While many startups founded prior to the emergence of ChatGPT are struggling to position themselves for the AI era, Vercel, a 10-year-old dev tool and website hosting platform, is benefiting from the explosion of AI-generated apps and agents.

“When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told the audience at the HumanX conference in San Francisco last week. “Now we’re seeing that everybody in the world can create an app.”

The explosion in app creation by non-developers has been a significant boon to Vercel’s business.

The company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has skyrocketed from $100 million at the beginning of 2024, as reported by The Information, to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026, according to Forbes.

Given that growth, Rauch was asked onstage about his IPO plans. He suggested the company is already operating with the discipline of a public entity. “Vercel is very much a working public company,” Rauch said.

As for when the debut will happen, he replied: “There’s no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company’s ready and getting more ready for it every day.”

2026 was expected to be a strong year for new listings, but a sharp sell-off in software, fueled by the fear of AI disruption, has effectively frozen the IPO pipeline. Aside from SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, most talk of public debuts has largely ceased. Once any of those company’s go public, all expected to be blockbuster hits, the window may open again.

Meanwhile most tech CEOs have gone quiet about their IPO plans. But Rauch is telegraphing the company’s public market readiness, suggesting that Vercel is eyeing a listing in the not-too-distant future.

When pressed about what Wall Street should know about Vercel, Rauch responded: “The total addressable market of infrastructure has now grown, and it simply has no ceiling.”

Vercel is betting that as more apps are created by AI agents instead of humans, the company will become the primary platform for hosting everything agents develop.

“Agents are very prolific at deploying,” Rauch said, adding that 30% of the apps running on the company’s platform already came from agents.

According to Rauch, agents will accelerate software production by making it easier to generate custom solutions than to purchase existing software.

“All of that software… it needs to go somewhere, and we think it’s going to be Vercel,” he said.

Vercel was last valued at $9.3 billion when it raised a $300 million Series F led by Accel in September. The company competes with Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services for hosting services, and it also offers v0, a vibe coding tool for creating websites and apps.  

Trinity College Dublin’s Elva Arulchelvan highlights five tips for improving both your working and long-term memory.

A version of this article was originally published by The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0)

As a researcher investigating how electric brain stimulation can improve people’s powers of recollection, I’m often asked how memory works – and what we can do to use it more effectively. Happily, decades of research have given us some clear answers to both questions.

Memory essentially operates in three stages, with different brain regions contributing to each one.

Sensory memory, which can last only milliseconds, registers raw information such as sights, sounds and smells. These are first processed by the brain’s five primary sensory cortices (visual cortex for sights, auditory cortex for sounds and so on).

Working (short-term) memory holds and manipulates a small amount of information over several seconds or more. Think of this as your brain’s mental workspace: the system that lets you do mental arithmetic, follow instructions and comprehend what you’re reading. So it mainly involves the prefrontal cortex – the front part of your brain that supports attention, decision-making and reasoning.

Finally, long-term memory stores information more permanently, from minutes to a lifetime. This includes both ‘explicit’ memories (facts and life events) and ‘implicit’ ones (skills, habits and emotional associations).

For long-term memories, the hippocampus and temporal lobes – located deep within the brain, around the sides of your head near your temples – contribute largely to memories involving facts or life events, while the amygdala (near the hippocampus), cerebellum (at the back of the brain) and basal ganglia (deep in the brain) process emotional or procedural memories.

Working memory often acts as a conscious gateway to long-term memory – but it has its limits. In 1956, the American psychologist George Miller proposed that we can only hold about seven ‘chunks’ of information in our working memory at any time.

While the exact number is debated to this day, the principle holds: working memory is limited. And that limitation can shape how effectively we learn and remember things.

But you can also get your memory working more effectively. Here are five easy steps for improving both your working and long-term memory.

Put your phone away

Smartphones reduce your working memory capacity. Even just having a phone nearby – no matter if it’s face down and on silent – can reduce performance on memory and reasoning tasks.

The reason is that part of your brain is still subtly monitoring it. Even resisting the urge to check notifications consumes mental resources – which is why researchers sometimes call smartphones a “brain drain”. The solution is simple: put your phone in another room when you need to focus. Out of sight really does free up mental capacity.

Stop your mind racing

Stress and anxiety can take up valuable mental space. When you’re worrying about something or are distracted by racing thoughts, part of your working memory is already in use.

Relaxation training and mindfulness practices can improve both working memory and academic performance, probably by reducing stress levels. And if meditation feels intimidating, try breathing techniques such as ‘cyclic sighing’. Inhale deeply through your nose, take a second shorter inhale, then slowly exhale through your mouth. Repeating this for five minutes can calm the nervous system and create better conditions for learning.

