factory Company,” has raised 1.4 billion dollars at a valuation above 10 billion. The round includes Valor Equity Partners, Mubadala Capital, Nvidia, and Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley.

The athlete’s participation surprised some observers, but it fits a broader pattern. Barkley has built a serious portfolio that includes Anthropic, Neuralink, Polymarket, and Founders Fund. According to The Profile, he lives off his endorsement income and invests most of his football salary. He studies founders closely, conducts his own interviews, and sees technology as both education and long-term capital preservation.

Crusoe’s work focuses on energy and infrastructure. The company operates large clean energy data centers that ease computing bottlenecks for advanced models. Its cloud systems already serve companies such as Together AI and Fireworks. The founders describe their mission as “activating energy for intelligence,” positioning Crusoe at the intersection of power and computation.

Barkley’s decision to join the round represents more than celebrity involvement. It shows how a new class of investors is directing capital toward the physical foundations of the digital world. Instead of investing in consumer apps or personal brands, these figures are moving upstream into data infrastructure and power networks.

For Nvidia, the deal deepens its control over the systems that make modern computing possible. For Barkley, it continues his shift from athlete to long-term investor in the core technologies shaping global industries.

Crusoe did not disclose how Barkley entered the round, though Founders Fund’s participation likely influenced the connection. The new funding strengthens Crusoe’s position in an increasingly competitive field where access to energy and compute capacity determines who leads the next wave of development.

While the headlines often focus on products or software breakthroughs, Crusoe’s rise shows where the real leverage lies. The future of technology depends not only on innovation but on who controls the infrastructure that powers it.

Meta is making another deep cut to its workforce, this time inside its most ambitious department. The company has laid off about 600 employees from its artificial intelligence division as it restructures to streamline operations and solidify Alexandr Wang’s control over the company’s AI strategy.

The layoffs, first reported by CNBC, affect workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure group, its Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR), and other product-focused teams. But one division was untouched: TBD Labs, which houses many of the high-profile AI researchers recruited by Meta this summer.

Those spared by the cuts report directly to Wang, who joined Meta in June after the company invested 14.3 billion dollars into his former company, Scale AI. The decision signals a clear bet by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wang’s vision and his costly new hires over long-serving staff.

Inside Meta, the AI division had been viewed as bloated. Legacy teams often competed for computing resources with newer research groups. When Wang’s team arrived to form Superintelligence Labs, it inherited what insiders described as an oversized and fragmented department. The layoffs, according to people familiar with the decision, are an effort to consolidate leadership, reduce redundancy, and align Meta’s AI work under one chain of command.

Following the cuts, Superintelligence Labs now has just under 3,000 employees. Workers impacted by the restructuring were told that November 21 will be their final day. Meta is offering 16 weeks of severance pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service.

Zuckerberg’s frustration with Meta’s AI performance has been growing for months. The release of the company’s Llama 4 models in April received a muted response from developers. Meta’s massive infrastructure spending has yet to deliver the breakthroughs its rivals, OpenAI and Google, have achieved.

Since Wang’s arrival, Meta has rebranded its flagship AI group as Superintelligence Labs, co-led by Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The pair have been tasked with unifying research and product development across the company’s platforms.

Meta’s financial outlook underscores the scale of that ambition. The company expects total expenses for 2025 to reach between 114 and 118 billion dollars, with higher costs projected in 2026 as its AI investments accelerate. The cuts in headcount are unlikely to slow spending but reflect a shift in who holds influence inside the company.

Earlier this week, Meta announced a 27 billion dollar partnership with Blue Owl Capital to fund its Hyperion data center in Louisiana, a project expected to occupy land comparable to much of Manhattan. The infrastructure will underpin Meta’s next phase of AI expansion.

Taken together, the layoffs and new construction signal a turning point for Meta. The company is trading its older research structure for a centralized, faster-moving operation built around Wang’s leadership. Efficiency is the public goal, but consolidation of control may be the true outcome.

