believes

Canada now allows Chinese cars to be sold and the US believes they have opened the door to the wolf

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Canada is about to become the gateway of chinese manufacturers of electric cars to North America. BYD, Geely and Chery They have been preparing their landing for months in the country, and from Washington they are watching with great suspicion. What has happened? In January, Mark Carney’s Government closed a trade agreement with China that reduced tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles from 100% to 6.1%, in exchange for Beijing lowering tariffs on Canadian agricultural products such as rapeseed or lobsters. The agreement allows the entry of up to 49,000 Chinese electric cars per year, with the possibility of scaling up to 70,000 in five years. March 1, Ottawa opened the application process of import permits. Tensions. This decision comes amid trade tensions with the United States under the Trump administration, which has imposed tariffs on both Canada and China. “We take the world as it is, not as we would like it to be,” counted at that time Carney, with the intention of diversifying its alliances. Who arrives and how. According to the DSMA advisory firm, which is mediating between Chinese manufacturers and Canadian dealers, three brands lead the race: BYD, Geely and Chery. The three are working in parallel on the approval of vehicles, the construction of distribution networks and agreements with local financial partners. Jason Zhao, director of Asian market development at DSMA, estimates that the first cars could arrive at the end of 2026. It would look like this: BYD wants to open 20 dealerships in a year, starting in the Toronto area and then expanding to Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary, according to explained to The Globe and Mail Farid Ahmad, CEO of Dealer Solutions Mergers & Acquisitions. The brand is also studying the possibility of building its own production plant in the country, although, according to declared to Bloomberg a few weeks ago its executive vice president Stella Li, “no decision has been made yet.” Geely expects to soon receive certification from Canadian authorities for its vehicles, according to confirmed to Bloomberg Andy An, CEO of Zhejiang Geely Holding. The company already has some presence in North America through Volvo and Polestar, but Zeekr would be its first Chinese brand to reach the Canadian market. Cherry is hiring in Canada and has already registered several of its brands, including Omoda, Jaecoo and Exeed. In statements collected According to Automotive News Canada, the company stated that it is “evaluating avenues for future development, including alliances with local players,” although without confirming dates. The problem of times. Just because there is a trade agreement does not mean that the cars will arrive tomorrow. Stephen Beatty, industry consultant and former executive at Toyota Canada, counted to Automotive News Canada that, if starting from scratch, the homologation process can take “a year or more.” And the brands best positioned to be the first through the door are Tesla (which had already prepared its Shanghai factory to export to Canada in 2023) and Volvo and Polestar, which already operate in the Canadian market under a Chinese umbrella. Washington’s reaction. Jamieson Greer, United States Trade Representative, qualified the agreement “problematic” and warned that Canada might regret it. The issue raises concern in Washington, since if Chinese manufacturers manage to establish themselves in Canada, the US market (the great long-term objective) will be much closer. “The obvious end goal is all of North America,” counted Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, in the middle. Between the lines. The United States maintains very high tariffs on Chinese cars and a ban on connectivity technology for Chinese-made vehicles, which has blocked any mass entry into its market. Canada, by opening its door, not only irritates Washington because of the direct commercial impact (about 49,000 cars are barely 3% of the Canadian market), but for what it represents: a precedent and a bridgehead. BYD, in fact, has already publicly ruled out trying to enter the US in the short term. Stella Li, speaking to Bloomberg, described the American market as a “complicated environment” and said that the brand is focused on other markets where it can replicate its successful model in Brazil. And now what. According to DSMA, large dealer groups in Canada they are divided: Half are actively looking to close an agreement with a Chinese brand, the other half are waiting to see how the situation evolves. The medium and small ones, on the other hand, are “all” interested, according to Zhao. Longer term, both DSMA and Sino Auto Insights estimate that between 15 and 20 Chinese manufacturers will end up operating in Canada. Cover image | Tom Carnegie and BYD In Xataka | What happens if you are in a self-driving taxi and someone wants to get into the car and attack you? Waymo’s response is not encouraging

Jensen Huang believes we have reached the “coming of the AI ​​wolf.” It is perfect for feeding a Tamagotchi

