H

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Philanthropy funding basic biomedical scientists

Postdoctoral Scientist - Mendell Lab

Full-TimeUpdated on 10/21/2026
$70k - $80.5k/yr
Mid
PhD
Dallas, TX, USA
In Person
Academic & Institutional ResearchLife Sciences Research

About the job

Requirements
  • A Ph.D. degree in a scientific discipline such as biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, structural biology, developmental biology, or cancer biology.
  • Less than two years of prior postdoctoral research experience.
  • Willingness to fully participate in lab and departmental activities, positively engage with other team members and promote their success (for example, by reviewing manuscripts and participating in practice talks), mentor junior colleagues, and contribute to an inclusive and productive research environment.
  • Commitment to research integrity.
  • Ability to meet the stated physical requirements, including extended periods seated or standing; reaching and grasping; finger dexterity to manipulate objects such as using a keyboard; spoken communication; seeing and hearing within normal parameters; workspace mobility; and moving materials weighing up to several pounds.
Responsibilities
  • Develop independent research projects based on interests, expertise, and goals, including the opportunity to establish a research program that could form the basis for an independent research laboratory after postdoctoral training.
  • Write scientific manuscripts describing research findings.
  • Attend national and international meetings to present research findings, learn about advances in the field, and develop a scientific network.
  • Apply for fellowships and grants.
  • Mentor junior scientists.

About the company

H

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

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Website

HHMI moves science forward by supporting basic biomedical scientists and science educators. It operates as an independent philanthropy, investing in people rather than specific projects, to enable transformative impact. The organization provides resources, collaboration opportunities, and an adaptable, results-driven environment so researchers and educators can work at their highest level. Its goal is to accelerate scientific progress by enabling researchers and teachers to push boundaries in laboratories and classrooms. Compared with others in philanthropy, HHMI emphasizes long-term, people-centered support, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and flexible structures rather than one-off grants or narrowly defined programs.

Company Size

1,001-5,000

Company Stage

Grant

Total Funding

$1M

Headquarters

Chevy Chase Village, Maryland

Founded

1953

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • FY2025 audited statements show $3.08 billion net investment return and $11.5 billion liquidity.
  • The 2026 male fly connectome strengthens HHMI’s global scientific brand and recruiting pull.
  • AI-driven projects now span protein design, cryo-ET, sensors, and zebrafish brain mapping.

What critics are saying

  • Janelia’s fly dominance narrows; Google Research and others can commoditize connectomics fast.
  • HHMI still faces discrimination lawsuits from Jeannie Lee and Vivian Cheung.
  • If AI@HHMI underdelivers, Janelia’s expensive platform bets become an existential endowment drain.

What makes Howard Hughes Medical Institute unique

  • Janelia’s 2026 male fly connectome maps 166,000 neurons and 125 million synapses.
  • HHMI’s AI@HHMI commits $500 million over ten years to AI-in-the-Loop biology.
  • Anthropic chose HHMI and Janelia as founding life-science partners for Claude labs.

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Benefits

  • Health Insurance
  • Wellness Program
  • Professional Development Budget

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

12%

1 year growth

12%

2 year growth

12%
Pharmacally
Oct 6th, 2026
2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded for optogenetics.

