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ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent are spending $647 million on AI. Or rather: in Christmas bribes by AI

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The big three Chinese tech companies have decided that the best way to get users for their AI chatbots is to literally pay them to use them. Between them, they are investing more than $2.9 billion in incentives during the Lunar New Year, the biggest Chinese holiday. It is a war with a single intention: to be the gateway for AI in the country. Subsidy war. The Chinese Lunar New Year has become another major battleground to win the AI ​​race. As they say from the LatePost newsletter (translated by Recode China AI), Alibaba leads with 3,000 million yuan (about 431 million dollars) that it will distribute to its users for its app qwenfollowed by Tencent with 1 billion yuan to yuanbaoand Baidu with 500 million. ByteDance, for its part, has secured the most expensive sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala to promote Doubaoits chatbot that already has 100 million daily active users. In Xataka ByteDance is not satisfied with TikTok and has just started a new career: one that leads it to create its own AI chip User acquisition. Companies are using money in different ways but with the same objective: hooking users. Alibaba is subsidizing real purchases, from milk tea to hotel reservations, all through its Qwen assistant. According to Bloombergsome stores that offered milk tea have been overwhelmed by orders that had been placed through the chatbot. Tencent offers digital envelopes of up to 10,000 yuan (1,219 euros) directly in cash. On the other hand, ByteDance has taken advantage of its muscle in social networks to integrate Doubao throughout its network of applications. Between the lines. The most interesting part of all this is that it seems that none of these companies yet know how to monetize their AI tools, according to industry sources cited by LatePost. “Monetization models for Chinese AI companies remain murky, a challenge that is also reflected in the United States,” points out Shi Jialong, analyst at Nomura. They are buying users in the hopes of later figuring out how to convert them into revenue. {“videoId”:”x8jpy2b”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”What’s BEHIND AIs like CHATGPT, DALL-E or MIDJOURNEY? | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”, “tag”:”Webedia-prod”, “duration”:”1173″} Competence. The situation is radically different from that of a year ago. DeepSeek changed the rules of the game your R1 model last year, gaining 10 million active users in less than a month. And just as they mention in LatePost, that set off a chain reaction, causing Tencent to dive headlong into AI after years of caution, Alibaba to prioritize its Qwen app above everything (even its Quark browser), and ByteDance to accelerate its investment in talent and infrastructure. Yields. ByteDance reported net profits of about $40 billion in the first three quarters of the year, while Tencent reached $30 billion and Alibaba about $10 billion. according to LatePost. Despite having achieved lower profitability in its operations, Alibaba intends to increase its investment in AI infrastructure, specifically from 55 billion to 69 billion dollars in the next three years, as pointed out in the newsletter. ByteDance, for its part, was processing an average of 63 billion tokens daily with its AI models at the end of 2025, a growth of 200% in six months. In Xataka "The world is in danger": Anthropic’s security manager leaves the company to write poetry And now what. The subsidy war to be the gateway to China is not new. As well as remember In Bloomberg, in sectors such as shared transportation or food delivery, they have experienced this battle of companies throwing incentives at their users. And companies lose money massively until the market consolidates. The difference is that here users are not afraid to change AI models and quickly switch to the one that offers the best technical performance, as indicated the OpenRouter report. It will be interesting to see what the market share of the main AI models in China looks like when they stop flying the envelope. Cover image | Arthur Wang and Solen Feyissa In Xataka |Google is going to borrow money to pay back in 100 years. You have to believe that in 100 years Google will still be there (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent are spending $647 million on AI. Or rather: in Christmas bribes by AI was originally published in Xataka by Antonio Vallejo .