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Artificial intelligence has become a football league. There are divisions in which titles are pursued such as having the most powerful AIthe fastest, the most capable at a specific task either the most versatilebut the goal is to become champion of the Champions League, and that is the AGI. Although from the United States they do not stop talk about artificial general intelligence As something that is about to fall, it is a theory that suggests that, at some point, an AI will be achieved that will surpass humans in all areas of knowledge. For the NVIDIA CEO, that moment has already arrived. At the moment it’s… smoke. The AGI has already arrived. It has been in the podcast by Lex Fridman in which Jensen Huangboss of the company that is supporting the AI ​​industry, has pointed out that general artificial intelligence is already here. Fridman posed a question: Could an AI system establish, grow, and operate a $1 billion-plus technology company within five to twenty years?” Huang rephrased the question, stating that current AI systems are already capable of creating a viral web service that briefly generates $1 billion in revenue. That remains to be seen, but it is not the only one that Huang threw into the air. When Fridman asked if AGI is five, ten, fifteen or twenty years away, Huang responded with a resounding “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI.” Well no. Friedman said that was going to raise some eyebrows, and it took Huang less time than ChatGPT to agree with you if you tell him something isn’t right to qualify his words. Much of the conversation focused on OpenClaw platform, the open source agentic AI framework that has become the pearl of the industry and where everyone wants to have something to say. In the article of The Verge point out the example of the Tamagotchi and how Huang points out that people can use their AI agents to do all kinds of things like digital influencers or apps to feed a Tamagotchi for you. That would become an “instant success” that can generate billions of dollars, but the possibility that, right now, 100,000 of those agents will build a company like NVIDIA “is zero percent,” he noted. What is AGI? That is, current AI and agents can create “fleeting and viral hits”, but… that is not the question. That is, one thing is agentic AI, which is something that all the major companies in the sector are already pushing and, basically, it is like a shortcut program for AI to do things for us. And a very different one is the AGI. The artificial general intelligence that Huang says we have already achieved is something very different. While the agents drink from the same AI that is nothing more than a language model that is dedicated to putting together words that more or less make sense, but that are calculated by algorithms, percentages and probabilities As long as two words go together, AGI is a “real” artificial intelligence, one that thinks like a human. It is something that, as far as we know, is only in the theoretical framework because its technical complexity is overwhelming. The big difference between an AI and agents and AGI is that, if the first two have language as their core and operate from it, AGI is the human brain whose core is thought. Or so they aspire to create. Is Huang an AI? After seeing some of their recent statements and this interview, the question that arises is why there are certain profiles that are choosing to “reason” exactly the way an AI reasons. These tools They are designed to prove us right.so as not to confront us and so that we spend more time using that AI and not another. That’s why ChatGPT or Gemini are so accommodating in their responses when we try to find a way around them. But, as Mashable points out, giving that more convenient answer is also becoming a trend among “real” intelligences. The wolf is coming. Huang himself already pointed out in 2024 that AGI would be software capable of imitating standard human intelligence, but his examples do not seem to match the idea of ​​what AGI is. The industry seems hell-bent on reaching AGI through language models, but as some point out, It’s a dead end. Yann LeCun is considered one of the godfathers of modern AI. Until recently, he was also the head of AI at Meta and stated that the path to AGI is not language modelsbut the world models. They are models that will learn from the environment, will be able to imagine scenarios and operate like humans. That has nothing to do with current models that would not be possible without plundering the Internet and human-created culture. It is not at all clear what it will be the spark that will allow that general artificial intelligence will be reached, but the American AI Big Tech never tires of saying that AGI is already here. Now it is, really good. Huang just stated it to qualify his words in the following sentence, Sam Altman of OpenAI It has been creating expectation for a long time about the AGI when they are not yet able to do a ChatGPT that doesn’t hallucinate, Zuckerberg has assembled a super team to achieve itAnthropic’s Darío Amodei believes that is at the doors and Elon Musk says that Grok 5 could achieve it. At the moment, a lot of promises, and something that creates an app to power a Tamagotchi doesn’t sound like that great revolution in technology either. Images | NVIDIA In Xataka | Customers demand that a human solve their problem. The surprising thing is that if humans serve them they think they are an AI

