Alibaba's AliExpress was caught using users' audio systems to track them. AliExpress wasn't recording users but instead playing a silent sound and measuring how users' specific devices processed it in order to fingerprint them. But don't worry because Brave stops this.

Today, we’re launching Meteoric (YC S26). Our drones clear clouds over solar farms to increase their annual output by 10-30% without using any chemicals. Ultimate target: weaken severe storms and hurricanes.

Today we're introducing Okara AI CMO v2. Drop in your website and it deploys a team of faster and smarter agents to help you get traffic, and users. Try it now at

一個國小四年級就輟學去做家具的木工，最後靠「抽屜滑軌」，一路滑進 AI 供應鏈，成為台灣首富。 川湖創辦人林聰吉早年就是做家具出身。 1970 年代開始做家具五金，1986 年成立川湖，最主要的產品就是大家家裡抽屜旁邊那兩條不起眼的「滑軌」。 真正的轉折發生在 2000 年。 當時中國製造崛起，川湖一個佔營收約 40% 的家具大客戶，直接要求他們降價 30%。 林聰吉沒有跟著打價格戰，而是選擇把這個大客戶丟掉。 結果隔年營收幾乎腰斬。 但也因為這次危機，川湖開始思考： 既然都是做「滑軌」，為什麼一定只能裝在家具裡？ 於是他們把幾十年累積的金屬加工、模具、機構設計能力，轉去做難度高很多的「伺服器滑軌」。 2000 年底，康柏原本的供應商出問題，緊急找到川湖。 川湖只花大約 一週就交出設計、通過測試，拿下第一張約 10 萬美元的試產訂單；後來 IBM、Dell、Sun 等科技大廠陸續成為客戶。 二十多年後，當 Server 變成 AI Server，這個當年「被迫轉型」的決定直接吃到史上最大一波算力建設。 因為今天一台塞滿 GPU 的 AI Server，重量、價格、散熱與維修需求都比以前更誇張。 GPU 再貴，最後還是要靠兩條滑軌撐住。 川湖現在累積超過 3,000 項滑軌專利，打進 NVIDIA 與大型 Cloud Service Provider 的供應鏈；本土券商甚至推估，川湖在 NVIDIA 新世代產品的滑軌市佔率超過 70%。 所以川湖其實不是「從家具突然轉型做 AI」。 它做的東西，從頭到尾都是滑軌。 只是： 家具抽屜 → Server → Cloud → AI Server 同一個核心能力，市場價值完全不同。 這也是我最近研究 AI Supply Chain 覺得最有趣的地方。 大家都在找下一個 NVIDIA、下一個台積電， 但 AI CapEx 真正爆發後，可能有一大批以前根本沒人注意的「傳統產業」，突然因為自己掌握了某個不可取代的零組件，變成 AI 公司。 AI 最大的機會，不一定是發明 AI。 也可能只是把你做了 40 年的東西，賣給 AI。 🚀

Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023. I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed. Building AI that advances humanity has been my lifelong dream. My parents left the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR in search of a better life for their kids. Life wasn’t always easy as immigrants. Despite the hardships, my parents believed that human values were priceless: values like courage, compassion, curiosity for understanding the world. As a child, I admired scientists like Richard Feynman and Max Planck, who relentlessly pushed the frontiers of physics in order to understand the universe. As a particle physics PhD student at CERN I was excited to contribute to that mission. But the search for new physics was getting harder and harder, requiring bigger and bigger colliders, while new discoveries kept getting fewer. So I began to wonder if superintelligence, not larger colliders, could be the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Could AI develop a consistent theory of quantum gravity? Could AI prove the Riemann hypothesis? In early 2023 I became convinced that we were getting close to a recipe for superintelligence. I saw the writing on the wall: very soon AI could reason beyond the level of humans. How could we ensure that this technology is used for good? Elon had warned of the dangers of powerful AI for years. Elon and I realized that we had a shared vision of AI used to benefit humanity, thus we recruited more like minded engineers and set off to build xAI. The early days of xAI were not easy. Naysayers told us that we arrived too late to the game, so starting a top AI company from scratch would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Starting a company from zero required lots of hands-on work. In the beginning I built many of the foundational tools used at the company to launch and manage training jobs. I later oversaw much of the engineering at the company, including Infrastructure, Product and Applied AI projects. xAI’s people are deeply dedicated. Through blood sweat and tears, our team’s blistering velocity built the Memphis supercluster, and shipped frontier models faster than any company in history. I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1# be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2# have a maniacal sense of urgency. xAI executes at ludicrous speed. Industry veterans told us that building the Memphis supercluster in 120 days would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Our goal was to get our training setup running at scale on the Memphis cluster ASAP. Towards the end of our 120 day deadline, we were riddled with mysterious issues with communicating over RDMA between the machines. Elon decided to fly to the datacenter, and we followed. Our infra team landed in Memphis in the middle of the night and got straight to work. After pouring through tens of thousands of lines of lspci output we finally identified a wrong BIOS setting, the root of the problem. Elon was there with us until late into the night. When the training run finally worked, Elon posted our triumph at “4:20am” causing us to laugh out loud. I will never forget the rush of adrenaline that night, and the emotional bonds that we were all in this together. We went to bed feeling like we were living through the most exhilarating time of our lives. I have enormous love for the whole family at xAI. Our team is truly special - you’re the most dedicated people I’ve ever worked with. Catching up to the frontier this quickly hasn’t been easy. It was made possible by everyone’s diehard grit and team spirit. Thank you to every single person who joined me on this adventure. I want to honor your contributions, your time, your sacrifices, which are never easy. I will always remember working together far into the nights and burning the midnight oil. I will never forget the sacrifices and contributions you’ve made. As I drive away today, I feel like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college. My heart is brimming with tears of joy, rooting for the company as it grows and matures. As I'm heading towards my next chapter, I’m inspired by how my parents immigrated to seek a better world for their children. Recently I had dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute. He showed me a photo of his young sons, and asked me “how can we build AI safely to ensure that our children can flourish?” I was deeply moved by his question. Earlier in my career, I was a technical lead for DeepMind's Alphastar StarCraft agent, and I got to see how powerful reinforcement learning is when scaled up. As frontier models become more agentic over longer horizons and a wider range of tasks, they will take on more and more powerful capabilities, which will make it critical to study and advance AI safety. I want to continue on my mission to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity. I’m announcing the launch of Babuschkin Ventures, which supports AI safety research and backs startups in AI and agentic systems that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe. Please reach out at ventures@babuschk.in if you want to chat. The singularity is near, but humanity’s future is bright!