Nick Sadler and his wife had different ideas of what a chill Saturday looked like. He considered the weekend a blank slate — no set plans, the family’s moment to reset and chill. She was under the impression that time was up for grabs and put a short hangout on their calendar, which Sadler saw as his wife not taking his schedule into account. To settle the argument, he opened up ChatGPT, specifically the group chat function, which allows more than one human to interact with the technology. Sadler prompted the chatbot to act as a neutral mediator and to instruct them on their next moves. Sadler tells Vox that ChatGPT acted as a trusted friend, or even a therapist, suggesting both of them consider different perspectives. It attempted to pinpoint where the conversation broke down (“Both of you then behaved logically according to your own understanding. That means this is not primarily a respect problem. It’s a classification problem.”) and offered guidelines for future scheduling (“A simple question can prevent most of these arguments: ‘Is this an idea, or are we locking this in?’”)
Tech
Can AI ever be a good couples therapist?
“It was like, ‘Well, next time just consider this’ and ‘maybe try saying this’ and ‘maybe try doing that,’” Sadler, a film producer, says. “We got some sort of advice to follow, but ultimately we’ve still got to do the work and we’ve still got to actually take the actions.”
Sadler, a 48-year-old self-proclaimed AI enthusiast, is no stranger to utilizing ChatGPT in his marriage. He’s used it to uncover the weaknesses in his arguments and to craft apology texts to his wife. “I put in purpose mistakes so she wouldn’t think I was just using ChatGPT,” he says.
But the pressures of parenting two young kids was kindling for their periodic annoying marital spats. Sadler and his wife considered couples counseling, but once he discovered ChatGPT could guide them through difficult conversations, they no longer felt they needed the help of a professional. One night, while sitting on the couch with his wife, Sadler launched ChatGPT and told his wife to talk to it as if it was a therapist. “In a way, it’s having a therapist on tap,” he says.
That people are turning to large language models to navigate their love lives isn’t entirely surprising. Relationships have peaks and valleys and, many times, exist in an emotional gray area. Chatbots, on the other hand, are authoritative in tone and confident, even when they’re wrong.
Some people are going a step beyond asking Claude to draft an apology text, and inviting AI into the most intimate moments of their lives: fights with their significant others. In other words, they are treating technology like an on-demand couples therapist. The tech, which could be ambiently listening or addressed directly via voice or text, might suggest someone use more “I” statements or prompt couples to ask questions like “Where did you feel unsupported?”
Research has suggested publicly available AI, like ChatGPT, is an effective intermediary in a dispute, with human subjects feeling less divided when AI was mediating. But AI platforms lack the emotional intelligence to adequately read a couple’s body language and tone, understand cultural context and power dynamics, and incorporate a couple’s past into the fight at hand.
The desire for an authoritative, always-available guide in the midst of conflict is certainly seductive, but emotional matters are best reserved for human-to-human conversation. “The answer is typically not that you need some type of content strategy on how you should approach your next steps,” Amelia Miller, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, tells Vox. “But it’s much more that you need emotional support, which comes from asking other people that you care about what you should do in the situation, not asking a machine.”
Drawing from a shared reality
In her Bay Area therapy practice, Courtney Quattrini has seen her fair share of couples who leverage AI chatbots in their relationships, including using it as a practice conversation partner and to ghostwrite texts to their significant other. While none of her clients have let ChatGPT or Claude mediate a fight, some do bring in AI summaries of arguments from one person’s perspective to their sessions with her. “They’re ruminating or they’re thinking about their side of the fight: What am I going to come back and say, how am I going to prove that I’m right or wrong?” Quattrini tells Vox. “They’re summarizing the fight from their perspective, and then they’ll bring in the summary and present it almost like it’s objective, but of course it’s not objective.”
But much of the work in couples therapy centers on the idea that two things can be true at once, and is about getting both individuals to understand that their partner’s emotional reality is important. “When you’re coming in and you want to summarize who won a fight, that really doesn’t align with the work that we’re actually doing,” Quattrini says. Feeding AI your narrative doesn’t help you see the things you could have done differently.
But when both people in a relationship invite AI into the discussion, leveling the playing field, the technology draws from a version of the story that may be more closely aligned with reality. A few months into dating, Khalid Tawohid and his partner discovered they’d both been discussing their relationship with their respective AI chatbots. “How can we get our AIs to just talk to each other?” Tawohid tells Vox.
Earlier this year, the 25-year-old software engineer designed a workaround where both his and his partner’s Claude agents — drawing from each individual’s full chat history — could facilitate difficult conversations. The app, called Bridge, claims to provide scaffolding for the discussions and package disorderly thoughts in a more coherent manner. Instead of looking to a machine to validate your point of view, the machine, ideally, would hold your hand as you attempt that same conversation with a human. “This helps your AI have a real sense of identity of who this [other] person is because it’s two different AIs, one knows one person, one knows the other person, and they’re both vehemently going to defend their own person,” Tawohid says. “But together it gets you to a more shared sense of truth.”
Still, Tawohid isn’t convinced his AI chatbot mediation tool, Bridge, is even a good idea. He has shared Bridge with about 10 couples, all of whom have given him the feedback that they’d use it again, he says, but it isn’t widely available for use. Perhaps, he says, it could be a supplement to traditional couples counseling, a way to practice communication outside of the therapy room.