The world’s largest crypto exchange just found absolution straight from the Oval Office.

President Donald Trump has pardoned Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder of Binance, who served time in federal prison after pleading guilty to allowing criminals to launder money through his exchange. The decision, announced Thursday, immediately reignited debate over how closely the White House has intertwined itself with the cryptocurrency industry.

Zhao’s company had admitted to compliance failures that let billions of dollars flow through Binance unchecked, funds tied to child exploitation, drug trafficking, and terrorism. He was sentenced to four months in prison and fined $50 million. Binance itself paid $4.3 billion in penalties to the U.S. government in 2024.

Yet Zhao’s pardon was not a surprise. He has close financial ties to World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture Trump launched in September with his sons Eric and Donald Jr. The company issued USD1, a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, which Trump has since touted as “America’s new digital currency.”

According to Trump’s latest financial disclosure, he earned more than $57 million from World Liberty Financial last year. The company recently announced a $2 billion investment from a UAE fund, using USD1 to purchase a stake in Binance, a deal now free of its founder’s criminal stain.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the decision, calling Zhao’s prosecution by the Biden administration “a politically motivated attack on innovation.” She emphasized that there were “no allegations of fraud or victims,” echoing language drawn from Zhao’s own legal defense.

Critics, however, see something else: the institutionalization of crypto patronage, where blockchain infrastructure and political power now circulate within the same ecosystem. A president who once promised to “drain the swamp” has effectively merged his financial interests with the global crypto economy and granted clemency to one of its most controversial figures.

The pardon also raises regulatory questions. Binance’s compliance failures helped trigger a global reckoning on crypto exchanges’ obligations under anti-money-laundering law. Restoring its founder’s reputation may complicate ongoing negotiations between U.S. regulators and the remaining crypto giants, who now face a political landscape openly friendly to digital asset magnates.

Crypto’s long campaign for legitimacy has reached its final frontier: state power itself. What began as an anti-establishment movement has now become a cornerstone of presidential economics, wielding the same tools of influence it once sought to disrupt.

For blockchain, the question is no longer whether governments will embrace it, but whose interests that embrace will ultimately serve.

Starlink was built to connect the unconnected. In Myanmar, it connected something else.

Earlier this week, SpaceX confirmed that it had disabled more than 2,500 Starlink terminals believed to be operating in large-scale scam compounds across Southeast Asia. The company said it identified the activity on its own and took action in coordination with law enforcement.

The move came after Myanmar’s military raided a sprawling cybercrime hub known as KK Park near the Thai border. The site had become a global symbol of digital exploitation, a place where trafficked workers were forced to operate romance scams and fake investment platforms targeting victims worldwide. More than 2,000 people were detained, and dozens of Starlink terminals were seized.

Starlink is not licensed to operate in Myanmar. Yet satellite dishes were seen across the region’s compound roofs, providing high-speed internet to criminal operations in otherwise disconnected zones. Reports from the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse suggest the technology had become essential to keeping the scam networks online, even under government crackdowns.

The portability of Starlink, once celebrated for empowering remote communities and journalists, also made it easy for bad actors to bypass state controls. In areas with no oversight, the same signal that could bring education or access to aid also enabled coercion, trafficking, and fraud.

SpaceX vice president Lauren Dreyer addressed the issue publicly, noting that the company works to detect and prevent misuse “by bad actors” and that it remains committed to ensuring Starlink is “a force for good.” The statement came after months of pressure from U.S. lawmakers, including Senator Maggie Hassan, who urged Elon Musk to stop the system from serving organized crime.

Myanmar’s government, meanwhile, has attempted to cast the crackdown as a victory against corruption. But human rights observers say it also highlights how criminal enterprises, militias, and state forces have all exploited connectivity to advance their interests in the country’s civil war.

Technology has always outpaced governance. But Starlink’s reach has exposed something deeper,  a world where digital infrastructure moves faster than the rules meant to contain it. When connection becomes borderless, accountability struggles to follow.