2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded for optogenetics. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine honors Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for discoveries that enabled light-based control of nerve cells. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin, and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. Their work established a new way to investigate how specific nerve cells and neural circuits contribute to functions including memory, emotion and behaviour. Hegemann, Nagel and colleagues established that light-sensitive proteins from the single-celled green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii could function as light-gated ion channels. Deisseroth and colleagues subsequently developed these proteins into practical tools for controlling neuronal activity with light. From a light-sensing alga to a neural switch. The discovery began with efforts to understand how Chlamydomonas detects and responds to light. Research led by Hegemann in the early 1990s had established that rhodopsins were involved in algal light sensing. In 2002 and 2003, Hegemann, Nagel and Ernst Bamberg demonstrated that algal rhodopsins could function as directly light-gated ion channels. These proteins were subsequently known as channelrhodopsins. One of the key proteins, channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), became particularly important for neuroscience. When activated by blue light, the channel opens and permits ions to cross the cell membrane, shifting the cell's electrical state. In neurons expressing ChR2, this can produce depolarization and trigger action potentials. This discovery provided the molecular component needed to control electrically excitable cells with light. Building on this work, Karl Deisseroth and colleagues introduced microbial opsin genes into neurons. In 2005, they demonstrated light-based control of neuronal activity, helping establish the experimental foundation of modern optogenetics. In 2007, Deisseroth and collaborators extended the approach to living animals, demonstrating optical control of neuronal activity in the brains of mice and developing fiber-optic methods to stimulate defined neural populations in vivo. The resulting approach became known as optogenetics, combining genetic targeting of light-sensitive proteins with optical control of cellular activity. Optogenetics opens a new era in neuroscience. Optogenetics transformed neuroscience because it allowed researchers to manipulate selected populations of neurons with high temporal and cellular precision while observing the resulting effects on neural circuits and behaviour. Earlier approaches could identify associations between particular brain regions and functions, but optogenetics provided a powerful way to test whether specific neural populations were causally involved. The technology has since become an important research platform for studying neural circuits involved in behaviour, learning, memory and neurological and psychiatric disorders. Modern optogenetic systems can selectively activate or inhibit defined neuronal populations, allowing researchers to investigate how individual circuits contribute to normal and pathological brain function. The technology is also being investigated for potential clinical applications. Researchers are exploring optogenetic strategies for conditions including vision loss and other neurological disorders, although these applications remain under clinical investigation rather than established routine treatments. The 2026 Nobel Prize recognizes the progression from understanding how a single-celled organism senses light to developing a technology capable of manipulating neural circuits in living animals. Together, the discoveries by Hegemann, Nagel and Deisseroth established a new experimental framework for understanding how the brain generates behaviour and how specific neural circuits function. The 2026 Nobel Prize carries an award of 12 million Swedish kronor, to be shared equally among the three laureates. The laureates. Karl Deisseroth, born in 1971, is a professor at Stanford University and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His work helped establish optogenetics as a method for controlling and studying defined neural circuits in living systems. Peter Hegemann, born in 1954, is Hertie Senior Professor of Neuroscience at Humboldt University of Berlin. His research into algal photoreceptors and rhodopsins provided critical foundations for understanding light-gated ion channels. His key channelrhodopsin work was conducted with collaborators including Georg Nagel and Ernst Bamberg at the University of Regensburg. Georg Nagel, born in 1953, is Professor of Molecular Plant Physiology at the University of Würzburg. His electrophysiological studies of algal rhodopsins were central to establishing their function as directly light-gated ion channels. Reference. Nobel Prize, The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026, NobelPrize.org, 5 October 2026. About the Writer Kirti Kumbhar (LinkedIn) is an M.Pharm graduate with experience in Quality Assurance at Lupin Limited and a strong interest in clinical research, regulatory affairs, and Trial Master File (TMF) management. She has developed knowledge of regulatory documentation, quality systems, compliance, and healthcare research through her professional experience. Passionate about clinical development and continuous learning, Kirti is committed to supporting high-quality healthcare documentation, regulatory excellence, and research-driven healthcare advancements.

Crypto Briefing
Sep 19th, 2026
Fruit fly's mapped brain trades crypto, controls robots, and claims contested chess wins

