China sends embryo models into space to test whether human reproduction is possible beyond Earth
A necessary experiment to find out whether humanity’s dreams of galactic colonisation are truly within reach.
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13:02 Saturday 13 June 2026
China sends embryo models into space to test whether human reproduction is possible beyond Earth
A necessary experiment to find out whether humanity’s dreams of galactic colonisation are truly within reach.
Bezos said Mamdani should stop going after billionaires, and the very next day Mamdani ordered Amazon to pay nine million dollars in outstanding traffic fines
Fines issued because Amazon delivery drivers leave their vans parked in the middle of the street with the engine running, polluting the air.
The tech bros did everything they could to convince the Pope that AI is a net good, but their efforts didn’t amount to much.
Judging by the contents of Leo XIV’s first encyclical on AI, Big Tech’s diplomatic efforts, after sending its envoys to the Vatican in recent weeks, appear to have left him largely indifferent.
A study suggests civilizations don’t collapse because of catastrophes, but because they begin to consume more than they can sustain – and that may already be happening to ours
The researchers also note that the futures in which we manage to survive are not impossible, but they would require conditions that simply don’t exist on Earth today.
The FAO says the world has just six months left to avoid a global food crisis
For the agency, the decisions governments and farmers make now on fertiliser use, imports, funding, and crop selection, will be critical.
SS26, Charli XCX’s new single, is neither rock nor dance—it is fashion.
And apocalypse, too: “Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell,” Charli sings on the album’s second single.
A board game is about to be released in which you play an office worker trying to survive corporate life without burning out
L’anteprima mondiale della nuova stagione di Euphoria sarà al Coachella
È la prima volta che al Coachella si tiene una prima di film o di una serie tv. L'appuntamento è per l'ultima notte del festival, per una proiezione sotto le stelle.
13 Jun 2026
There are so few AI engineers and researchers in the world that Big Tech companies are paying them like sports superstars
By some estimates, there are only around a hundred in the world. And in Silicon Valley, companies are willing to pay any price to get them.
If the dot-com boom once created an unprecedented labour market, artificial intelligence has already outgrown it.
With one decisive difference: then, talent was plentiful. Now, it isn’t.
What AI has produced is a race that increasingly resembles an arms race, except the weapons are people. And those people are counted in very small numbers. By most estimates, there are only around a hundred elite researchers and top-tier engineers capable of building frontier AI systems at scale.
OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI, and a growing constellation of startups are all competing for the same, vanishingly small pool.
The outcome is predictable. When demand overwhelms supply, prices explode. Only here, the prices are salaries, bonuses, and equity packages for people who, until recently, were academics on academic wages, and who now command compensation on the level of global sports superstars.
The numbers circulating are so high they border on implausible. Some may well be. As Euronews has noted, many remain unverified, and there is no way of separating fact from Silicon Valley echo chamber inflation. Still, the confirmed cases are enough to sketch the contours of the escalation.
Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, now at Meta Superintelligence Labs after Zuckerberg acquired nearly half his company for $14.3 billion, is reported to have a $1 million base salary, multimillion-dollar bonuses, and between $100 and $150 million in stock awards over five years.
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder, has disclosed a stake in the company valued at around $7 billion. His post-OpenAI venture, Safe Superintelligence, has reached a private valuation of $32 billion without yet shipping a commercial product.
Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, has launched Thinking Machines Lab, which was valued at over $5 billion almost immediately after its founding.
To grasp the intensity of the competition, it is enough to note that Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman now personally lead recruitment. No delegation. No intermediaries. They go themselves.
In elite sport, the gap between first and second place is never linear. The best player in the world is not twice as good as the next: it can be a hundred times more valuable in impact, gravity, attention.
AI now behaves in much the same way. The best researchers are not simply better; they are multipliers. They attract other talent, set the direction of entire labs, and determine whether a system is state of the art or already obsolete on arrival.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, embodies this logic. For Google, his value lies not only in what he builds, but in what becomes impossible without him.
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