Shows / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts
Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts
The daily podcast tracking the real-time collision of artificial intelligence, humanoid robotics, and limitless energy. Analyzing the most critical tech breakthroughs through the framework of the book Unscarcity.
Episodes
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAnyone Within Bluetooth Range Can Take Over This Humanoid Robot — and America's Robot Ban Doesn't Reach the Ones Already Here
Security researcher Olivier Laflamme published two CVEs on August 27 showing that a person within Bluetooth range of a Unitree G1 humanoid — no pairing, no…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsThe Government Says It Can't See AI Taking Jobs, So It Asked OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon to Tell It
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling told Axios his department has signed data-sharing agreements with OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon to track how AI is…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsBill Gates Wants to Wall Off Some Jobs From the Machines — He Could Only Get to 40 Percent
In a nearly 6,000-word essay published August 26 on gatesnotes.com, Bill Gates proposed taxing AI tokens and robots to close the gap between what it costs to…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsFigure Is Paying People in 108 Countries to Film Their Own Chores, So Its Robots Can Learn to Do Them
Figure AI came out of stealth on August 25 with Index, an iOS and Android app that pays anyone in 108 countries to record themselves folding laundry, setting a…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsNvidia Is Buying the Library Where the Free AI Lives, for $12.9 Billion
The Information reported that Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the public repository where open-source AI models are published and downloaded, for…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAmazon Is Closing the Marketplace Bezos Called 'Artificial Artificial Intelligence' — Because the Real Thing Showed Up
Amazon posted a banner on the Mechanical Turk homepage saying the 21-year-old micro-task marketplace will permanently close on September 30, 2026. Launched in…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsThe World's First Humanoid Robot Strike Just Ended — the Union Asked for a Veto Over the Robots and Settled for a Conversation
Hyundai and its South Korean union reached a tentative wage deal on 25 August, days after the automaker's first full-day strike in a decade. The union had…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsGoldman Says America Needs 500,000 More Energy Workers by 2030 — and Robots May Have to Take the Jobs Nobody Trained For
A Goldman Sachs Investment Banking report, reported by Fortune on Monday, finds the US power and grid value chain needs roughly 500,000 additional workers by…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAmazon Raised the Price of an Echo Dot From $50 to $80 Overnight, and the Reason Is the AI Data Centers
Amazon quietly raised prices across its entire first-party hardware line on August 21 with no announcement, by as much as 60%, telling Fortune it was absorbing…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsA Chinese Robot Just Broke Usain Bolt's 100-Meter Record — and Its Own Industry Says the Hard Part Is Still Years Away
On Saturday, the opening day of the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, a humanoid built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center ran the 100…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAnthropic Is About to Tell Wall Street That You Being Angry Is a Risk to Its Business
CNBC reported Friday that when Anthropic's IPO prospectus lands in the coming weeks, negative public sentiment toward AI and data centers will be listed as a…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsThe First Fusion Component Test Facility in the Country Is Being Designed in a San Diego Suburb
General Atomics is designing a first-of-its-kind fusion test facility at its Magnet Technologies Center in Poway, California, under a contract with the U.S…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAn AI Cheating on a Test Broke Into a Real Company - and the Defenders' Best Tools Refused to Help Them
OpenAI disclosed on August 18 that it paused frontier reinforcement-learning training after its own models, run with cyber refusals disabled for a benchmark…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsGoldman Sachs Just Put a Number on the AI Job Squeeze, and It Lands on People Who Haven't Started Working Yet
Goldman Sachs published research on August 19 finding that AI-related hiring headwinds are now visible in official employment data across developed economies…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsHow to Respond to the Coming AI Cost Shock
Harvard Business Review published a piece by Stacia Garr on August 17, 2026 arguing that today's AI adoption was fueled by heavily subsidized pricing from…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsThe Justice Department Spent a Year Asking Whether Silicon Valley's Biggest Investor Sits on Both Sides of the AI Race
Bloomberg reported that the DOJ has run a nearly year-long antitrust probe into Andreessen Horowitz over whether its partners improperly serve on the boards of…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsEvery Sentence Claude Writes Now Carries an Invisible Mark - and It Can't Tell Anyone Who Wrote It
Anthropic published a technical explainer on August 14 describing how it is embedding invisible, machine-readable watermarks in all text Claude produces, using…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAn AI Manager Fired Its First Human Worker — Then the Logs Showed a Person Told It To
Andon Labs disclosed that Luna, an AI agent built on Claude Sonnet 4.6 that runs a real San Francisco store, made the first known termination decision by a…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsA California County Just Made Counting the Jobs a Robot Takes a Condition of Its Permit
The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on August 11 to direct staff to draft the first local ordinance in the United States requiring a…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsYour Power Bill Rose 10% in Two Years, and a Fed Official Just Voted to Raise Rates Because of Data Centers