A year ago, the blackout caused the Spanish data network to collapse. The CNMC believes it has the solution

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In April 2025 Spain suffered a zero energy of which, precisely now, we are going to begin to pay some of its consequences. I remember quite clearly being cut off, not being able to call or send messages via data connection. However, when I changed locations and arrived at my relatives’ houses, some of them could do it. The fall of telecommunications It was uneven in Spainand the CNMC has published a document with preventive measures in case a similar situation occurs again. What happened. The energy blackout that left Spain plunged into darkness resulted in a large part of the population being cut off from communication. However, some operators They managed to keep their mobile network active for hours. Backup generators, generating sets moved to each area, backup systems… The challenge for operators to maintain coverage in Spanish territory was a titanic challenge, quite dependent on internal logistics, the state of the reserve batteries (some of them run on fuel), and the network infrastructure itself They were variables that influenced such unequal conditions to be experienced. A single network. In its statement, the CNMC proposes that the four giants of the Spanish territory put roaming plans at the service of the population in emergency cases. The experience of other countries shows that it is viable to incorporate roaming plans between operators in case of emergency. In this way, in areas where this was necessary due to the unavailability of service in an operator’s mobile network, the networks could be prepared to quickly enable the basic telecommunications services of the affected users through roaming in the networks of other operators. According to the regulator, this is an “ideal measure to strengthen resilience”, but it is not so easy to apply. Yes, but. What the CNMC proposes is a cross-roaming service between Telefónica, Vodafone and MásOrange, something that requires coordination and agreement between the three giants. The best example is Sweden where, after two years of preparation, any mobile phone can connect to any operator. Go deeper. In addition to this proposal, the CNMC requests the mandatory nature of the alert system HANDLE in those cars with DAB+ radio receivers (the evolution of FM radio). Although DAB+ works via antenna (like AM and FM radio), its signal is digitally encoded. The ASA system allows you to automatically activate a DAB+ radio connected to power, being able to quickly launch alerts. At the moment, there is a distance from proposal to fact. In Xataka | Europe has a million reasons to fear an increase in the price of electricity. Spain has something else: renewables

Jensen Huang believes he has found the perfect new bonus for software engineers. Not Stocks: AI Tokens

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The CEO of Nvidia has been converting the AI tokens at the center of all their public conversations. Jensen Huang’s latest idea links these tokens to the efficiency of engineers and how the best engineers in the world are recruited: in addition to a generous salary, offer them an amount equivalent to half their annual salary in AI tokens as part of the hiring package.​ Huang verbalized his proposal during the inaugural speech of the GTC 2026 conferenceNVIDIA’s largest annual event for developers. In a later interview, the Nvidia CEO detailed that engineers would earn “a few hundred thousand dollars a year as a base salary,” and the intention would be to give them “probably half of that, also, in tokens, so they can multiply your productivity times ten”.​ What Huang proposes already has a name: Tokenmaxxing. In one podcast appearance ‘All-InHuang said he would be on “high alert” if an engineer earning $500,000 didn’t spend at least $250,000 a year on tokens. “If that person said (that he has used tokens worth) $5,000, I would go completely crazy,” Huang stated. When asked if NVIDIA planned to spend $2 billion on tokens for its engineering team, as proposed, Huang responded: “We’re trying.”​ As and how they counted in The New York Timesthat has generated a phenomenon called “Tokenmaxxing“, with which engineers brag about the number of tokens they consume to try to improve the perception of their productivity: the more tokens you consume, the more productive you are. Tokens as bonuses are a trend in Silicon Valley. The CEO of NVIDIA is not the only one who thinks this way, and the use of tokens as an extra work benefit it’s soaking among investors in the sector. Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures stated to Business Insider that “companies are incorporating AI inference as a fourth component of engineer compensation: salary, bonus, stock and tokens.” The interest of whoever sells the chips. The NVIDIA CEO encouraging everyone to spend more on tokens is not disinterested advice. Gergely Orosz, analyst at software engineeringhe pointed it out bluntly in a publication from AND he added an analogy that sums it up accurately: “It’s almost as if the CEO of Apple said, ‘If someone who makes $500,000 a year doesn’t spend at least $50,000 a year on in-app purchases on iOS, I’d be deeply alarmed.’ And yes, you would be, because that would reduce the revenue you generate.” Huang is the head of the company that manufactures the chips for AI on which most of the world’s artificial intelligence runs. Huang himself made it clear to his investors: “Without computing, there is no way to generate tokens. Without tokens, there is no way to grow revenue,” he declared, describing his data centers as “token factories” whose demand will only grow as AI agents proliferate.​ Do not confuse value with price. However, Huang has incurred a bias when arguing his idea: confusing value with price. Orosz formulated it clearly in a message in X : “The advice that engineers should use tools that make them more productive IS correct… except that the cost of tools should NOT be what we focus on. Some of the most useful tools are very cheap. Of course, vendors will focus on selling the most expensive and most profitable tools.” Productivity is not measured in tokens spent, but in results achieved. The right question for companies should not be whether their employees use more AI, but whether increased use of AI is rewarded. with greater productivity. In Xataka | Customers demand that a human solve their problem. The surprising thing is that if humans serve them they think they are an AI Image | NVIDIA, Unsplash (Arif Riyanto)