Tell Applied Materials and its fine of 252 million

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For years, the call United States Entity List It has been interpreted as a geopolitical tool aimed at slowing Chinese technological advance. However, its scope does not remain symbolic or diplomatic rhetoric: it also has immediate economic consequences for companies that operate in the global chip chain. Applied Materials just proved it with a civil penalty of $252 million linked to exports to SMIC, in an episode that illustrates the extent to which Washington’s controls can translate into tangible costs for the industry. The sanction. The move follows an agreement with the US Department of Commerce to close allegations of irregular exports of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to subsidiaries of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC). According to the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), between November 2020 and July 2022, there were 56 exports or attempted exports valued at around $126 million, carried out even though certain operations were already subject to licensing requirements. The agreed civil fine amounts to double that figure and, according to the Department of Commerce itself, represents the legal maximum applicable in this case. behind the scenes. The regulatory sequence begins with a specific notification sent to Applied Materials on September 25, 2020, which warned that certain operations related to SMIC were subject to licensing control for reasons of possible military end uses. These types of communications, known as “is-informed” letters, informed the receiving company that it needed authorization for certain exports, re-exports or transfers. What exports are in question. The US regulator’s research focuses on ion implantation systems and associated modules, tools used in the early phases of the semiconductor manufacturing process to modify, through doping, the electrical properties of silicon. Although it is not machinery as visible as advanced lithography, its role is essential in multiple technological nodes, both mature and cutting-edge. The logistical scheme under analysis. The case documentation includes a fragmented production and shipping model which involved several jurisdictions before final delivery in China. Part of the equipment originated in the United States, continued its process in South Korea and ended up in SMIC subsidiaries, while certain modules traveled from Singapore independently. BIS presents this journey as a central element to reconstruct the operations examined and evaluate whether the export control framework was respected throughout the chain. Conditions beyond the fine. The agreement reached is not limited to financial payment. The order includes a denial of export privileges suspended for three years, which could be activated if the company fails to comply with established obligations, along with the requirement for periodic external audits and annual certifications of compliance. The message. The resolution not only closes an administrative file, it also offers a broader reading about the moment the global technology industry is going through. The export control policies promoted by Washington are showing their ability to transfer strategic decisions to the operational terrain of companies, with measurable financial and regulatory consequences. Images | Applied Materials | aboodi vesakaran In Xataka | US sanctions are collapsing China’s factories. It’s bad news for the rest of the world

if it closes the entrance door to the 10 million inhabitants

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Since post-war Europe, immigration has been a silent constant in the economic reconstruction of the continent, first to supply labor in industry and later to sustain growth and the welfare state in increasingly aging societies. Over the decades, this phenomenon went from being an assumed necessity to becoming a central political debate, especially after EU enlargements and economic crises. Today, Europe once again faces a question that it thought had been resolved: how far it is willing to go to remain an open space. The nerve figure. The idea we tell it a few months ago. Switzerland heads to a vote which condenses many of the tensions accumulated in Europe during the last decade: demographic growth, immigration, housing and the economic model. The proposal to set an absolute limit of 10 million inhabitantsdriven by the Swiss People’s Partyreaches the polls after gathering the necessary signatures in a country where direct democracy turns social unrest into state decisions. The situation: with a current population of 9.1 million and growth much higher than that of its neighbors, the debate no longer revolves around whether Switzerland can continue to grow, but rather whether if you want to do it. From attractive to “saturated” country. For decades, Swiss prosperity rested on high wages, political stability and an open economy capable of attracting both low-skilled labor and international talent. This success has had an increasingly visible reverse: a 27% foreign residentsa stressed real estate market and increasing pressure on infrastructure and public services. For defenders of the population cap, this growth has become uncontrollable and threatens the quality of life, but for its detractors, it is precisely the engine that has sustained the country’s wealth. The limit and its consequences. The initiative, a priori, does not propose a gradual system or flexible quotas, but rather a rigid, hard limit, which would force action once it exceeds 9.5 million and which, upon reaching 10 million, would literally imply close almost completely the entry of new residents, including asylum seekers and family reunifications. This absolute nature is possibly what most worries economists and companies, which warn of an abrupt stop to the arrival of workers just when the aging of the population is beginning to be noticed and the demand for labor remains high. Europe as a red line. The most delicate point of the plan is precisely its direct impact on the relationship with the European Union. The reason is very simple: if the limit is not respected, the Government would be obliged to abandon the agreement of free movement of people, the cornerstone of the treaties that guarantee Switzerland access to the single market. In a country where nearly half of exports go to the EU, breaking that link is not only a migration issue, but a structural change of the economic model built over decades. The economy versus the emotional vote. Other factors appear here, since multinationals and employers have reacted harshlywarning of relocations, loss of innovation and additional tensions on the pension system, largely fueled by foreign workers. For its part, the business lobby Economiesuisse has described the proposal of chaoticwhile academics emphasize that the recent stagnation of real wages and the increase in the cost of living have created a perfect breeding ground for looking for culprits in immigration, although the problems have more complex roots. Beyond the census. Polls show a country divided almost in half, with a support close to 48% which makes the result unpredictable. So it doesn’t seem like it’s just about deciding how many people can live in Switzerland. The fundamental crux points elsewhere: defining what kind of country do you want to be in an increasingly tense European environment. Either one that preserves its openness at the cost of better managing its internal imbalances, or another that raises a symbolic limit and assumes the risk of redefining its relationship with Europe and with its own idea of ​​prosperity. And, meanwhile, Europe hold your breath for what may arise from the decision. Image | Pexels In Xataka | Switzerland is about to exceed 10 million inhabitants. And he will do everything possible to avoid it. In Xataka | The countries with the largest immigrant population in the world, displayed on this map