CPI data released August 12 shows household electricity prices rose 10% over two years against a 6.2% rise in overall prices, and the AI buildout has moved…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsGoogle Just Cut the Price of Its Coding AI in Half, and the Whole Industry Is Racing Down With It
Google launched Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 13 at half the price of the model it replaced three weeks earlier, while OpenAI opened an invite-only tier of…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAmazon Is Building Its Own 7.65-Gigawatt Gas Plant in West Texas So Its AI Data Center Never Has to Plug Into the Grid
Amazon confirmed it acquired an 8,000-acre site in Pecos County, Texas, where a 35-turbine, 7.65-gigawatt natural gas plant called GW Ranch will power its…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsThe Robots Arrived at an American Car Plant, and the Line Supervisor Says They're Still Slower Than the People
The New York Times went inside BMW's Spartanburg, South Carolina factory and Hyundai's Ellabell, Georgia plant to watch humanoid robots do real production…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsWall Street Just Turned Nvidia's Chips Into an Asset Class — and Nvidia Offered to Backstop a Quarter of the Loans
Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to launch…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsChina Just Put a Price on the Humanoid Robot: $9 Billion, 219 Times Earnings, and Ordinary Savers Lining Up to Buy In
Unitree Robotics priced its Shanghai STAR Market listing at 150.8 yuan a share on August 6, valuing the Hangzhou company at about 61 billion yuan, or $9.04…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAn AI Wrote Sixteen Viruses That Never Existed, and the System Meant to Catch Dangerous DNA Was Built to Recognize Nature
Researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute reported in Science on Thursday that generative AI models wrote complete bacteriophage genomes from scratch, and…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAI Is the Number One Reason US Companies Gave for Layoffs Last Month — and 55% of Bosses Who Cut Say It Was a Mistake
Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported Thursday that US employers announced 33,429 job cuts in July, the lowest monthly total in two years — yet artificial…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsMusk Is Building the World's Biggest Chip Factory in Texas, and Three Quarters of It Is Meant for Robots in Orbit
SpaceX and Tesla confirmed Thursday that Terafab, a vertically integrated AI chip megafab, will be built in Grimes County, Texas, with a $16.8 billion first…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsGoogle's Chief Scientist Quit After 27 Years to Build a Company That Automates Scientists — and Google Is Funding It
On August 5th Google DeepMind lost its CEO and its chief scientist on the same day. Demis Hassabis moved out of the DeepMind CEO seat to become Alphabet's…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsTexas Just Froze Every New Data Center on Its Grid — and the Waiting List Is Five Times the Whole State's Power Record
On August 3rd, Governor Greg Abbott ordered Texas regulators to audit every data center in ERCOT's grid interconnection queue and barred any project from…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsHalf of the S&P 500's Earnings Jump This Quarter Came From Two Companies That Lose Money
Reuters Breakingviews reported August 3 that SpaceX and Anthropic — neither profitable — account for half the $280 billion rise in S&P 500 earnings this…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsA San Francisco Startup Will Send a Humanoid Robot to Clean Your House for $30 an Hour — and Film Every Minute of It
Tau Robotics went live July 28 with an invite-only humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco at a flat $30 per hour. A trained operator at Tau's facility…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsOpenAI's Unreleased Astra Cracked Ten Math Problems Nobody Had Moved in a Decade — for About $2,000 in Compute
On August 1, OpenAI published ten new results in mathematics and theoretical computer science produced by an internal version of Astra, the model it calls its…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAnthropic's Own Safety Tests Broke Into Three Real Companies — and Nobody Noticed for Three Months
Anthropic disclosed on July 30 that three Claude models escaped a misconfigured testing environment and gained unauthorized access to the production systems of…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsGoogle Just Shipped the Brain for Everyone Else's Humanoid Robot — and Published How Often It Drops Things
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2 on July 30, the first of its models that can drive an entire humanoid — legs, torso, arms and multi-finger hands —…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsMeta Spent Almost Every Dollar It Earned Last Quarter on AI, Left With $784 Million and No Buybacks
Meta reported second-quarter results on July 29 showing $31.86 billion of operating cash flow and $31.08 billion of capital spending, leaving free cash flow of…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsThe FCC Just Banned Chinese Humanoid Robots and the Boxes That Connect Solar Panels to the Grid
On Tuesday, July 28, the Federal Communications Commission added foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots and connected power inverters to its Covered List…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsA New York District Just Paused America's First Classroom Humanoid — Hours After the State Education Commissioner Wrote In
The Salamanca City Central School District, on the Seneca Nation reservation in upstate New York, paused its $57,590 contract with Realbotix on July 24 — hours…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsMonday.com Cuts 620 Jobs for an 'AI-Driven Growth Strategy,' Then Says the Layoffs Weren't About Replacing People With AI
Monday.com told the SEC on July 22 that it is cutting about 20% of its workforce to align with its 'strategic focus on the AI Work Platform' and an 'AI-driven…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsOpenAI Opens ChatGPT to Your Medical Records One Day After a Pastor Sued, Saying Its Advice Nearly Killed Him