Oatmeal has been “removed” to being the queen of breakfasts. Science believes it is more beneficial at dinner

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One of the great nutritional dilemmas is undoubtedly at dinner timesince we want to eat something that is quick, satisfying and that does not make us go to bed with a distressing heaviness. And this is where oats can come into play, a food that has been relegated to breakfast territory by associating with cereals, but scientific evidence suggests that we are wasting all your potentialsince we can take it to the last meal of the day. His secret. To understand why oatmeal is ideal for dinner, you have to look at a microscopic level. And the reason is that oats are rich in beta-glucana type of soluble fiber that generates high viscosity in the intestine. In this way, when oats are eaten, this beta-glucan forms a kind of viscous gel in the digestive tract that achieves dramatically delay gastric emptying and glucose absorption. Unlike classic refined grains that cause a sugar spike followed by a crash, which can lead to midnight hunger, oats offer a slow release of energy to stabilize blood levels after a meal. Goodbye to snacking night. If you’ve ever had a light dinner and two hours later you were raiding the refrigerator, oatmeal has the solution here, since several randomized clinical studies support its amazing satiating capacity. one of them was published in 2016 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition and focused on analyzing 48 healthy adults who were given a serving of hydrated oats of just 250 kcal. The results showed that the feeling of fullness was significantly increased and hunger was reduced for up to four hours, compared to classic ready-to-eat cereals. This satiety, mediated by the high molecular weight and viscosity of beta-glucan, caused the subjects to reduce their energy intake by 85 kcal on average at the next meal. A better sleep. Going to bed with sky-high sugar levels is not the best idea, neither for our metabolism nor for the quality of our rest. Again, our great ally here is beta-glucan, since the EFSA endorses that consumption of four grams of beta-glucan per meal significantly reduces glycemic responses without disproportionately raising insulin. This is something that was confirmed by a study in 2021where it was seen that doses of four grams or more of beta-glucans for every 30 grams of available carbohydrates are the key to avoiding the dreaded nocturnal glucose peaks. The impact. To all this, and although there are no studies designed exclusively to measure the impact of oats at dinner, we know that their glycemic index is low, which ensures fairly smooth digestion. This is in addition to the fact that it contains tryptophan, an essential amino acid that our body uses to produce melatonin and serotonin, the hormones responsible for regulating and improving the sleep cycle. His presence at dinner. Keep in mind that not all oats are the same. The first thing to keep in mind is that you should avoid ultra-processed foods, avoiding instant oatmeal versions that are loaded with added sugars or artificial flavorings. Furthermore, since at night we look for a complete meal, the best way to prepare it is by combining it with a good source of protein. Images | micheile henderson In Xataka | We have been believing for years that intermittent fasting is the definitive weapon to lose weight. Science has another idea

Texas has the same problem of sinkholes and potholes as Spain but believes it has the solution: plastic roads