An 80-year-old retiree won 2.7 million euros in the lottery and invested it in something unexpected: creating a drug trafficking network

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That a chemistry professor sick with cancer becomes one of the largest manufacturers of methamphetamine is something that gave us hours of entertainment with Breaking Bad. What we didn’t see coming is that a retiree from the United Kingdom could serve as inspiration for a sequel to the popular series. As detailed police sourcesan 80-year-old man won a small fortune in the lottery and, instead of investing it in Nvidia stock either in Hermès bags, He displayed an unexpected entrepreneurial spirit by setting up a fake pill factory that generated hundreds of millions of euros. The stroke of luck that changed everything. John Eric Spiby, from Wigan in Greater Manchester, won €2.77 million in the British Lotto in 2010. With that money he bought a rural property in Astley (west of Manchester) and started his new business venture there: manufacturing pills. The detail is that the pills he was manufacturing were etizolama thienodiazepine six to ten times more powerful than diazepam, and mixed it with other ingredients to make perfect imitations of legal anxiolytics. In Xataka Millions of Spaniards consume benzodiazepines to sleep at night. They don’t know it’s poisoned candy The Retiree’s Band. John’s son, John Colin Spiby, 37, was responsible for managing daily production in a rented container next to the house. A friend, Callum Dorian, was responsible for distributing the pills through encrypted chats on platforms such as EncroChat. For his part, Lee Ryan Drury, 45, helped with logistics. Each member of the band had an assigned role so that the entire production and distribution infrastructure functioned on an industrial scale. They sold the pills to 65 pence each (the equivalent of 75 cents) but the total estimated value reached 332 million euros on the black market. The raid that uncovered him. Spiby’s “pharmaceutical” scheme was uncovered in April 2022. Police stopped a vehicle at a hotel in Manchester and found 2.5 million fake pills valued at 77 million euros. The investigation took them to the Spiby farm, where they found hydraulic presses, automatic packaging machines, firearms, ammunition and enough equipment to produce million pills a month. The etizolam they manufactured reached a magnitude that, in the previous months, 58% of the opioid-related deaths in 2021 in Scotland, they were because of pills like those manufactured by Spiby. Dorian, the distribution manager, boasted in messages comparing Spiby’s business to drug trafficking empires, while the gang armed its distributors to protect the companies. key distribution routes. {“videoId”:”x8px49v”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”ANTIBIOTICS are CEASING TO BE EFFECTIVE and the PROBLEM is SUPERBACTERIA”, “tag”:”Webedia-prod”, “duration”:”327″} The judge has just sentenced the band. The case came to Bolton court in November 2025. According to published The Timesduring the trial Spiby denied any knowledge of the organization that manufactured etizolam pills, claiming that he only rented his property to make some extra money. However, the chats, bank transfers and machinery pointed to him as the main financier, in addition to having found a Lotus and a Porsche that he had hidden in his garage next to the pill manufacturing machines, and the testimony of some neighbors who claimed to have seen him driving around in a Lamborghini, as he collected the BBC. The judge sentenced Spiby and his henchmen in January 2026. “Despite winning the lottery, he decided to continue a life dedicated to crime, far from what would have been normal years of retirement,” the court noted in its ruling. John Eric Spiby was sentenced to 16 years and one month in prison; his son at 9 years old. Drury, the logistics manager, was sentenced to 9 years in prison and Dorian, who already had a 12-year sentence pending, received more time. In total, 47 years in prison for the retiree’s gang. In Xataka | 13% of Spaniards have tried cocaine once in their lives. If we ask the dogs of Madrid the percentage will be higher Image | AMC, Unsplash (Candace Mathers) (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news An 80-year-old retiree won 2.7 million euros in the lottery and invested it in something unexpected: creating a drug trafficking network was originally published in Xataka by Ruben Andres .