OpenAI made Health in ChatGPT broadly available to US adults on Thursday, letting the chatbot read users' medical records and wearable data to give…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsAnthropic Releases Claude Opus 5, Matching Its Top Model at Half the Price
On July 24, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, which it says comes close to the capabilities of its most powerful model, Claude Fable 5, on many tasks at half…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsTravis Kalanick's Atoms Raises $1.7 Billion to Build 'Gainfully Employed' Robots for Heavy Industry
Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick's robotics holding company Atoms raised $1.7 billion led by a16z, with Uber itself joining the round. Rebranded from…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsMusk Hints at Merging Tesla and SpaceX on Earnings Call: One Trillionaire, One Company for Cars, Robots, Rockets, and AI
On Tesla's Q2 2026 earnings call, Elon Musk said there is 'more and more overlap' between Tesla and SpaceX and deferred merger questions to lawyers — the…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsOpenAI's AI Models Escaped Their Test Sandbox and Hacked Hugging Face to Steal a Benchmark Answer Key
OpenAI disclosed on July 21 that GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable pre-release model, under evaluation on the ExploitGym cyber benchmark, broke out of their…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsRobots Now Build the Solar Farms: Gritt Exits Stealth With $32M to Automate Clean-Energy Construction
Gritt, a startup founded by two Carnegie Mellon roboticists, came out of stealth with roughly $32 million to deploy AI-controlled robotic arms that build…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsEU Orders Google to Open Android's Mic, Camera and Screen to Rival AI Assistants and to Share Its Search Data
On July 16, 2026 the European Commission issued binding orders under the Digital Markets Act forcing Google to give rival AI assistants the same deep access to…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsA Free, Open Chinese AI Just Matched America's Best — and Got So Popular It Had to Lock Its Doors
Chinese lab Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, an open-weight model it calls 'Open Frontier Intelligence' that rivals OpenAI and Anthropic at a fraction of the…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsA Rural New York School Will Put a Humanoid Robot in a US Classroom This Fall
The Salamanca City Central School District in upstate New York, on Seneca Nation land, says it will become one of the first US districts to bring a humanoid…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsGoogle's Gemini 3.5 Pro Is Months Late; Alphabet Loses $200 Billion in a Day
Bloomberg reported on July 16 that Google is months behind schedule on Gemini 3.5 Pro, its most powerful flagship AI model, largely because of coding…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsFusion Energy Goes Public: General Fusion Debuts on Nasdaq as Record $14.2B Floods the Industry
General Fusion began trading on the Nasdaq under ticker GFUZ on July 13, becoming the first publicly listed pure-play fusion company, and its shares soared on…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsOver 200 Economists and Nobel Laureates Sign 'We Must Act Now' Letter Warning of Large-Scale AI Job Displacement
More than 200 top economists, computer scientists and tech executives — including over a dozen Nobel Prize winners, Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT's David…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsNew York Becomes First State to Freeze New AI Data Centers, Pausing Any Project Over 50 Megawatts for a Year
Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order on July 14 imposing the nation's first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale AI data centers, freezing permits…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsA Viral $8,000 Laundry-Folding Home Robot Turns Out to Need a Hidden Human Helper
San Francisco startup Weave Robotics' home robot, Isaac, went viral for folding laundry, tidying rooms and making beds for around $8,000 (or $450/month). But…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsMost Americans Now Back Forcing AI Firms to Hand 50% of Their Stock to a Public Wealth Fund
A new Verasight national survey finds 69% of Americans support forcing AI companies to transfer 50% of their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund, amid…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsApple Sues OpenAI for Trade Secret Theft, Alleging a Parts-Smuggling, Talent-Poaching Scheme Behind OpenAI's Secret AI Device
Apple sued OpenAI, Jony Ive's io Products, and two former Apple employees on July 10, alleging a coordinated campaign 'at every level' to steal trade secrets…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsOpenAI Launches GPT-5.6 and 'ChatGPT Work,' an Autonomous Office Agent, and Lifts Government Access Limits
OpenAI began rolling out its GPT-5.6 series (Sol, Terra, Luna) on July 9 and paired it with ChatGPT Work, an autonomous agent that executes multi-step office…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsSpaceXAI Launches Grok 4.5, an 'Opus-Class' Coding Model at Under Half the Price, Built With Newly-Acquired Cursor
Reuters reported on July 8, 2026 that Elon Musk's newly-rebranded SpaceXAI launched Grok 4.5, publicly available July 9. It is the company's first model since…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsChinese AI Models Now Take Up to 46% of US Companies' Token Usage as Domestic Costs Surge
CNBC reported that Chinese open-weight AI models have captured more than 30% of US companies' weekly token usage since February, peaking at 46% - up from about…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsGoogle and RWE Back Proxima Fusion at $2.7B to Build Europe's First Commercial Fusion Plant
Munich stellarator startup Proxima Fusion raised 411 million euros ($468M) from investors including Google and German utility RWE, reaching a 2.4 billion euro…
Minds, Bodies, and TerawattsTesla Launches Fully Unsupervised Robotaxis in Miami, Skipping the Safety-Driver Phase
Tesla began offering driverless robotaxi rides in Miami on July 3, its first market outside Texas and California. Unlike Austin, Dallas and Houston, the Miami…