Fruit fly's mapped brain trades crypto, controls robots, and claims contested chess wins. Scientists released the complete neural wiring of a fruit fly, and developers immediately put it to work in ways nobody expected. 2 hours ago Sponsored: Vera - AI-powered prediction market intelligence, built for serious analysts Explore Vera A fruit fly has 166,000 neurons. Yet when scientists published a complete map of those 166,000 neurons, developers around the world immediately asked the same question: what can Crypto Briefing make it do? The answer, it turns out, includes trading crypto, playing chess, and piloting robots. The map that started everything. On September 3, 2026, Google Research and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus released the MaleCNS v1.0 dataset, a full connectome of an adult male fruit fly covering its brain, optic lobes, and ventral nerve cord. The map details approximately 125 million synaptic connections across those 166,000 neurons, making it the most complete wiring diagram ever published for any adult animal's central nervous system. A 2024 effort mapped the female fly brain, which contained around 139,000 neurons. The new male map is larger, more detailed, and covers the complete central nervous system rather than just the brain. The dataset is public. Within days of release, independent developers were running the fly's actual biological wiring through simulation environments, not building artificial neural networks inspired by biology, but directly simulating the exact connectivity of a real animal's nervous system. Chess, Coinbase, and one dollar of profit. One simulated trading experiment connected the fly's neural firing thresholds directly to a Coinbase interface, using sensory input signals to trigger buy and sell decisions. The reported result was a profit of exactly one dollar. AI, tech, and the markets they move - in one daily briefing. Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy. The chess experiments attracted more attention. Developers fed visual board states into the fly's sensory input pathways and mapped motor output signals to legal moves. Independent verification of a convincing win against a top-tier chess engine has not materialized. What the experiments did demonstrate is that biological wiring, without any training or optimization, can generate coherent responses to structured inputs. Robotic control applications showed perhaps the clearest near-term utility. The fly's ventral nerve cord, which manages locomotion in the actual animal, translated relatively cleanly into movement commands for simple robotic systems. Why this matters beyond the novelty. The fly connectome offers a validated, evolved solution to the problem of turning sensory input into useful action, refined over millions of generations of actual selection pressure. Simulating that wiring directly, rather than abstracting it into weight matrices, is a fundamentally different approach to machine intelligence. Neural firing thresholds are not inherently suited to the kind of probabilistic reasoning that generates consistent trading edges. A fly brain did not evolve to read order books. The $1 profit figure reflects the experimental nature of the work, not a viable strategy. The fruit fly is the entry point, chosen because its nervous system is small enough to map completely with current tools. For now, it holds an unusual position: the most thoroughly understood mind on the planet, briefly running a Coinbase account with a one-dollar P&L and a contested chess record. Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how Crypto Briefing create and review content, see its Editorial Policy.

Google
Sep 3rd, 2026
5 amazing visuals show how the male fruit fly's brain map is advancing neuroscience.