Get chunking

Everyone can expand their working memory using the technique of chunking – grouping information into meaningful units. In fact, you probably already do it to remember some phone numbers or lists of words – breaking long sequences into bite-size chunks that your brain can recall as a mini-group.

The same principles apply if you’re delivering a presentation, to help your audience remember your key points more effectively. Chunking would involve grouping 10 case studies, say, into three or four themes, each with a short headline and single key takeaway.

Repeat this structure on each slide: one idea, a few supporting details, then move on. By organising information into meaningful patterns, you reduce cognitive load and make it more memorable.

Become a retriever

In the 19th century, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus demonstrated how quickly we forget information after learning it. Within about 30 minutes, we lose roughly half of what we have learned, with much more fading over the next day. Ebbinghaus called this the forgetting curve. The light blue line on the chart below illustrates this.

The forgetting curve – and how to disrupt it

The forgetting curve. Image: Elva Arulchelvan (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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However, there is a way of ensuring that more sinks in when you are trying to learn a lot of information in a short period of time: retrieval practice.

When preparing to give a talk or studying for an exam, rather than simply rereading your notes, keep testing how much you remember. Use flash cards, answer practice questions, or try explaining the material out loud without notes.

Memory works through associations. Each time you successfully retrieve information, you link the material to new prompts, examples and contexts. This builds more cues to accessing the information, and strengthens each memory pathway. Often when we ‘forget’, the memory isn’t gone – we just lack the right retrieval cue.

Give yourself a break

Research shows that memory is more effective when study or practice sessions are spread out, rather than massed together. If you are studying for an exam, build solid blocks of downtime into your revision schedule. The dark blue line on the chart above illustrates how spacing out your practice sessions can help you remember more information over time, by adjusting Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve.

One study suggests leaving gaps between each revision session that equate to 10-20pc of the time left until your exam or presentation. So, if your deadline is five days away and you do hours of revision a day, you should still take between a half and full day off in between sessions. In other words, don’t overdo it – you probably won’t see the rewards!

If you only remember one thing from this article about improving memory, make it this. Memory isn’t just about intelligence, it’s about strategy. Small changes in how you study or work can make a real difference in how well, and how long, you remember crucial information.

By Elva Arulchelvan

Elva Arulchelvan is completing a PhD in psychology and neuroscience for the Lab for Clinical and Integrative Neuroscience in Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland. She is also a lecturer in psychology for social work students in TCD. Arulchelvan’s PhD research focuses on memory and forgetting processes. In particular, her PhD research involves investigating peripheral nerve stimulation’s effect on memory and forgetting in both clinical and non-clinical groups. 

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house may have been the target of a second attack after San Francisco Police Department arrested two suspects for a reported shooting in the Russian Hill neighborhood. The SFPD said in a press release that police officers responded to a “suspicious occurrence of possible shots fired” at around 5:56 AM ET / 2:56 AM PT on Sunday, April 12.

SFPD’s Special Investigation Division took over the case and have since detained both 25-year-old Amanda Tom and 23-year-old Muhamad Tarik Hussein, seizing three firearms in the process with the help of a warrant. The two suspects were charged with negligent discharge.

According to the initial police report, as reported by The San Francisco Standard, two people inside a Honda sedan stopped in front of Altman’s property that spans from Chestnut Street to Lombard Street. The police report also noted that the passenger appeared to fire a round at the Lombard Street side of Altman’s property. The property’s security personnel reported hearing a gunshot and there was surveillance footage that recorded the incident, according to the report.

This could be the second instance of violence targeting Altman and his residence in a matter of days. On Friday, a 20-year-old man allegedly hurled a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home, which caused a fire on one of the property’s exterior gates, according to SFPD. The San Francisco Standard reported that there were no injuries in either incident.

Carwow’s Mat Watson crossed the Atlantic to organize this unusual showdown on a California ranch. Two vehicles lined up for a day of flat-out racing, with little in common other than a price tag of roughly $120,000. On one side, there’s the Corvette Z06 designed for cornering, while on the other is Rivian’s full-size electric truck, which has four motors and enough power to move a home. Despite the comparable price tag, their approach to speed could not have been more different.

