The CEO Who Fired The Future

Hey Explorers, 

Something strange is happening. It’s not that AI is getting better. We already knew that. What’s weirder is that humans are starting to give it the benefit of the doubt by default. Case in point: Shopify.

When AI Becomes the First Interview

Shopify’s CEO has laid down a policy that reads like a headline from the future: you don’t hire humans until you prove a machine can’t do it. That’s a complete inversion of how hiring works. Normally, you bring in people and then optimize. But this policy flips the switch—AI is the default. You have to justify human labor now. From an economic standpoint, it’s efficient. From a cultural one? It’s unnerving. It also means AI isn’t “coming for jobs” anymore. It’s already sitting in the HR department, deciding who gets in.

The Internet Lives in Virginia, Apparently

File this under “Things They Don’t Teach You in School”: 70% of the world’s online traffic flows through Northern Virginia. Data Center Alley is packed with industrial-sized server farms owned by Amazon, Microsoft, and Lumen. These places power everything: your Google Docs, your memes, your AI prompts. Want to see the ghost in the machine? It's there. In Costco-sized bunkers, humming in the dark.

A Game, a Memory, and a Muse

Imagine playing a video game that wasn’t coded—it was remembered. That’s what the Muse AI model did with Quake 2. It watched hours of footage, understood the game’s logic, and then dreamed it into reality. This is simulation, not emulation. The difference is subtle, but massive. It means future AIs might not need detailed code. They’ll need memories. Then they build from there.

Iron Man Tech Meets Cardiologist Skills

Researchers built a chest-mounted, starfish-shaped device that looks ripped from sci-fi. Each arm monitors your heart’s electrical and mechanical signals. AI filters the noise, looks for arrhythmias, and sends alerts with over 90% accuracy. Wearable health is about to leap past step counters and into life-saving territory.

Quantum Is Getting Weird—in a Good Way

China’s latest experiment used a quantum chip to fine-tune a billion-parameter AI model. That sounds like buzzword soup, but here’s what it really means: classical and quantum computing can now tag-team a model for extreme precision. Imagine shrinking your model by 70%, while boosting its logic skills by 20%—all thanks to a superconducting quantum chip. I’ll say it again: weird... but good. This week gave us a glimpse of what happens when humans shift from builders to curators of AI.

Stay curious,
Dylan Curious