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It is barely one kilometer but the promise is enormous: converting the roads into a huge plastic recycling plant. Testing began at the University of Texas at Arlington (United States) promulgated by Sahadat Hossaincivil engineer and director of the Solid Waste Institute for Sustainability at the University of Texas, but they have already taken the leap to the road. Hossain tells the story in The Conversationwhere he explains that the project was born from his obsession with recycling plastic. The engineer points out that he grew up in a low-income neighborhood of Bangladesh and that there he observed that people who lived closer to the landfills suffered more health problems than those who lived a little further away. His childhood experience has focused much of his research, focusing on the impact of materials on the environment and possible solutions for recycling them. Among the most complicated to recycle and, without a doubt, the most used: plastic. Now, under their research, in the United States they have launched a project to use plastics used in the construction of roads. And the results are being successful. Harder and more resistant In Texas they have a problem: it’s hot. Very hot, in fact. When building a road, taking the climate into account is essential. ANDIn warmer places, harder bitumens are needed. because they tolerate heat better. The problem is that asphalt also becomes more fragile and breaks more easily. The problems are even more pronounced if a wave of bad weather with a lot of water hits a fragile pavement, as has happened in Spain. A solution could go through make the asphalt a little more elastic but this has an intrinsic problem. And if the asphalt is more elastic, it also resists heat less well and in the harshest months it can soften and melt, as has happened to the United Kingdom in recent years. But this is, always, if we use traditional methods. What Sahadat Hossain’s team is testing is injecting plastics into the bitumen that binds the mixture of stones and sand that makes up the asphalt. At the moment, they are trying to inject plastics that make up between 8 and 10% of the bitumen mixture that binds the rest of the materials. It may not seem like a lot but, according to Hossain, at a test site near Dallas they used 4.5 tons of plastics that came from single-use plastic bags or bottles that were discarded to build a mile. It is a not insignificant amount if we think that we are talking about building about 1,600 meters of road while giving a new use to a material that produces about 400 million tons a year and of which barely 10% is recycled. To be useful, the process requires shred plastic until you get a very fine material that can melt with the bitumen and thus not leave elements in the air. And the result is being good. The first tests were done in university parking lot but they have already been scaling the project to roads with intense road traffic. According to their experience, the asphalt continues to resist heat (with good performance on days that exceeded 100º Fahrenheit, almost 38ºC) and is more flexible than with the traditional system, which reduces the risk of cracks and fractures. Point at The Conversationthat one of these tests has also been carried out in Bangladesh, where a heat wave caused more cracks and fractures in traditional roads while this road with plastics suffered much less wear. It is, therefore, good news when it comes to extend the useful life of the pavement and save money on maintenance. The good news is that the project is monitoring all the results with high traffic volume roads (also the adverse ones such as the possible emission of microplastics when vehicles pass by). And this test is by no means the first. In Rotterdam there was already talk of building these roads with recycled plastics a decade ago. However, its fatigue is much lower. The advantage here is that its performance can be studied under constant and high-tonnage traffic. Photo | The University of Texas at Arlington In Xataka | Until 2020, Spain had the most praised roads in Europe. Now it has something else: a hole of 13,000 million euros

The big problem with putting robots everywhere is that they get lost. An engineer from Elche believes she has the solution

