• Intel shut down On Demand after customers rejected paying for dormant silicon
• Archiving SDSi signals the end of hardware features sold as add-ons
• Cloud buyers refused fees for capabilities already fused into processors

Intel has moved to shut down its pay-as-you-go hardware upgrade effort with little public explanation or formal announcement.

The Software Defined Silicon initiative, later called Intel On Demand, has effectively been abandoned after years of limited visibility and sparse maintenance.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I found 1-Down tricky — nice one, puzzle creators. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Like flowers that never wilt
Answer: FAKE

5A clue: Italian city that’s hosting part of the 2026 Winter Olympics
Answer: MILAN

6A clue: “Huh, that’s strange …”
Answer: WEIRD

7A clue: Regions
Answer: AREAS

8A clue: Crossword clue, e.g.
Answer: HINT

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Guy in a kitchen
Answer: FIERI

2D clue: Visitor from another world
Answer: ALIEN

3D clue: Gold measurement
Answer: KARAT

4D clue: “Don’t tell me how it ___!”
Answer: ENDS

5D clue: Kissing sound
Answer: MWAH

It’s the middle of February, and the air is dry. There are fine lines emerging on my forehead, maybe because I don’t moisturize enough, but maybe as a harbinger of something greater: Each day I grow closer to my own death. Soon, I will be 30. I will never be younger than I am right now.

Fintech-founder-turned-longevity-guru Bryan Johnson has an offer that has caught my attention. For the low, low price of $1 million per year, I can pay him to show me the ropes of the “exact protocol” he’s followed for the last five years. He calls the program “Immortals.”

Yes, a guy who has received botox injections in his genitals will teach me how to supposedly reverse the process of aging. Why shouldn’t I believe that Bryan Johnson has uncovered the secrets to living longer than any other human? No, he has not yet proven his capacity to outlive all other humans. He was born in 1977, a year in which many current humans were born.

But why would I doubt the judgment of a guy who fortified his constitution with blood from his teenage son? When have the tech elite ever misled us? Should I also question when Elon Musk says that saving for retirement is irrelevant because AGI will create an economic abundance so great that no one will ever know poverty again?

According to Johnson’s post on X, this exclusive service — only three spots are available! — will include “a dedicated concierge team, BryanAI 24/7, extensive testing, millions of biological data points, continuous tracking, best skin and hair protocols, and access to the best therapies on market.”

I can talk to the AI version of a guy who livestreams himself doing shrooms for “science”? Sign me up!

Except I can’t. Because I do not have $1 million. Those like me will have to settle for buying Johnson’s overpriced olive oil in our pursuit of immortality (it’s peppery and smooth!).

My emergent forehead wrinkle intensifies with the knowledge that Johnson will likely have an easy time filling up those three $1 million spots. Among the ultrawealthy, longevity has become an increasingly hot pursuit.

John Hering, who has given Musk billions of dollars in backing, co-founded Biograph, which describes itself as a preventative health and diagnostics clinic. Its most premium membership costs $15,000 a year (next to Johnson’s offering, it almost seems like a good deal … almost). A similar startup, Fountain Life, has raised $108 million to fund its “ultimate longevity program,” which charges a $21,500 annual fee. Sure, Johnson’s program is a lot more expensive, but remember, there’s only three spots! And if you’re still not ready to shell out seven figures, well, you can access a vague “supported tier” for $60,000.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live a longer, healthier life, but longevity influencers like Johnson take this to an extreme that’s unattainable and (common sense would say) totally unnecessary for the average person.

In his defense, Johnson isn’t trying to proselytize us all into taking 100 pills a day and subsisting largely on boiled vegetables. But he’s also not depriving us of the chance to make him richer in exchange for his “secrets.”

It still feels like a technological marvel: Waymo’s autonomous cars are now transporting passengers across six cities. Alas, this driverless future comes with its own set of problems. These vehicles can be rendered inert if a passenger accidentally leaves the door open.

According to a Reddit post, one DoorDash driver discovered this issue when an odd request appeared in their queue. Instead of making a delivery, the driver was offered $6.25 to drive less than one mile to a Waymo vehicle and close its door. After “verified completion,” they would get an extra $5.

“You actually ‘door’ dashed,” one commenter noted.