22,000 million in the air and two other factories canceled

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A little more than five years ago, a star was born. FCA and PSA announced their merger under the name of Stellantis. The result was a gigantic conglomerate. In these five years Stellantis has never managed to position itself as an alternative to Volkswagen or Toyota by sales volume but its structure is enormous, with 14 brands in its portfolio. The first steps were hopeful. The company marked record yearswith profit margins that They were the envy of the sector and a strategic plan that embraced the electric car. A decision that even before the merger of both automotive groups seemed like the right path. Carlos Tavares led a reconversion based on the reuse of platforms for their generalist brands and deep electrification. So much so that they pointed to a date: In 2030 they would only sell electric cars in Europe and half of sales in the United States would also be electric cars. The strategy was in line with the plans of the European Union. But manufacturers have not offered products that live up to what the customer expected in terms of price and/or autonomy. European regulators, after much pressure from automakers (from which Tavares distanced himself on several occasions), have ended up making the rules a little more flexible. The ban on selling combustion engines is maintained in 2035 unless they are met some very strict exceptions. Yes indeed, the path to get there has been made slightly more flexible. All of this has had a direct consequence on a company that focused on finances and regulations, forgetting about customers, that regulators had room to change their minds and about their own history. Yestellantis tried to sneak in the electric Fiat 500 with a shoehorn in the United States. Eliminated mythical V8 engines of Dodge or RAM in that same country to comply with emissions. He threw 3,000 million euros into the trash with the development of electric cars for Maserati that will never see the light of day. And now, with Europe accepting the electric car at a more contained speed than expected, Stellantis assumes a amortization of 22,000 million euros in its accounts and the cancellation of new factory openings in Germany and Italy. The last chapter Of a story that has no end. At the moment it is the last chapter written but it will by no means be the last one that we have news of. And Stellantis and the electric car continue to leave enormous rivers of ink in their wake. Last Friday, February 6, Stellantis shares fell up to 27% in a fateful day for the company. The movement in the stock market was the immediate consequence of show some not very optimistic numbers. When presenting results, the company confirmed that an adjustment of 22,000 million euros was going to appear in its accounts. Those 22,000 million euros have a culprit: electric car. And it is that the company confirmed that in 2025 they would present losses in their income statements, assuming an impact on them of around 22,000 million euros. Actually, of those 22,000 million euros, 6,500 million are hard cash. Cash. Real money, to put it simply. These are the 6.5 billion euros that the company will have to pay in the next four years to those affected who will suffer the cancellation of their plans or the readjustment in the production of electric cars. The rest of the money corresponds to the forecasts that Stellantis expected for the future. That is, sales that will not be consolidated because, simply, these new models will not be manufactured or their production will be reduced. These types of announcements have a direct impact, again, on the stock market because the company not only sends the message that its profits will be slimmer in the future, it also confirms that its real value is lower. “The charges announced today reflect the cost of overestimate the pace of the energy transition that distanced us from the real-world needs, means and desires of many car buyers,” said Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa in words reported by Financial Times. Among the cancellations, Stellantis confirmed that it was canceling the construction of two new gigafactories in Europe, specifically those in Termoli (Italy) and Kaiserslautern (Germany). For the first of them, Stellantis planned a conversion to produce electric cars while building a gigafactory next to it. Now, this second option has already been ruled out and it remains to be seen what the future is of a factory that has been producing engines for Fiat for more than half a century. One of the options that Stellantis had chosen was to once again produce Fiat 500 hybrids and thus keep this engine plant alive. Both this factory and the second canceled plant, the German one, not only impact Stellantis. The company had a 45% stake in ACC, a joint venture made up of TotalEnergies (30%) and Mercedes (25%), which was going to be in charge of building three gigafactories in Europe. For this they had raised 4,000 million euros in capital but the Italian and German project have been paralyzed since 2024. Now, ACC has confirmed its cancellation and that the French plant will begin with a production equivalent to 13 GWh, very far from the maximum of 40 GWh for which it is designed. That is to say, Stellantis planned to embrace the electric car that was not being produced. To do this, it intended to build up to four gigafactories in Europe (Spain, France, Germany and Italy). Of them, only the Spanish and French are still running. Photo | Stellantis In Xataka | If Tavares is out of Stellantis it is because of a giant problem in the United States. One that already forces us to give away electric cars