The world is running out of power. Not oil, not gas, not uranium, but electricity itself. The current that feeds every data center and every model driving the artificial intelligence age is reaching its limit.

At Apollo Global, a senior executive described the problem with stark clarity. The demand from AI systems is growing faster than the global power grid can expand. The gap between what AI consumes and what the world can supply, he said, will not be closed in our lifetime.

This is not a prediction about policy. It is a statement about physics.

For decades, the story of technology has been about acceleration. Each generation of processors delivered more performance. Each model demanded more computation. Each company promised growth without end. The energy to sustain it all was assumed to appear somewhere, from renewables or nuclear power or storage breakthroughs.

Now the equation has broken.

Across the world, data centers compete with cities for electricity. Renewable projects are delayed by regulation and supply shortages. Even countries rich in fossil fuels are rationing grid access to keep digital infrastructure online.

Apollo’s response is not despair but strategy. The firm is investing in what it calls “energy addition,” an approach that accepts every available source of power. Clean, dirty, or in between, all of it is needed. Investors are beginning to see the energy shortage not as a threat but as an opening to reshape global markets.

The meaning of the energy transition is shifting. What began as a moral effort to decarbonize has become a race to meet the needs of machines. Climate goals are colliding with the economics of computation.

This is what happens when human ambition outpaces physical capacity. The tools built to make life smarter now test the limits of the grid itself. Every generated image, every processed query, every digital task consumes a measure of light that must come from somewhere.

The dream of endless intelligence has met the reality of finite power. The future will depend not only on what the machines can think, but on how much energy we are willing to give them.

For a few hours on Monday, the Internet seemed to fall apart. Amazon Web Services, the invisible engine that powers much of the modern web, went offline. Banks froze. Flights were delayed. Apps from Snapchat to Reddit disappeared.

Amazon called it a “DNS issue,” but the outage revealed something far larger. The world’s digital infrastructure depends on a few data centers concentrated in one company’s hands. When that system falters, everything stops.

More than 70 AWS services failed before engineers restored them late Monday evening. Amazon promised a “detailed post-event summary,” though early reports suggest that its main US East data center in Virginia was the source of the problem. This single region has been the scene of repeated failures since 2020.

The numbers are staggering. Analysts told CNN that the financial losses could stretch into the hundreds of billions, with millions of workers unable to log in, transact, or even communicate. Airlines, hospitals, schools, and retailers all waited for servers to blink back to life.

The outage reached beyond Amazon’s own operations. Delivery drivers were told to stand by. Warehouse employees sat idle as internal systems froze. Even the app used to access their paychecks stopped working. For a company that has built its empire on efficiency, the silence was deafening.

Security analysts pointed out that this was not a cyberattack. It was a technical fault in the world’s most powerful cloud network. But the effect was indistinguishable from one. When the system collapsed, trust in digital stability collapsed with it.

The incident also rekindled an uncomfortable conversation. What happens when three corporations — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google,  control the core of global computing? The convenience of the cloud has made dependence invisible. Every login, payment, and communication is routed through a handful of data centers that no one outside those firms can inspect.

Experts have warned for years that the cloud’s promise of resilience was more myth than reality. Each outage proves the point. The Internet is not decentralized. It is centralized around profit.

After the CrowdStrike and Microsoft outages earlier this year, many businesses discussed moving to a “multi-cloud” strategy, spreading operations across providers. Yet even that may not be enough. When the backbone of the Internet belongs to a few companies, diversification can only go so far.

Amazon insists that service has returned to normal. But “normal” is starting to look more fragile each time. The outage is over, but the dependency remains.

When TikTok updated its law enforcement policy earlier this year, very few people noticed. The edits appeared small, but they signaled a deeper change. The company added language that allows it to share data with government and regulatory authorities more freely.

Until April, TikTok stated that it would notify users before disclosing their data to authorities. That promise has been replaced. The current version says the company will inform users about requests for their information only when required by law. It also changed the timing. Now users are notified after their data has been shared, not before.