It seems too ironic to be real. Waymo vehicles represent technological breakthroughs that once seemed unfathomable. The Alphabet-owned company just raised $16 billion to take its driverless cars international!

But Waymo and DoorDash confirmed to TechCrunch that this Reddit post is legitimate. This is, in fact, a real problem.

“Waymo is currently running a pilot program in Atlanta to enhance its AV fleet efficiency. In the rare event a vehicle door is left ajar, preventing the car from departing, nearby Dashers are notified, allowing Waymo to get its vehicles back on the road quickly,” Waymo and DoorDash said in a joint response. (The door-closing partnership, which began earlier this year, is just one facet of Waymo and DoorDash’s broader relationship. In October, the companies launched an autonomous delivery service in Phoenix, where Waymo vehicles deliver food and groceries to DoorDash customers.)

If a Waymo door is left open, it’s worth it to the company to pay someone to close it — the car cannot complete any more rides if it’s left immobile. Not to mention, an unmoving car could block the flow of traffic.

This isn’t the first time Waymo has enlisted help with its door troubles. In Los Angeles, Waymo works with Honk, an app that’s like Uber for towing services. According to reports, Honk users in L.A. have been offered up to $24 to close a Waymo door — more than double what Atlanta DoorDash drivers receive.

The company noted that Waymo’s future vehicles will have automated door closures. But for now, gig workers are Waymo’s best bet.

Chinese AI startup MiniMax, headquartered in Shanghai, has sent shockwaves through the AI industry today with the release of its new M2.5 language model in two variants, which promise to make high-end artificial intelligence so cheap you might stop worrying about the bill entirely.

It’s also said to be “open source,” though the weights (settings) and code haven’t been posted yet, nor has the exact license type or terms. But that’s almost beside the point given how cheap MiniMax is serving it through its API and those of partners.

For the last few years, using the world’s most powerful AI was like hiring an expensive consultant—it was brilliant, but you watched the clock (and the token count) constantly. M2.5 changes that math, dropping the cost of the frontier by as much as 95%.

By delivering performance that rivals the top-tier models from Google and Anthropic at a fraction of the cost, particularly in agentic tool use for enterprise tasks, including creating Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, MiniMax is betting that the future isn’t just about how smart a model is, but how often you can afford to use it.

Indeed, to this end, MiniMax says it worked “with senior professionals in fields such as finance, law, and social sciences” to ensure the model could perform real work up to their specifications and standards.

This release matters because it signals a shift from AI as a “chatbot” to AI as a “worker”. When intelligence becomes “too cheap to meter,” developers stop building simple Q&A tools and start building “agents”—software that can spend hours autonomously coding, researching, and organizing complex projects without breaking the bank.

In fact, MiniMax has already deployed this model into its own operations. Currently, 30% of all tasks at MiniMax HQ are completed by M2.5, and a staggering 80% of their newly committed code is generated by M2.5!

As the MiniMax team writes in their release blog post, “we believe that M2.5 provides virtually limitless possibilities for the development and operation of agents in the economy.”

Technology: sparse power and the CISPO breakthrough

The secret to M2.5’s efficiency lies in its Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. Rather than running all of its 230 billion parameters for every single word it generates, the model only “activates” 10 billion. This allows it to maintain the reasoning depth of a massive model while moving with the agility of a much smaller one.

To train this complex system, MiniMax developed a proprietary Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework called Forge. MiniMax engineer Olive Song stated on the ThursdAI podcast on YouTube that this technique was instrumental to scaling the performance even while using the relatively small number of parameters, and that the model was trained over a period of two months.

Forge is designed to help the model learn from “real-world environments” — essentially letting the AI practice coding and using tools in thousands of simulated workspaces.

“What we realized is that there’s a lot of potential with a small model like this if we train reinforcement learning on it with a large amount of environments and agents,” Song said. “But it’s not a very easy thing to do,” adding that was what they spent “a lot of time” on.

To keep the model stable during this intense training, they used a mathematical approach called CISPO (Clipping Importance Sampling Policy Optimization) and shared the formula on their blog.

This formula ensures the model doesn’t over-correct during training, allowing it to develop what MiniMax calls an “Architect Mindset”. Instead of jumping straight into writing code, M2.5 has learned to proactively plan the structure, features, and interface of a project first.