5 amazing visuals show how the male fruit fly's brain map is advancing neuroscience. Sep 03, 2026 A years-long project by HHMI Janelia, Google Research, and collaborators has built the first complete brain map for a male fruit fly, a key model organism in science. Michał Januszewski Research Scientist, Google Research Viren Jain Research Scientist, Google Research Listen to article 4:57 minutes For the first time, scientists have mapped every single neural connection in the brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly. In this years-long project by HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Google Research, and collaborators from the scientific community, this map of the male fruit fly brain includes a record-breaking more than 166,000 neurons. It's a big step in advancing neuroscience experiments on this key model organism. AI is making it possible for scientists and researchers to exponentially scale projects in the field of connectomics, which precisely reconstruct the connections between brain cells. This new complete brain map, a first for a male fruit fly, builds on the earlier release of a complete female fruit fly brain map, and promises to be a foundational resource for neuroscience for years to come. Today, Blog is sharing five images from the project. 1. A record-breaking map: charting more neurons than ever before. This image shows selected neurons in the male fruit fly's brain and ventral nerve cord, which is analogous to a spinal cord. Like humans, flies do most of their sensing using organs located on their heads, including two huge compound eyes and a retractable proboscis that extends to detect smell and ingest liquid food. Neurons in these sensing organs detect external information and pass the signal through pathways that eventually reach the motor neurons that control movement. 2. Brain + nerve cord: Connecting sensing to actions using AI. When seen from above, the fruit fly's massive eyes and central brain stand out. They connect via a thick cord of nerves to the body, where motor neurons control behavior. This map was created by taking thin sections of a fruit fly brain and body, imaging each slice, and then using computers and AI to combine millions of 2D images to create 3D neural shapes. Knowing the structure of the brain allows neuroscientists to understand the mechanisms behind brain function. 3. Inside the black box: Visualizing almost 11,700 types of neurons. (Data acquired and analyzed by the FlyEM Project Team at HHMI-Janelia, the Cambridge Connectomics Group, and Google Research. Video by Philip Hubbard.) This video shows some of the 11,691 types of neuron cells in the male fruit fly's central nervous system, which includes the brain and ventral nerve cord. Neurons can be categorized by size, shape, function, gene expression, or other factors. This visualization begins with neurons at the core of the brain and body. It then gradually moves to outer layers and, finally, to neurons at the extremities. Computing and AI helped human experts classify more than 166,000 neurons. 4. Vive la différence: Brain differences between male and female fruit flies. (Data acquired and analyzed by the FlyEM Project Team at HHMI-Janelia, the Cambridge Connectomics Group, and Google Research. Female data acquired by the FlyWire project. Video by Philip Hubbard and Isabella Beckett.) While most neurons in male and fruit females are the same, or isomorphic, a minority are sex-specific. A third category of neurons are "dimorphic," existing in both males and females but connecting to different neighboring neurons. These neighbors may be isomorphic, the same in both male and female, or sex-specific, or even dimorphic themselves. This video shows one example, for the neural type AOTU012 (blue) that plays a role in processing sensory and taste inputs. While paired AOTU012 neurons exist in both male (left) and female (right) fruit fly brains, the AOTU012 connect to both similar (green) and different (red, orange and yellow) neurons in male and female fruit flies. 5. Fly see, fly do: Connecting stimulus to motion. (Data acquired and analyzed by the FlyEM Project Team at HHMI-Janelia, the Cambridge Connectomics Group, and Google Research. Video by Philip Hubbard and Alexandra Fragniere.) The new brain map of the male fruit fly includes visual-motor pathways. These connect the visual neurons, which help the fly detect its environment, to motor neurons, which help it move in response. This video shows an example of such a pathway, going from the R1-R6 visual neurons (purple) to the DNg13 motor neuron (green). In between are several intermediate steps, including the male-specific LoVP92, named for the so-called "love spot," that plays a role in courtship behavior. Three companion studies also released today apply the new brain map to studying visual systems, taste, and social behavior. Read more about this groundbreaking project, and about its ongoing efforts to map full vertebrate brains, on the Neural Mapping website and in the Google Research Blog post. Posted in:

Google
Sep 3rd, 2026
A connectomics milestone: Mapping the complete male fruit fly brain.

