the data economy is gonna be insane. for process knowledge alone there's ~1 million SMBs who can sell their data for $100k+ to 1000s of data brokers and 100s of RL env cos and 10s of labs. $100T market easily

This is an incredible moment in this history of mathematics, computer science, physics & science with some of the hardest problems in human history being solved by AI over a period of weeks. Depending on your perspective, it's either a crisis, a triumph, or both. I don't think anyone knows for sure. We're all trying to make sense of it. I oscillate between fear/dread and optimism/excitement on a daily basis. The rate of progress is insane, including today's announcement from OpenAI of more problems solved. To help make sense of all of it, here's my conversation with three mathematicians about this moment. Each of them is an expert in the field of each of the biggest problems solved: Navier-Stokes, quasi-Riemann hypothesis, the unique games conjecture and complexity theory more generally. Ankur Moitra is a mathematician and theoretical computer scientist at MIT, visiting the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Steven Brunton (@eigensteve) is a mathematician and fluid dynamics expert at UW. Alex Kontorovich (@AlexKontorovich) is a mathematician at Rutgers specializing in number theory.

Announcing three major scientific discoveries, one each in mathematics (harmonic analysis), computer science (complexity theory), and physics (quantum field theory). AI starting to help us improve our understanding of the universe! openai.com/index/building-sc…

it's the golden age of the white hats. the world has never needed you more. there should be a huge prize pool for finding flaws in civic infrastructure. their work should be strongly protected by statute

The only way out is through. They're calling it the Bugpocalypse. LLMs are being used to find long-hidden cracks in the software infrastructure, and it's happening at a furious rate. 3% of all compromises in computing history happened in the last week, claims one source? I believe it. There are people saying public access to the frontier models ought to be locked out, or heavily guardrailed, over this. The problem with that idea can be summed up in one sentence: when lockpicks are outlawed, only outlaws will have lockpicks. The lockpicks will be Chinese open-weight models, if nothing else. There's no way to stop those from becoming ubiquitous. There are two futures in front of us. One in which only the bad guys have lockpicks, and security holes go undiscovered until they're exploited. Another in which everybody has lockpicks and is aggressively red-teaming their own software so it gets fixed before the holes are exploited. The corpus of human code is huge but finite. The number of defects in it has to be finite too. We can fix those defects now; we have a million friendly robots to do it with. The only way out is through.

🚨 RETAIL INVESTORS DID IT AGAIN. JPMorgan data shows retail investors bought nearly $550 MILLION worth of tech stocks between October 15 and 21, their biggest buying spree in at least 2 years, right before another brutal AI stock sell off. Most of the buying was concentrated in semiconductor stocks, memory chipmakers and AI infrastructure companies. Tech ETFs also recorded their SECOND HIGHEST weekly inflows EVER, with October 16 seeing the biggest single day inflow on record. But the timing couldn't have been worse. The semiconductor index plunged 6.7% on October 22 and was down 19.5% from October 6. Retail investors rushed to buy the AI dip, only to get caught in another brutal sell off. If the AI downturn continues, those aggressive bets could turn into much bigger losses.

BREAKING: Hedge funds are betting against stocks at near-record levels, per Goldman Sachs. Short sales outpaced purchases by about 5 to 1 across global stocks. Short positions on Goldman’s books are at the 99th percentile of the past five years.

Chainguard received PHP’s fix for two critical RCEs under embargo, like every other distributor. On October 21 at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, it published built images containing that fix. The PHP Foundation’s postmortem says Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo. From that point, any attacker could study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting. CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 let attackers run code on web servers without logging in. PHP runs 69% of websites whose server-side language is known. The embargo was already under strain. The CVE IDs leaked the day before, and Calif accidentally posted an exploit video that evening. PHP pulled the release forward a day but held it until 14:00 UTC, because distributors were still packaging and an immediate release would have left many users without a clean way to update. Chainguard went first anyway. Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc says several vendors in the disclosure had reported exploits in the wild, and that he notified the group right after making the call. He did not name the vendors or publish evidence. PHP’s security team found no working public exploit by release time. Lorenc has since apologized for the added stress on PHP’s maintainers. Chainguard’s disclosure policy allows it to shorten timelines when exploitation is active. The patch it shipped was PHP’s, shared under PHP’s embargo. In July, Lorenc wrote: “Pre-disclosure protection extends exactly as far as the people you can vet and hold to an embargo.” Coordinated disclosure only works if everyone holding the fix ships at the same moment. When one party goes early, the fix becomes a map for attackers, and the users still waiting carry the risk. PHP owned its part. Its postmortem calls the long delay in fixing the underlying bug, first spotted in a 2024 audit, “a structural failure.” It is asking the companies that run on PHP to fund more engine engineers. If you haven’t patched: update the PHP runtime itself, not just WordPress or your framework, to 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, or 8.2.35. Then restart your workers.