will have 129 million euros to achieve it

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It is the fourteenth supercomputer in the world according to the TOP500 listis in Spain and is called MareNostrum 5. But it is also a “living” system because it continues to evolve and adapt to new times. In fact, it has just received a notable injection of capital for a critical update: the one that will allow it to work with AI model training and inference. 129 million for MareNostrum 5. As explained at the BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center), the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed the contract for the acquisition of new hardware elements for MareNostrum 5. It does so with the collaboration of Fsas Technologies (Fujitsu) and Telefónica. The budget is close to 129 million euros and will be co-financed 50% by EuroHPC and the other 50% by Spain, Portugal and Turkey. The update will be installed during the first half of 2026. The project, defined in the documentation of the European Commission, started in July 2025. MareNostrum 5 adapts. This update will not be a “more of the same”, but is focused entirely on artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. The project also has another objective: to strengthen European digital sovereignty, which will reduce technological dependencies and prevent unwanted technology transfers outside the EU. HPC used to rule, now AI will also rule. The expanded architecture of MareNostrum 5 will make use of specialized compute partitions. Thus, there will be at least one for LLM training and another for inference. Today this supercomputer has five different partitions and according to the TOP500 list it has an Rmax power of 175.30 PFLOPS (FP64, Linkpack) or 215.40 PFLOPS according to EuroHPC. Its total power capacity is 20 MW. 30 Exaflops FP4 for AI. In the white paper the goal is to achieve 30 FP4 exaflops, which seems like a huge jump, but it must be clarified that the current 0.17 FP64 exaflops are dedicated to classic High Performance Computing (HPC). These FP4 exaflops are dedicated to training and massive inference, and cannot be easily compared to those FP64 exaflops. The technical description of the GH72 partition, even without explicitly mentioning NVIDIA, clearly fits your DGX GB200 NVL72. NVIDIA in the pools. Although the technical documentation does not specify what type of hardware will be used, it does talk about a GH72 partition whose specifications are very similar to the DGX GB200 NVL72 supercomputer. It is not specified how many GPUs, what type of GPUs or how much memory they will have, but there are minimum requirements, such as “180 GB of HBM3e memory or higher.” That rules out the H100 and H200, but models like the B200/GB200 would enter (MareNostrum 5 currently uses those) or the B300/GB300, in addition to others like the AMD Instinct MI350/MI355X, which according to market data could arrive with 256 GB of HBM3e memory. And soon, own chip. Yesterday, the BSC simultaneously announced good news about its efforts to develop its own chip. The so-called Cinco Ranch TC1 developed by the Barcelona Zettascale Lab has been validated and its experimental implementation it has been a success. We are looking at a chip based on RISC-V architecture and that uses Intel 3 3 nm manufacturing technology. It is a relatively modest chip that can operate at 1.25 GHz, but it is still a notable first step for the BSC to also continue advancing its role in semiconductor design. European supercomputers. This project is part of EuroHPC’s program to keep European supercomputing moving forward. Currently it has 12 supercomputers distributed throughout Europe, among which Jupiter (Germany, 4th in the world on the TOP500 list) and the future Alice Recoque (France), which will be consolidated as the first two exascale systems on the old continent. In Xataka | The EU wants to close the gap in the race for AI with 750 million euros. And it is good news for Barcelona