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It is no surprise that we see more and more robots in our daily lives: in a restaurant bringing orders to the table, in the field as a seasonal workermaking him courier delivery competition…and that’s not to mention its applications in automation on an industrial scale. Robots don’t need to rest, they don’t have labor rights, and they don’t complain. But they get lost. And that is a real, very common problem for which a research team from the Miguel Hernández University of Elche has found solution. The context. Autonomous robots need to know where they are to function and that does not always happen: when the location reference is lost, either because someone moves it, it is turned off or the environment changes without warning, the robot is unable to recover its position. Something as normal as running out of battery can be a technical drama. This phenomenon is not something isolated, in fact it even has a name in robotics: the “kidnapped robot problem“. Although we see more and more robots everywhere, this incident is a pending issue that has not been resolved in a robust way for decades. Without going any further, because resorting to GPS is something that can fail in settings such as indoors or near tall buildings. As deepens Míriam Máximolead author of the article: “It is a classic problem and very difficult to solve, especially in large environments.” The solution. What the team from the University of Elche has implemented is MCL-DLF, the acronym for Monte Carlo Localization – Deep Local Feature, a system that combines two technologies: on the one hand, a 3D LiDAR that emits laser pulses to draw a three-dimensional map of the environment similar to that of robot vacuum cleaners. On the other hand, an artificial intelligence that learns which elements of the environment are most useful for orientation. Why is it important. Because having a reliable location system is essential for any robotic deployment in real life: autonomous vehicles, delivery and logistics, assistance… its presence may be increasingly common, but it is still tremendously dependent on supervision: knowing where it is is essential for it to operate safely. The implemented method also introduces an important change: it is independent, in that it does not require external infrastructure to function like GPS, so its base is more robust and versatile in the face of different use scenarios in the real world. How it works. Its approach is hierarchical, so it first recognizes large structures and then fine details, similar to how people do. When you arrive at an unknown place, first you keep the essentials: what neighborhood you are in, for example. Then you look for more specific references to refine further. Furthermore, the system does not play everything on one card: it maintains several position hypotheses simultaneously and discards or refines them as the sensor captures more information. Tests carried out for months on the university campus with different lighting conditions, vegetation or simply the weather have shown more consistency than conventional methods. A good start with pending subjects. Beyond its promising results, the most striking thing about this research is its commitment to sensory autonomy: it does not depend on networks of beacons or GPS, but on its own sensors. This makes it a potentially more versatile system. However, it faces the great historical challenge of robot placement: how fragile it is in the face of changing environments. It is true that they have tested it in different conditions, but it has been within the campus: making the leap to more complex and constantly changing environments is their litmus test, in addition to additional validation in extreme conditions. Finally, before an eventual real commercial deployment, we will have to see how it integrates with other navigation systems and its computational cost. In Xataka | Tesla has been building the Optimus for years. China has just presented itself with fifteen companies and factories already set up In Xataka | We already have so many “humanoid” robots that it is difficult to differentiate one from the other. This graph fixes it Cover | Enchanted Tools

The owner of Mercadona believes that in a few years kitchens will disappear from homes. The consumption of precooked foods proves him right