A connectomics milestone: Mapping the complete male fruit fly brain. September 3, 2026 Michał Januszewski and Viren Jain, Research Scientists, Google Research Research partnered with HHMI Janelia and collaborators to publish a complete map of the male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system, creating the largest brain map to date. Together with ongoing research on other species, such as fish and mice, these wiring maps begin to reveal the mechanics of how all brains work. The common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has been central to scientific research leading to multiple Nobel Prizes. Fruit flies have been a fundamental model organism in genetics, thanks to their stereotypical behavior and short life cycle, and promise to do the same for neuroscience. While the thoughts of this fruit-loving insect might seem far removed from human cognition, the brains of vastly different species share many similarities. Because mapping the 86 billion neurons in a human brain is not yet possible, scientists are using AI to map the brains of smaller organisms, like fruit flies. This will help Research decipher how animal nervous systems perceive the world, react to stimuli, and how damaged neural pathways might one day be repaired. Now, in a project led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus, its team and collaborators have released a complete wiring diagram of the male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. Published in Cell, "Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system", is the result of a decade-long partnership that advances the field of connectomics using computing and AI to build cellular-scale maps of entire brains. With over 166,000 neurons and 125 million synaptic connections, this is the largest brain map by number of neurons to date, providing a fundamental resource for scientists to use fruit flies as a model organism for studying how the brain works. A small subset of cells in the male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system, as viewed from in front at an angle (left) and from above (right). The male fruit fly connectome also includes the ventral nerve cord, analogous to the spinal cord, and so begins to expand from just the brain into how the brain controls the body. The male fly connectome has been annotated and verified, or proofread, by a team of human experts at HHMI Janelia. It can be viewed, explored and downloaded via Neuroglancer, the open-source tool Research created to enable researchers to visualize huge multidimensional datasets. The new connectome contains neurons from the central brain (green), optic lobes (purple) and ventral (i.e., central) nerve cord (blue). The new connectome enables linking auditory, visual and olfactory inputs to motor outputs for this key model organism. This new brain map complements the female fruit fly brain map and recently released complete female fruit fly brain and nerve cord map. Having both male and female brains and central nervous systems mapped allows the two to be compared in places where neurons differ, and used to study the biological mechanisms for fruit fly courtship and aggression. In parts of the brain that are similar in both sexes, having two complete fruit fly connectomes will allow researchers to begin to see the variability between individuals. An example of a neuron that is different between the male (green) and previously mapped female (magenta) fruit fly brains. The male neuron has two additional projections. AI enables accurate 3D reconstructions to pinpoint these structural differences. Steps toward mapping a full fruit fly brain. Brain mapping, or connectomics, begins with sectioning a brain into millions of thin slices, taking an image of each section, and using computers and AI to stitch the images together. Its researchers build systems that leverage AI to turn flat electron microscope images into 3D reconstructions, using an evolving suite of techniques to generate accurate neural shapes. Its AI connectomics tools include flood-filling networks, which use convolutional neural networks to start at a single pixel and identify all other pixels that are part of the same object. In 2019, its Connectomics team released an initial, fully-automated reconstruction of a female fruit fly brain. By 2020, its team and collaborators released a human-verified map of half a female fruit fly brain with 25,000 neurons and 21 million connections, a record at the time. Meanwhile, the team was already working on the full, verified brain map for a male fruit fly, which is now complete. These methods continue to improve. A recent effort incorporated synthetic neurons into the training data, successfully improving the speed and accuracy of its state-of-the-art reconstruction system, PATHFINDER. Research is also helping to develop new techniques for labeling and annotating specific types of neurons. Currently, mapping the fruit fly brain requires years of human effort just to verify and annotate the neural shapes. By reducing this need for manual error correction, research groups can tackle even larger brain mapping projects within reasonable budgets and timelines. Looking ahead: Mapping entire fish brains. The field of connectomics is already advancing into vertebrates: organisms with a spinal cord. These are anatomically, evolutionarily and functionally more similar to humans. In a study led by Columbia University and published this week in Nature, its team helped map a portion of the elephantnose fish's hindbrain that is used in signal processing. This paper, "Connectome analysis of a cerebellum-like circuit for sensory prediction", shows for the first time how the connectome, a static resource, can be combined with other information to study neural plasticity and learning, producing the most complete mechanistic model of learning in a vertebrate brain to date. Larval zebrafish are one of the few vertebrates whose brains are small enough to be mapped from end to end using current techniques. Zebrafish also have the advantage of being transparent in their larval stage, allowing measurements of neural activity during experiments, as captured in the ZAPBench dataset. Its upcoming paper with Harvard, "A connectomic resource for neural cataloguing and circuit dissection of the larval zebrafish brain", is the first whole-brain dataset for a vertebrate that includes the neural structure and molecular type spanning an entire vertebrate brain. Its team also released a preliminary version of a dataset that combines neural activity and structure in the same larval zebrafish brain, as an open resource to the research community. An image from the Fish Fire&Wire dataset, which combines whole-brain electrical activity and neural structure for the same larval zebrafish specimen. Conclusion. The male fruit fly connectome is a foundational resource that will support a new era for experimental neuroscience, with future applications in biology, pharmacy and medicine. Three companion papers released today show how the male fruit fly connectome has already been used for research on the neuroscience of visual systems, taste and social behavior. Methods developed here will also help advance other projects, such as the upcoming fully proofread map of the zebrafish brain, and mapping a portion of the mouse brain. While modeling the 86 billion neurons in the human brain remains out of reach, Research is moving toward revealing how brains function and understanding the processes underlying mental ailments, such as Alzheimer's, depression or schizophrenia. Someday, Research hope these efforts lead to new ways to treat cognitive ailments, improve brain health, and support brain repair. Acknowledgments. Research thank its academic collaborators at HHMI Janelia and elsewhere, and acknowledge core contributions from the Connectomics Team at Google. Research is grateful to Hannah Hickey and Elise Kleeman for their help. Thanks to Lizzie Dorfman, Michael Brenner, John Platt, and Yossi Matias for their support, coordination and leadership.