Emirates just melted down 60 million to create Noah’s Ark. And he has given them to those who want to resurrect the mammoth

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We’ve been really into playing God for a few years now. On the one hand, we have Bryan Johnson, a millionaire who lives to rejuvenate -and to sell you oil-. On the other hand, there is Colossal, a company that is doing more serious and interesting things. How far? Until the of chase resurrect the mammoth. At the moment there are more promises than realities, but they have managed to get the United Arab Emirates to give them a check for 60 million dollars. Aim? Create the modern Noah’s Ark. Colossal. This company dedicated to biotechnology has become popular for its objective not only in bring the mammoth back to lifebut also to the dodoto the moa either to the Tasmanian tiger. It does so from well-preserved DNA samples, to the interest of personalities such as Peter Jackson -director of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and great collector of moa bones– and, evidently, thanks to tremendously generous sums of money. Colossal Biosciences has reached a assessment of more than 10,000 million dollars and, in the latest round, it has been 600 accumulated. Peter Jackson himself collaborated with 25 million for the company to place the moa in its goal list. BioVault. Although there are those who think that What Colossal does is sell the motorcyclethey have achieved some results, like resurrecting the giant wolf. The theory is simple: they take the DNA of the extinct animal, combine it with samples from living relatives and the difficult part comes when they have to filter out the variants to polish the genes and get the animal they want. When they have it ready, they use the belly of a living animal to gestate the extinct creature. UAE does not want them to resurrect anything. At least, that objective has not been made public, but due to Colossal’s activity, they have obtained thousands of DNA samples. And that is what we want to preserve in BioVault. The goal is a capsule in which the DNA of more than 10,000 species is stored, with a special focus at the beginning on the 100 most endangered species today. Which is it? They are in ‘coming soon‘. Museum of the Future. For this, the United Arab Emirates will spend 60 million dollars, and once completed in 2027, this modern Noah’s Ark will be stored in the World Preservation Laboratory, which will be a part of the Museum of the Future from Dubai. Inaugurated in 2022, it is a tremendous building, on par with the pharaonic works built in the Middle East at that time. particular architectural war in which the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are involved. If it is spectacular on the outside, it is even more so on the inside, and precisely its name is due to the fact that it is a museum that does not show antiquity, but rather presents a journey to the future. To 2071, specifically. The museum is outrageous Backup. In the end, this is one of the largest and most important biotech deals. Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal, affirms that we are losing species at an alarming rate and the world “urgently needs a network of global BioVaults, a backup plan for life on Earth.” He threw a dart at the financing of other biobanks, ensuring that they are fragmented, underfinanced and do not have a collaborative spirit that allows them to use data in the event of a crisis. In fact, it is estimated that half of the species on Earth will face extinction by 2050, and BioVault will be there to remedy it. The big question is whether it will be worth bringing animals back just because we can when their ecosystems are destroyed. Images | Colossal, روتانا In Xataka | Face transplants always seemed like something out of science fiction. A hospital in Barcelona has made it a reality

Creating a C compiler cost 2 million dollars and took 2 years. Claude Opus 4.6 did it in two weeks for $20,000