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The forecast sounded so far-fetched, it clashed to such an extent with the gastronomic tradition of Spain, that it generated a considerable stir. Just a year ago, during the presentation of Mercadona’s accounts, Juan Roig surprised by predicting death (almost) imminent of domestic kitchens. “I said it and I maintain it: in the middle of the 21st century there will be no kitchens,” cried the businessman. In the future imagined by Roig we go from making our own food in the vitro at home to taking it already prepared from supermarkets, which have become an absolute reference for food. The sector data They confirm that, no matter how dystopian Roig’s prophecy sounds, it seems to be coming true. A percentage: 3.8%. Spain is a benchmark for the Mediterranean diet. But also, and increasingly, a country of families who are no longer willing to spend hours and hours in the kitchen. That’s what it suggests at least. the last balance of the Spanish Association of Prepared Meal Manufacturers (Asefapre). According to the data of the sector, in 2025, ready-made foods “reinforced their weight in the shopping basket”, with an increase in consumption of 3.8%. In total, 715,052 tons of prepared meals were sold, “a new record,” recalls Asefapre, which consolidates the trend of the last decade. Translated into hard and fast euros, sales rose to 4,309 million, with an annual increase of 5%. A figure: 18 kilos a year. To give us an idea of ​​what this growth means, Asefapre calculates that last year each Spaniard ate on average about 18 kilos of prepared dishes. As a reference it is almost the same amount of fish products that we Spaniards consume in our homes (another thing is the restaurants) throughout 2024. The difference between precooked and fish is that the demand for the latter takes time to increase. low hours (both fresh and frozen) while the former grows at a good pace. The latest balance sheet of the employers’ association reflects an annual increase of 4.7% in the consumption of prepared foods, a growth rate that comfortably exceeds that of food as a whole (0.6%). What do we eat? Asefapre segregate your data of sales, which offers us an interesting vision of what exactly we Spaniards consume. The cake goes to “refrigerated” products, with a sales volume of 330,602 t shipped in 2025, 5% more than the previous year. In second place are “frozen products”, with sales that amounted to 297,023 t (+2.5%). The “dishes prepared at room temperature”, very common in some supermarket chains, are quite far behind, with 87,426 tons sold, but they leave an interesting fact: their demand grew by 4.1%. From pizza to potatoes and pasta. If we go down to detail we see that what we Spaniards like most (at least it is what we demand most) are pizzas, the leading producer in the sector with a sales volume that amounted to 131,600 tons. They are followed by frozen potatoes, with 98,056 t, and pasta-based dishes, which totaled 72,405 t. The three categories grew, with sales increases ranging between 2.6 and 7.2%. Beyond the Spanish market, one fifth (21.4%) of the industry’s production ends up being exported. More than just strategy. At this point the question is obvious: Why do we buy more and more pre-cooked foods? What leads us to feed ourselves with prepared dishes, whether frozen, refrigerated or food sold at room temperature ready for consumption, like what Mercadona offers in its supermarkets? The answer is complex. On the one hand there is the sector’s strategy, which has increased and perfected its range of products, adding foreign dishes that aim in part at the growing population immigrant living in Spain. Beyond the efforts of the industry, the increase in consumption of prepared dishes also responds to profound changes at a social and cultural level. They increase the single-person householdsit gets complicated conciliation between professional and family life and even change the kitchen structure in the houses. Also our way of thinking, as Asefapre herself remembers: today it no longer ‘squeaks’ at us that they serve us a pre-cooked dish on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve or that in families there are no longer people willing to lock themselves between the stoves. Of new grandmothers and homes. “Grandmas are not like they used to be and prefer to go walking with friends, do pilates or travel,” he reflected during the presentation of the balance sheet the president of Asefapre, David Aldea. It is not the only cultural change he cited. Added to this are others, such as the fact that it is increasingly easier to find “homes with fewer members” or homes in which the space dedicated to cooking has been reduced to a minimum. The trend seems to confirm Roig’s prediction, which a year ago I already confirmed the good progress of Mercadona’s business line for ready-to-eat dishes, launched in 2018. “It is profitable and continues to grow.” Images | Andalusian Government (Flickr), Mercadona and Asefapre In Xataka | Mercadona has grown so much in Spain that for the US it is no longer just a supermarket chain: it is a “cultural phenomenon”

Perplexity has already marked its path for what it believes is fundamental

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For years, advertising has been the silent fuel of much of the internet. It has financed search engines, web pages, applications and services that we use daily without paying directly for them, something that we have assumed almost as a norm in the digital environment. But the emergence of chatbots and search products powered by AI forces us to rethink that balance, because here the product is no longer just content, but answers that the public should consider reliable. In this area, any suspicion about who influences what is read stops being a technical detail and becomes a central issue. Clash between trust and monetization. In recent months we have begun to see how large AI companies take clear positions, some betting on introducing advertising in their free products and others rejecting it outright due to the impact it could have on user perception. The result is a map that begins to outline a division, just when the sector needs to demonstrate that it can become a sustainable business. And what’s at stake is not just how you make money with AI, but what kind of relationship you build with those who use it. Trust as a product. One of the clearest movements in this division is found in Perplexity. The company even tested ads in 2024, showing sponsored responses under the chatbot’s responses, but it began to withdraw them at the end of last year and now assures that it has no plans to continue down that path. “The user must believe that this is the best possible response to continue using the product and be willing to pay for it,” an executive explained to the Financial Times. The internal conclusion is direct: if the advertisements sow doubts, the value of the product itself is compromised, although the company leaves the door open to revisit that path in the future. War of ads against ads. Anthropic is in the same line as Perplexity, which not only defends keeping its chatbot without advertising, but has turned that decision into a public message. The company launched a campaign prior to the Super Bowl with a direct slogan, “The ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” which points to the direction of the sector without explicitly mentioning competing products. The campaign shows scenes that caricature commercial recommendations within personal conversations, underscoring the discomfort that such a scenario could generate. The reaction from OpenAI. Sam Altman rated the campaign of Anthropic as “clearly dishonest” and defended that the ad model his company is exploring would follow different principles, with advertising “separated and clearly labeled” and without influence on the system’s responses. The manager framed this decision as a question of access, arguing that expanding the free use of AI requires new sources of income, and he contrasted this with the idea that Anthropic offers an expensive product for those who can pay for it while OpenAI seeks massive reach with free access. Not everyone wants (or can) do without advertising. Training and sustaining these systems burns cash and has increased the pressure to find sustainable income as usage grows. In this context, some relevant actors are exploring advertising as a way to finance free access, with formulas in which sponsored content appears separated from the responses, with testing on products like ChatGPT and in formats Google Search with AI. It should be noted that Google has not introduced ads to its Gemini chatbot. Images | Perplexity + Nano Banana In Xataka | Claude Sonnet 4.6 promises to do the paperwork for you. Now he has the challenge of his life: dealing with the Spanish administration’s websites

