Neuralink has a backlog of 10,000 individuals interested in having its N1 device drilled into their skulls, according to President and Co-Founder Dongjin (DJ) Seo. The company has implanted the N1 into 12 clinical trial patients so far; Seo expects the number to grow to 25 by year’s end.
People can sign up to participate in the company’s clinical trials online, but to qualify, they must have either limited or no ability to use their hands due to a cervical spinal cord injury or ALS. — Read More
Daily Archives: October 10, 2025
A built-in ‘off switch’ to stop persistent pain
Nearly 50 million people in the U.S. live with chronic pain, an invisible and often stubborn condition that can last for decades.
Now, collaborative research led by neuroscientist J. Nicholas Betley finds that a critical hub in the brainstem, has a built-in “off switch” to stop persistent pain signals from reaching the rest of the brain.
Their findings could help clinicians better understand chronic pain. “If we can measure and eventually target these neurons, that opens up a whole new path for treatment,” says Betley. — Read More
Figure AI’s New Humanoid Robot Can Fold Your Clothes, Do the Dishes
The day that humanoid robots wash the dishes and do the laundry may be closer than you think. On Thursday, Figure AI introduced its next-generation robot, Figure 03, taking its technology beyond factory floors to the home.
“Figure 03 is a general-purpose humanoid robot for every day,” the California startup said. In a video, it showed off the new model performing a wide range of chores at home, including watering plants, serving food, folding clothes, and tidying up a room. — Read More
Antifraud Company raises $5M for its AI whistleblower platform
The Antifraud Company is betting that AI and private-sector incentives can succeed where government has failed in clawing back billions in fraud.
A new startup with a bold pitch just came out of stealth with over $5 million in funding. The Antifraud Company is building what its founders call a “private-sector DOGE,” a reference to the government’s own short-lived Department of Government Efficiency. The goal is to use AI and investigative journalism to hunt down a slice of the estimated $500 billion lost to US government fraud each year.
The company, which has raised capital from Abstract Ventures, Browder Capital, and Dune Ventures, isn’t selling SaaS. Its business model is pure bounty hunting. The Antifraud Company finds fraud, reports it through official government whistleblower programs, and takes a cut—typically 10 to 30 percent—of whatever the government recovers. It’s a high-stakes, long-game approach, as payouts can take years to materialize. — Read More
Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?
Is there a seahorse emoji?
… [P]opular language models are very confident that there’s a seahorse emoji. And they’re not alone in that confidence.
… Maybe LLMs believe a seahorse emoji exists because so many humans in the training data do. Or maybe it’s a convergent belief – given how many other aquatic animals are in Unicode, it’s reasonable for both humans and LLMs to assume (generalize, even) that such a delightful animal is as well. A seahorse emoji was even formally proposed at one point, but was rejected in 2018.
Regardless of the root cause, many LLMs begin each new context window fresh with the mistaken latent belief that the seahorse emoji exists. But why does that produce such strange behavior? I mean, I used to believe a seahorse emoji existed myself, but if I had tried to send it to a friend, I would’ve simply looked for it on my keyboard and realized it wasn’t there, not sent the wrong emoji and then gone into an emoji spam doomloop. So what’s happening inside the LLM that causes it to act like this? — Read More
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