The Neuron
Aug 30th, 2026
Anthropic wants Claude operating real lab gear.

Anthropic wants Claude operating real lab gear. Plus: Welcome, humans. Okay, so here's some dumb fun for your Sunday viewing pleasure: somebody turned the internet's favorite classic memes into one continuous stroll down "Meme Street": Now for something actually cool: someone built penombra, a handwriting notebook where you write with a stylus and Claude writes back on the page. It can read PDFs and ebooks, respond to what you annotate, explain passages, and quiz you. It runs on Android tablets with a stylus, and the creator is taking early-tester signups here. Pretty good timing: MIT says today's AI can now credibly complete most undergraduate assignments, which is either the end of homework or a strong argument for turning Claude into your tutor's tablet. Basically, it's Tom Riddle's diary, except it quizzes you on organic chemistry instead of unleashing a basilisk on your friend's sister. Here's what happened in AI today: * | Anthropic taught agents to operate real lab hardware * | Claude beat 28 humans at alignment research * | Z.ai's GLM-5.3 found 2,436 open-source bugs * | South Korea picked free AI for 52M people * | Make Claude cite every spreadsheet number Anthropic gave AI agents a common language for machines. AI agents to date have mostly lived inside browsers, terminals, and spreadsheets. Anthropic now wants the same kind of agent to walk into a lab and know how to use the machines. Here's what happened: * Anthropic and HHMI Janelia opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a shared interface for programmable lab and factory equipment. * Each device gets a standard driver with simple read/write commands plus plain-language tags describing what it does and its safety limits. * Early partners used MHS at Genentech, Carnegie Mellon, and QuEra; QuEra's agent-built script recovered a quantum laser's lock in 695 of 700 trials. Why this matters: Today, every microscope, plate reader, or robot arm tends to need its own custom AI software integration. MHS gives agents one interface for discovering equipment, sequencing work across devices, and turning successful procedures into scripts. The payoff is less integration glue to connect agent software with physical hardware. Anthropic says setups that usually take weeks or months can fall to hours or minutes, making round-the-clock automated experiments much easier to build. This is a fast takeoff scenario y'all. Check yourself: This is still a limited research preview, not an autonomous scientist in a box. Anthropic says Claude still needs expert oversight for physical reasoning, and MHS currently requires hardware with a programmable interface. But if the standard catches on, the next major agent platform may be the layer connecting models to the physical world. Researchers and manufacturers can apply for access here. FROM OUR PARTNERS Your prospects won't sign without proof of security. A proof of compliance request stalls deals and pulls engineers into audit prep. Vanta gets you compliant fast (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA+) and keeps you that way. Trusted by 16,000+ companies like Ramp, Harvey, and Writer. AI skill of the day: Make Claude show every number it touched. AI can sound confident about a workbook while quietly skipping the cells you care about. Claude for Excel can cite exact cells and highlight edits, so make it prove coverage before changing anything. * Ask for a coverage ledger: every sheet or range reviewed, skipped, or ambiguous. * Require cell-level citations for each conclusion and a log of every formula or value it proposes changing. * End with unresolved assumptions and a no-edit review pass; approve changes only after checking the cited cells. Review this workbook without editing it. List every sheet or range you inspected, cite the cells behind each conclusion, flag anything you could not verify, and show every formula or value you would change before I approve edits. Have a specific skill you want to learn? Request it here. Around the horn. * OpenAI is ending Cursor's direct model access on Nov. 12 as a reaction to SpaceX's