At first glance, or rather, by looking at the spec sheets, it was evident that these two cars were not a good match. The Corvette Z06 features a 5.5-liter V8 engine that delivers 670 horsepower and 460 pound-feet of torque to the rear wheels via an 8-speed dual-clutch transmission. That’s a rather eye-watering setup for handling, but the real stats show the true difference: it weighs only 3,715 pounds, which is a significant benefit when attempting to travel fast. Meanwhile, the Rivian R1T Quad Motor produces an impressive 1,025 horsepower and 1,198 pound-feet of torque, but it all goes through a heavyweight 4-wheel drive system that weighs about 7,000 pounds. On paper, the truck should have been unstoppable from the outset, but the real world was a lot more unpredictable.

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The first test was a half-mile straight-line run, which began at roughly 30 mph in second gear to settle the engine and transmission before getting underway. The electric truck accelerated immediately away, thanks to its fast torque. It didn’t remain ahead for long; the Corvette soon came up and took the lead. Mat Watson later revealed that the truck had a bit of a limiting element, as it reached an electronically limited 112 mph early on. That means it couldn’t push as hard as the Corvette.

The bigger braking test came next, starting at 100 mph. Both vehicles approached the strip at full speed before the drivers slammed on the anchors. The Corvette stopped the quickest and remained rock solid thanks to its incredible carbon-ceramic brakes and small weight. The heavier Rivian took much longer to come to a stop and felt quite unstable when braking hard. That extra weight was certainly having a significant impact here.

The standing-start quarter-mile runs delivered the most drama. The Corvette edged over the Rivian by a hair in the first few runs, but the latter struggled to get moving under factory traction. Then Mat Watson came in and changed the settings to turn off traction control and enable full launch mode on the truck. Suddenly, everything changed. The Rivian caught up smoothly and sped down the track like a missile. In the last run, it crossed the line in 10.6 seconds at 130 mph. The Corvette clocked 11.3 seconds.

Like a lot of people, Ann Garner thought that shingles was a “mild” illness—until 2024, when she became sick with it herself. If she had known at the time that Norwegians call shingles helvetesild, literally meaning “hell’s fire,” or that the Arabic name for it translates to “belt of fire,” she might have been better prepared.

Shingles (herpes zoster) is a common viral infection that causes a painful skin rash and can trigger post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN), a form of long-term nerve pain that can last for years. The English name derives from the Latin for “girdle,” as the shingles rash most commonly occurs around the torso, although it can affect the face and eyes as well, as Garner discovered.

One in three people will get shingles in their lifetime, but the risk rises sharply after 50 or for anyone with a weakened immune system. The disease is triggered by the reactivation of the varicella zoster virus, the same one that causes chickenpox when it first enters the body. The virus can lie dormant in a person’s nervous system for years until it reactivates—often, but not always, when immunity starts to wane due to factors such as aging, immunosuppressant drugs, or acute stress.

Garner, a 73-year-old retired pharmacy administrator from Wales, in the UK, feels sure stress was a factor in her developing shingles. She had been under intense financial pressure over a large tax bill when, one July afternoon, she felt a strange tingling sensation along one side of her hairline above her forehead.

Within hours, the feeling had intensified—causing her severe pain—and began progressing down her face toward one eye. “It was like hundreds of invisible, tiny hot needles pricking my scalp and face,” she recalls.

Doctors recommended that Garner take acyclovir, an antiviral drug that can help reduce symptoms if taken within a 72-hour window of them appearing, and an acyclovir eye cream to protect her eye, as shingles can cause vision damage and lead to blindness if it affects the eye.

But even with treatment, Garner’s face and eyelid were soon covered in a hot red rash with angry blisters. “I couldn’t do anything to stop this sensation of being tortured by burning needles,” she says. “It was like my nerves were electrical wires that had been cut and they were fizzing and sparking.”

Despite shingles being common, it seems public perception has only recently started catching up with the severity of the condition. A 2025 study by researchers at the University of Bristol, UK, points to inadequate public health messaging and a lack of communication regarding patient experiences of the disease: “Limited literature about the experience and understanding of shingles suggests that people tend to think of it as minor until they experience it themselves,” researchers concluded.

Many people also fail to realize shingles can have a significant and long-lasting impact on their lives, says Martin Sollie, a consultant plastic surgeon at Oslo University Hospital in Norway. Sollie conducts research into the surgical management of chronic pain, including exploring whether grafting fat onto the skin could help reduce PHN. In 2022, he led a systematic review examining how shingles affects patients’ quality of life.

His meta-analysis of five studies, involving 2,519 patients in the US, Europe, and China, found those with an acute case of shingles had quality-of-life scores 15 percent below the norm for physical health and 13 percent below for mental health. “We were quite surprised that it did affect quality of life so much,” he says. “We know that if you have chronic pain, your quality of life is affected, but it’s very uncommon for a disease that is temporary—and not deadly—to have such an effect.”