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We are facing a technological inflection point. Uo in which software engineering, one of the most complex and demanding technical tasks in history, little by little It is becoming the “killer app” of AI. It is clear that generative AI models are not perfect, but we continue to see extraordinary evolution. The latest example? The C compiler that Claude Opus 4.6 programmed all by himself. what has happened. Nicholas Carlini, researcher at Anthropic, I counted yesterday how “I’ve been experimenting with a new way of monitoring language models that we’ve called “agent teams””. What it has done is ensure that several programming agents work in parallel using the recently released Claude Opus 4.6, and thanks to that it has developed something exceptional with 16 of these agents: a C code compiler. Hello CCC. At Anthropic they have called it Claude’s C Compiler (CCC), and they have published the code, completely generated by Opus 4.6, on GitHub. The project consists of 100,000 lines of Rust code that were generated in two weeks with an API cost of $20,000. And it works: with it they have compiled a functional Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V. Before it was (at least) two million dollars and two years. What this experiment has achieved is to demonstrate how software development can be much cheaper and faster thanks to the use of these agents. Although there is no readily available data on how much time and money compilers cost in the past, the size of these products was enormous, as is the case with Microsoft Visual C++For example. It is difficult to know how much it cost, but it is estimated that it involved 15-20 people working for five years. That’s a lot of man hours and a lot of money to develop and polish that compiler. The estimate of two years and two million dollars may in fact be overly optimistic. another example. Historically, building a C compiler from scratch was considered one of the pinnacles of systems engineering. Not only was in-depth knowledge of processor architecture required, but thousands of man-hours were required to manage optimization and machine code generation. In the 90s the company Cygnus Solutions (clue in compiler development gcc) came to invest more than 250 million in a decade to maintain and port build tools. The real cost was not just in the final lines of code, but in countless hours analyzing CPU and memory patterns to make the resulting binary efficient. Far from perfect, but… Carlini himself explained in the post that this compiler had serious limitations and for example “it does not have a 16-bit x86 compiler which is essential to start Linux outside of “real mode”, and it does not have its own assembler nor its linker“. It is probably far from mature compilers, but even so the achievement remains exceptional and points to that future in which even very complex developments can be supported with AI. They will be expensive, no doubt, but their total development will probably be a fraction of what they cost a few years ago. Cursor already demonstrated it. Before Anthropic launched its AI-programmed compiler, Cursor completed a similar project, combining GPT-5.2 agents into its development platform to create a working browser in a week. In total the AI ​​programmed three million (!) lines of code in Rust, and although it was again far from being perfect or competing with Chrome, it demonstrated the current capacity of these agentic programming systems. Turning point (especially for Anthropic). For the SemiAnalysis experts Claude Code, current leading exponent of this new era of AI-driven programming, is a paradigm shift: “We believe that Claude Code is the turning point for AI agents and is a glimpse into the future of how AI will work.” This prestigious newsletter predicts an exceptional 2026 for Anthropic, and so much so that they believe it will “dramatically surpass OpenAI.” You ask, the AI ​​programs. If you have tried the vibe codingI’m sure you agree with me: AI allows you to do things you would never have dreamed of. What I did a few weeks ago with Immich made it clear to me, and I continue experimenting with AI and programming “custom” things that solve real problems and needs for me. Yes, for now they are for me and therefore they are not large and complex systems that need to be put into production as happens in professional environments, but I am clear that this is being done little by little and more will be done. In fact, both OpenAI and Anthropic have stood out how in the development of their latest models part of the work has been done, paradoxically, by those same models, which have fed back to each other. And the result is in production and used by millions of people. Something is changing. And it’s something big. In Xataka | OpenAI has a problem: Anthropic is succeeding right where the most money is at stake

Someone has paid 2.4 million for a check for 500. It bears the signatures of Steve Jobs and Wozniak