acquisition of it, citing "trust" concerns and prior Musk-company contract breaches. Cursor users can still bring their own OpenAI API keys. * Researchers at Google and Purdue introduced SKILL.state, which keeps an agent's current structured state instead of replaying its full history; on a 100-step Gemini 3 Flash benchmark, it cut token use about 94% (65K vs. 1.06M) while accuracy rose from 0.91 to 0.94. * Pollen Robotics' Microduck (above) can train behaviors in simulation and transfer them to a real 25 cm biped. * Anthropic let Claude spend 48 hours and one GPU fixing 10 alignment failures (alignmnet = AI's "rules" for good behavior), beating 28 human researchers at the job; that said, a monitor did catch the AI test-gaming in 2.4% of roughly 1,600 runs. AI still gonna AI. * South Korea selected SK Telecom, Kakao, and KT for free domestic AI access for roughly 52 million residents, backed initially by 512 Nvidia B200 GPUs. * The EU AI Act entered its first transparency-enforcement phase, giving regulators access to company information and models while stricter high-risk-system rules arrive later. * Gemini Co-Scientist moved into real labs, helping guide materials, biology, and medical-reasoning experiments, including a technique that beat six frontier models in blinded physician review. Want absolutely EVERYTHING that happened in AI this week? Click here! Treats to try. * *Generate Music, Speech, and Sound Effects for creative projects, plus Firefly AI Assistant and leading models like Gemini, Runway, and Kling. Try today! * LLM Cliché Highlighter scans pasted text or a URL for common AI-writing tells and explains the pattern it matched. * Gemini Notebook Expert Intelligence turns eligible Google Play Books you own into sources you can question, quiz yourself on, or turn into audio overviews. * LightReel indexes roughly 10,000 new TikToks a day so marketers can search winning hooks, formats, and creative patterns instead of doomscrolling manually. * Hao AI Lab open-sourced FastH3 v1, a four-step MiniMax H3 distill that ran up to 14x faster on one Blackwell GPU, though its team says motion and fine detail still trail base H3. Try the checkpoint. * Z.ai open-sourced GLM-5.3 after post-training sharply improved coding and cyber performance; it says the model found 2,436 bugs across 269 open-source projects. Download the weights or run it on Tinker. * Tencent open-sourced Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter model that activates 49B parameters per token and supports a 1-million-token context window. Download or run it here. Sunday special. Top 5 Stories of the Week * Hackers used Cursor to compromise seven real companies. * NVIDIA reportedly moved to buy Hugging Face for about $13B. * OpenAI's Jalapeño chip posted faster, more efficient inference results. * Anthropic's IPO could become one of tech's biggest raises. * AWS and NVIDIA planned 2 million more GPUs. Top 5 Tools of the Week * Construct turns repeatable work into scheduled agent workflows. * BrowserOS Neo gives Claude, Codex, and Cursor a local browser. * Atlaso shares one persistent memory across your AI tools. * Xirp gives coding agents your company's real system context. * Mem Agent tracks unfinished work and follows up automatically. New from the neuron: AI explained. New episode: Why AI agent security gets "almost infinite" once agents can act. Alice CEO and co-founder Noam Schwartz joins Corey and Grant to explain why model safety is only one layer, why prompt injection may never disappear, and why real agent security also has to cover tools, data, permissions, and policies. A chatbot can say the wrong thing. An agent can delete files, move money, change a database, or even influence another agent. It's about to get weird y'all. A cat's commentary. good problems only | / | That's all for now. If you want to get featured above, fill out the poll below and tell us how we did today! | What'd you think of today's email? | | * | Like a hit of catnip * | Good, not great * | It sucked | | Login or Subscribe to participate in polls. P.S: Love the newsletter, but only want to get it once per week? Don't unsubscribe - update your preferences here.