State-of-the-art (and near) benchmarks

The results of this architecture are reflected in the latest industry leaderboards. M2.5 hasn’t just improved; it has vaulted into the top tier of coding models, approaching Anthropic’s latest model, Claude Opus 4.6, released just a week ago, and showing that Chinese companies are now just days away from catching up to far better resourced (in terms of GPUs) U.S. labs.

Here are some of the new MiniMax M2.5 benchmark highlights:

• SWE-Bench Verified: 80.2% — Matches Claude Opus 4.6 speeds

• BrowseComp: 76.3% — Industry-leading search & tool use.

• Multi-SWE-Bench: 51.3% — SOTA in multi-language coding

• BFCL (Tool Calling): 76.8% — High-precision agentic workflows.

On the ThursdAI podcast, host Alex Volkov pointed out that MiniMax M2.5 operates extremely quickly and therefore uses less tokens to complete tasks, on the order $0.15 per task compared to $3.00 for Claude Opus 4.6.

Breaking the cost barrier

MiniMax is offering two versions of the model through its API, both focused on high-volume production use:

• M2.5-Lightning: Optimized for speed, delivering 100 tokens per second. It costs $0.30 per 1M input tokens and $2.40 per 1M output tokens.

• Standard M2.5: Optimized for cost, running at 50 tokens per second. It costs half as much as the Lightning version ($0.15 per 1M input tokens / $1.20 per 1M output tokens).

In plain language: MiniMax claims you can run four “agents” (AI workers) continuously for an entire year for roughly $10,000.

For enterprise users, this pricing is roughly 1/10th to 1/20th the cost of competing proprietary models like GPT-5 or Claude 4.6 Opus.

Strategic implications for enterprises and leaders

For technical leaders, M2.5 represents more than just a cheaper API. It changes the operational playbook for enterprises right now.

The pressure to “optimize” prompts to save money is gone. You can now deploy high-context, high-reasoning models for routine tasks that were previously cost-prohibitive.

The 37% speed improvement in end-to-end task completion means the “agentic” pipelines valued by AI orchestrators — where models talk to other models — finally move fast enough for real-time user applications.

In addition, M2.5’s high scores in financial modeling (74.4% on MEWC) suggest it can handle the “tacit knowledge” of specialized industries like law and finance with minimal oversight.

Because M2.5 is positioned as an open-source model, organizations can potentially run intensive, automated code audits at a scale that was previously impossible without massive human intervention, all while maintaining better control over data privacy, but until the licensing terms and weights are posted, this remains just a moniker.

MiniMax M2.5 is a signal that the frontier of AI is no longer just about who can build the biggest brain, but who can make that brain the most useful—and affordable—worker in the room.

NASA is just hours away from its first crewed launch of 2026, and its first since Crew-11 flew to orbit in August last year.

Just ahead of Crew-12’s liftoff, the space agency has released a short trailer (above) for the mission, which will send four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The crew will travel aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule carried to orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, are expected to blast off from from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral in Florida at 5:15 a.m. ET on Friday, February 13. If you’re interested in watching a livestream of the event, Digital Trends has all the information you need.

The mission team had been hoping to launch early on Wednesday, but poor weather conditions in the ascent corridor prompted it to push the launch to Thursday. But then another forecast pushed it to Friday. Thankfully, everything is looking good for the launch in just a few hours from now.

“Weather forecasters issued an improved outlook for the launch site conditions, with a 90% chance of acceptable weather at launch time,” NASA said in a post on its website. The team will assess a final forecast at around 10 p.m. ET, a few hours before the crew suits up. Be sure to check NASA’s X account for any last-minute changes to the schedule.

The crew will spend eight months aboard the orbital outpost performing research, technology demonstrations, and maintenance activities, some 250 miles above Earth.

“We do research on the International Space Station because it provides a very unique and novel environment that we cannot replicate here on Earth,” Jessica Meir, on her second mission to the ISS, says in NASA’s trailer. “We’ll be doing a wealth of scientific experiments, ranging from physiology and medical experiments to radiation material science experiments, deploying small satellites, you name it. Really, every aspect of science is represented in the work that we do on the International Space Station.”

Jack Hathaway adds that it’s “important to push the boundaries of what’s possible — if we’re just satisfied with what we have, we’re never going to create the technology to make our lives better.”