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Turning $500 into $2.4 million could be anyone’s wet dream cryptobro, but the story at hand It has nothing to do with investment. The protagonist is a small piece of paper, and not just any one, but one that was key in the creation of one of the most important technology companies of our era: Apple. lto auction. It occurred a few days ago via RR Auction. The object auctioned was the $500 check that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak signed in March 1976 and its final price was $2,409,886, 4,800 times its original value. The check is encapsulated in a plastic casing and its authenticity and quality is certified with a “MINT 9” note, which indicates that it is in a perfect state of conservation. The first check. Throughout their time together, the Apple founders signed many checks, but this one is special because it is the first of all. Furthermore, getting the money was not easy. At that time neither of the two steves He was rich, so Jobs had to sell his van and Wozniak his HP 65 calculator. At the time of his signature, there were still 16 days left before the official birth of the company, so we can affirm that he was a key player in the birth of Apple. The assignment. We already know who the senders were, but who was the receiver? The check is made out to Howard Cantin, who at the time was designing printed circuit boards at Atari. The commission for which he received this amount was to create the plaque that would carry the Apple Ithe company’s first computer that went on sale a few months later. When it was time to get paid, Steve Jobs offered Cantin shares in Apple, but Cantin preferred money. Little did he know that the company would be worth $4 billion. It was not the only thing that was auctioned. The check was the star object of the Apple 50th anniversary auctionbut there were many others such as the opening document for Apple’s first bank account, which sold for $828,569. The Apple poster that Jobs had hanging in his living room was also sold for $659,900 and the most expensive: the prototype of the Apple I board, which reached $2,750,000. In total, the auction has raised more than $8 million. In Xataka | Einstein’s first violin had passed unnoticed. Until an auction house put it up for sale. Image | Wikipedia

the footprint of a turtle stampede from 80 million years ago

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Sometimes the older ones paleontological discoveries They do not occur in planned excavations and with large studies behind them, but by pure chance in places where no one should be. This is precisely what happened in 2019 on Mount Còrneo in Italy where two climbers entered in a restricted area of ​​the natural park and they came across something that did not fit into the rock: hundreds of strange brands on a vertical wall. We already know what it is. Now, a study published in Cretaceous Research has revealed what those marks really are: the fossil trace of a stampede of sea turtles fleeing in terror from an earthquake that occurred 80 million years ago. The forbidden zone. The discovery is attributed to Luca Natali and Paolo Sandroni, who were climbing a limestone wall in the Scaglia Rossa formation. And what they found was neither more nor less than a canvas of more than 1,000 fingerprints distributed in an area of ​​about 200 square meters. The location where they were found is no less, since it is key and at the same time problematic. As it is a vertical wall, which in the Cretaceous It was a flat seabed, access for scientists was almost impossible. That is why they had to resort to drones to be able to photogrammetrically map the site and study the furrows without risking the life of any researcher. CSI Cretaceous. In order to clarify this discovery, the researchers used the magnetostratigraphythe analysis of magnetic polarity of the rocks, to date the event to the Campanian, about 80 million years ago. The scene. To locate ourselves, 80 million years ago this vertical wall was a deep seabed that It was about 300 meters deepcompletely calm and muddy. But an earthquake shook the area, causing an immediate reaction: a group of sea turtles panicked. And as anyone would do, the reaction was to start swimming frantically towards deeper waters, hitting the bottom with their alerts and leaving those semi-lunar marks. Minutes or hours after the turtles passed, an avalanche of sediment caused by the same earthquake, known as turbiditecovered the footprints instantly, sealing them as if it were an “underwater Pompeii.” Why turtles? The identification of these traces has not been an easy task for the researchers who have had to discard among the possibilities in front of them. At first, other inhabitants of the Cretaceous were considered fish, plesiosaurs or mosasaurs. However, analysis of the furrows told a different story. The first thing to keep in mind is that they couldn’t be fish because the marks had bilateral symmetry. They also could not be plesiosaurs since the pattern of the markings did not fit with the four-fin movement of these reptiles. In this way, for the researchers, the semilunar marks, consistent with turtle fins, left no doubt that it was this marine animal of the time. Healthy skepticism. As is often the case in paleontology, not everyone is 100% convinced. Thus, there are different well-known experts who point out that, although the seismic theory is solid, attributing the marks definitively to the turtles requires more comparative evidencemaking it a rare fossil record in deep pelagic environments. Although what is truly interesting in this case is not the species, but the paradigm shift. Right now, most fossils told us about the death of an animal or its anatomy. But now we have seen how these footprints tell us about their behavior in a moment of terror experienced millions of years ago. Images | Cretaceous Research In Xataka | The skull that changes everything: a million-year-old fossil suggests that ‘Homo sapiens’ did not come from Africa

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