Neuralink bionic eye 👀, Unitree's $6k robot 🤖, AI code evals 👨💻
TLDR 2025-07-28
📱Big Tech & Startups
Elon Musk's Neuralink Joins Study Working Toward a Bionic Eye (1 minute read)
Neuralink is collaborating with researchers in California and Spain on a clinical trial to study visual prosthetics. The study, sponsored by the University of California at Santa Barbara, aims to address the fundamental questions that will allow the development of a Smart Bionic Eye. Such a device would use AI to help blind people identify faces, navigate the outdoors, and read, among other things. The study's description says that researchers will use Neuralink patients 'once available'. Neuralink is developing a brainchip called Blindsight that aims to restore vision to blind people and grant superhuman vision.
Meta Appoints Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist of New Superintelligence Lab (2 minute read)
Shengjia Zhao, a former lead scientist at OpenAI, has joined Meta as chief scientist at the company's newly established Superintelligence Lab. Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and GPT-4, will be tasked with setting the research agenda and scientific direction for the new lab. He will work directly with Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang to steer Meta's research efforts towards artificial general intelligence. Industry observers see Zhao's hiring as a significant move in the escalating AI talent war.
🚀Science & Futuristic Technology
China's Unitree Offers a Humanoid Robot for Under $6,000 (2 minute read)
Unitree Robotics's R1 bot has a starting price of 39,900 yuan, or around $5,900. Weighing just 25 kilograms, it has 26 joints and is equipped with multimodal artificial intelligence, including voice in image recognition. If it works as advertised, the new robot marks a milestone for the robotics industry. Chinese companies are pushing ahead with humanoids for factories, households, and even military use - pricing is crucial to their proliferation.
The first 100% effective HIV prevention drug is approved and going global (4 minute read)
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved lenacapavir, a drug that offers 100% protection against HIV with twice-yearly injections. Sold under the brand name Yeztugo, lenacapavir is a capsid inhibitor. It stops the virus from entering cells and copying itself. Gilead has made moves to ensure the drug is affordable - eligible uninsured individuals will likely be able to access the drug free of cost through its Advancing Access medication assistance program.
💻Programming, Design & Data Science
An Engineer's Guide to AI Code Model Evals (30 minute read)
A crucial part of the process of improving a coding-capable AI model is evaluation (evals). Evals are structured tests or benchmarks used to measure model performance on specific tasks. They are analogous to unit tests or integration tests in software. This post explores what evals are, how they're constructed, what 'hill climbing' means in model development, and how all these pieces connect to the continuous training and improvement of coding models.
It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA (10 minute read)
Modern CSS can provide seamless navigation without the need to build an app. New capabilities enable fading between pages, animating shared elements, maintaining persistent elements, and more, all with real URLs, real page loads, and without JavaScript routing hacks. This article discusses how. Most websites don't need to be apps - build a site like a site.
🎁Miscellaneous
The New Chips Designed to Solve AI's Energy Problem (6 minute read)
The estimated growth in energy required for AI is currently unsustainable. Several startups and companies are experimenting with new kinds of chips that have the potential to be much more energy efficient than current industry leaders at the all-important task of inference. While Nvidia chips will continue to be used for AI training for the foreseeable future, more efficient inference could collectively save companies tens of billions of dollars. The intensity of these chip development efforts shows how desperate the tech world is to provide AI to customers without paying the 'Nvidia tax'.
Elon Musk Interview: X Takeover Event (2 minute read)
Elon Musk recently sat down for an interview at the X Takeover 2025 event held in San Mateo, California. During the interview, Musk spoke candidly about Tesla's Optimus robot, Neuralink's potential medical applications, and more, offering wide-ranging insights into his companies. Despite regulatory and logistical hurdles, Tesla's roadmap remains ambitious and far-reaching. A video of the interview is linked in the article.
⚡Quick Links
Anthropic Seeks $150 Billion Valuation in New Funding Round (2 minute read)
Anthropic is looking to raise at least $3 billion and possibly as much as $5 billion.
Tesla plans ‘friends and family' car service in California, regulator says (5 minute read)
Tesla CEO recently teased an expansion of Tesla's robotaxi service to the San Francisco Bay Area, but California regulators say the company is not authorized to carry passengers on public roads in autonomous vehicles.
Heredocs Can Make Your Bash Scripts Self-Documenting (3 minute read)
Heredocs allows developers to add Markdown to bash scripts for inline documentation.
Saudi Aramco wants a Google spinoff to turn its waste into wealth (7 minute read)
SandboxAQ will use Quantum AI to help Aramco transform captured carbon dioxide into valuable products such as advanced materials and plastics.
An AI-Generated Protein Helps T Cells Kill Cancer (4 minute read)
A data scientist and an immunologist used AI to design de novo T cell receptor-like proteins that helped kill cancer in vitro in a process that only took several weeks, in contrast to the typical one-and-a-half years.
The Rise of Shippable Microfactories (20 minute read)
Microfactories aim to capture the benefits of off-site fabrication without the drawbacks of centralized production by making factories shippable and goods more locally produced.