An archaeologist believes his mental rigidity was more lethal than the sapiens’ spears

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For decades, the million-dollar question in paleoanthropology has always been the same: how on earth do we Neanderthals disappeared? We have blamed climate changeto the lower cognitive capacity, to the diseases and even a violent genocide perpetrated by us, the Homo sapiens. However, the French paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak has put another theory much more uncomfortable on the table. The theory. Through his latest book, ‘The last neanderthal‘, and in recent statementsthe French paleoanthropologist has pointed out that the Neanderthals were not swept away by an external force, but rather suffered an internal collapse. A true “individual and social suicide” caused by their own cultural rigidity and their refusal to connect. The specimen. Slimak is not an armchair theorist, but has spent decades digging in Grotte Mandrin (France), a key site that has revolutionized what we know about the transition between Neanderthals and modern humans. Here the cornerstone of his argument is “Thorin”, a late Neanderthal whose remains were analyzed in a genomic study published in Cell Genomics. What was seen. In this specimen it was seen that, despite living about 42,000-50,000 years ago (relatively “close” to the end), Thorin’s lineage had been genetically isolated for 50,000 years. This is in addition to the fact that, although there were other Neanderthal populations just two weeks away, they did not mix. They lived in a genetic and social bubble for millennia without gene flow either with other Neanderthals or, of course, with the sapiens who were already around the area. Slimak interprets this isolation not as a physical impossibility, but as a cultural choice. Thorin’s Neanderthals, according to his reading, rejected interaction. A clash of values. Based on this isolation of Thorin and on the lithic technology found in Mandrin, which are very creative but poorly standardized tools, Slimak draws two opposing “mental spheres.” The first of them is the ‘sapiens model’, where vast and interconnected communities meant that, if one group failed, the entire network could be sustained thanks to the efficiency and homogenization. At the other extreme we have the ‘Neanderthal model’ where small, independent and highly creative groups existed, but fragmented. Simply put, each clan was a world where there was no interconnection. The metaphor of ‘suicide’. The author in this case is not referring to them taking their own lives individually, but rather to a collapse of their values. Upon encountering the social “machine” of the Sapiens, the Neanderthal worldview of isolated groups became unsustainable, since, according to Slimaksome groups “decided to become invisible” or their social structure simply imploded due to the efficiency of human networks. The scientific consensus. Although Slimak’s narrative is literary powerful, the current scientific consensus prefers less romantic and more mathematical explanations. Most paleoanthropologists do not see conscious “suicide,” but rather a structural disadvantage. Recent literature explains extinction through a combination of factors such as demographics. In this case, stochastic drift models show that, if you have very small and dispersed populations (like Neanderthals), a very slight disadvantage in the reproduction or survival rate is enough for the species to become extinct in a few thousand years. There is more. Coinciding with Slimak’s data, there are different investigations that accept that Sapiens They had broader social networks. This can allow for help in a major crisis, such as a local drought, where neighbors can help others move forward. In the case of Neanderthals, being isolated, as Thorin demonstrates, they were vulnerable to any ecological “bump.” In addition to all this, we cannot forget about endogamy. Here a genetic analysis confirms that inbreeding weakened Neanderthals, reducing their fertility and biological resistance, without the need to invoke psychological factors. Something that also anticipated his complete disappearance from this planet. Images | 12019 In Xataka | A 4,000-kilometer “hybrid zone” in the heart of Europe: what we know about Neanderthals has just changed

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