This quiet change removes an important safeguard for anyone who might want to contest a request for their information. Without advance notice, there is no chance to challenge a data handover.

TikTok has not explained why it made this change or whether it has already shared data with agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When asked for clarification, the company did not respond.

Under United States law, administrative subpoenas issued by DHS or ICE do not need approval from a judge. They can request sensitive information like usernames, IP addresses, and phone numbers. Companies are not legally required to comply, but they can choose to. In the past, platforms like Meta informed users when these subpoenas were issued. That notice allowed individuals to take legal action, and some succeeded in blocking the release of their data.

TikTok’s new policy makes that process far less likely.

The company also weakened other parts of its policy. A statement that once said TikTok rejects invalid law enforcement requests now says it may reject them. A section that was titled “reporting obligations” is now called “proactive reports obligations.” This section lists situations where TikTok might share user information without receiving a formal request. The examples include reporting child exploitation or suspicious financial activity, which all major tech firms are required to do. However, the updated language leaves room for broader interpretation.

The shift comes as TikTok faces pressure from both the Trump administration and the Chinese government. The company’s ability to operate in the United States depends on political negotiations and executive discretion. That context makes its policy changes even more significant.

TikTok is not the only technology company adjusting to political realities. Other major platforms, including Meta, Google, and Apple, have also faced demands from government agencies and have modified their policies in response.

Outside the United States, the consequences may be greater. In countries that do not have strong legal notice requirements, TikTok’s revised policy could make it easier for governments to access user information without oversight. A platform with more than a billion users has made data requests easier to fulfill and harder to detect.

TikTok maintains that it complies with all applicable laws and regulations. Yet the meaning of compliance depends on the laws themselves. The company’s quiet policy changes show how easily user protection can be rewritten when oversight is weak.

In a quiet office tower in Manila’s financial district, dozens of workers are performing a kind of remote labor that barely existed a few years ago. Using headsets and joysticks, they control robots that restock shelves across hundreds of convenience stores in Tokyo.

The robots are made by Tokyo-based startup Telexistence and managed by a Manila firm called Astro Robotics. Around 60 employees monitor the machines twenty-four hours a day, stepping in when something goes wrong. About four percent of the time, the AI-driven systems drop a can or fail to recognize an item correctly. That is when a human pilot takes over through virtual reality controls to finish the task.

Each tele-operator supervises about fifty robots and earns between two hundred fifty and three hundred fifteen dollars per month, roughly the same as a call center wage. It is steady work, but it comes with an uneasy irony. The same operators who keep the robots functioning are also training the AI systems that may one day replace them.

Telexistence has been collecting large amounts of what it calls embodied teleoperation data from its human workforce. That data is now being shared with a San Francisco company called Physical Intelligence, which is using it to build foundation models for fully autonomous robots. The goal is to give machines a kind of physical intelligence, the ability to grasp, move, and adapt with minimal human help.

Astro Robotics’ founder, Juan Paolo Villonco, sees the system as a solution to Japan’s labor crisis. With an aging population and tight immigration policies, Japan has been unable to fill jobs in logistics and retail. Offshoring physical work through telepresence lowers costs and keeps operations running.

But not everyone views this as progress. Experts warn that this model creates a new kind of economic imbalance. Developed countries reduce domestic jobs while developing nations provide cheap technical labor to build the tools meant to erase their own. A professor at the University of Michigan called it a “double whammy”, automation removes jobs locally while offshoring the remaining tasks abroad.

In the Philippines, this model has triggered a quiet boom in automation-related IT work. Engineers and computer science graduates are now operating machines, training AI, and developing systems for foreign companies. Yet most remain contractors without benefits and with limited job security.

The global market for AI agents is projected to reach forty-three billion dollars by 2030, and the share of human-only jobs is expected to fall by more than a quarter within five years. For now, Filipino operators keep the shelves in Tokyo stocked from thousands of miles away. But with every movement they make through a virtual headset, they may also be helping teach the robots how to no longer need them.