Ironically, though, Tawohid has come down on the side of mild AI skepticism. “It’s a combination of a journal and a therapist and a friend, but it is also not real. It’s also just a computer code,” he says. When he discovered he’d lost his ability to craft a sentence without help, he stopped writing with AI. Now he fears people could lose their relationships to chatbots, too.
Gateway to introspection or outsourcing sincerity?
After a few months of using Bridge, Tawohid says he and his partner spend much less time talking to AI. They’ve had enough machine-facilitated conversations that they better understand each other’s thought patterns and triggers. Sadler, the AI-curious film producer, and his wife have similarly come to rely on AI less frequently because, he says, ChatGPT has taught them to be better communicators. “It just taught me to understand that she’s got a different perspective on things. If I’m not understanding where [she’s] coming from, just asking questions to say, well, what do you mean? And not jumping to conclusions,” he says.
Using AI as a therapeutic outlet can be instructive for people who aren’t in the habit of introspection, says Miller, the Harvard fellow. These chatbots can, in theory, be a tool for reflecting on an argument and for rehearsing what to say next. But sometimes the language the chatbot suggests is so far out of the realm of what your partner would actually say that its assistance is counterproductive.
For Josh Elledge and his wife, the stupid fight began over a haircut — or lack thereof. Elledge, a 54-year-old podcast consultant, was refusing to clean up his look (“I didn’t like something my barber said, and so I stopped going to him,” Elledge says) and his wife was not pleased. So she turned to an AI chatbot for assistance on how to break it to him. What she ended up saying to Elledge didn’t land. “It just made her opinion stronger in a way that wasn’t really helpful,” he says. “She’s conveying this stuff and I’m like, wow, you really think that? And she’s like, well, no, not really.” He says they “thankfully had the good sense” to distinguish between what she believed and what was the AI.
Once you relinquish enough of your critical thinking to AI, you run the risk of undermining the relationship you sought to fix. Therapists are trained to identify when a fight needs to be slowed, rerouted, or ditched altogether. But because chatbots never tire of hearing about your problems, you can get caught in a loop of rumination, perpetually mulling over the same frustrations and workshopping language on how to tell your husband you hate his haircut. At that point, who are you in a relationship with — a large language model, or a human? “That was an instance where maybe this isn’t a miracle process. You still have to just be really careful about not showing up as someone who you are not just simply because you defaulted to this AI being this authority in all things,” Elledge says.
AI chatbots are programmed to keep you engaged, but endless mediation and reflection isn’t exactly helpful. If you feel compelled to use one to navigate a squabble, give the technology guardrails. For example, Miller has created custom prompts that don’t exceed 10 or so exchanges with the AI and are meant to illuminate your own biases and shortcomings. But, ultimately, Quattrini, the therapist, says it’s important to remember that true counsel comes from a human who possesses the ability to read nonverbal cues, affect, and changes in body language. “Right now I think AI is a pretty dangerous mediator because it doesn’t have a nervous system,” she says.
The joy of being a person in a relationship with another person is getting through the hard parts together, even imperfectly. “We’re complicated people and no one really knows everything going on in everyone’s mind,” Tawohid says. “But humans are awesome, truly.”
When looking at motorcycle engines, one of the first things to note is the engine’s displacement, as this usually has a strong correlation with the bike’s overall weight and power output. But that isn’t the only factor worth considering. It’s also worth taking a look at the number and orientation of the engine’s pistons.
Most of the motorcycles being made these days use either a parallel-twin or an inline triple-cylinder engine. These are affordable to manufacture and offer a unique blend of power and efficiency. Then there are the inline-four motorcycle engines, which are also sometimes called ‘screamers.’ These became very popular starting in the late ’60s, with that popularity seeming to peak in the mid-2010s. It’s only recently that these have started to slow down in production, and we have begun seeing fewer and fewer of them coming out each year. Many riders still consider these bikes highly desirable for their high-RPM power, smooth balance, and racetrack competence, but there’s no denying they’re slowly slipping out of vogue.
There are a few reasons why you’re seeing fewer inline-four engines coming out than before, and it isn’t just because they’re more expensive to make. There are several other disadvantages that might make them less appealing to the rider. You can still find a fair few affordable inline-4 motorcycles being made even now, but you might want to stop and consider the drawbacks before seeking one out.
1. Inline-fours typically have less low-to-mid-range torque
Most of the arguments in favor of the inline-four engine model primarily cite performance. The bikes that use them are known for delivering a large amount of power smoothly during acceleration, pushing the bike harder at higher speeds. That said, performance isn’t exactly a zero-sum game. While it’s true that inline-four engines are well known for their ability to output incredible amounts of horsepower at high RPMs (which is one of the reasons they are still so popular at the racetrack), this comes at a slight cost.
Inline-fours produce slightly less low-to-mid-range torque than some other engine types. This means riders often discover that they have a little less get-up-and-go when accelerating from a stop than if they were riding a bike with something like a parallel twin in its chassis. This makes them less than ideal for a daily driver, especially for those living in cities with plenty of traffic lights.
So, what qualifies as performance can vary depending on the type of bike and how it’s being ridden. An ultra-lightweight sport bike might have no trouble getting up to speed using an inline-four, while a heavy cruiser might struggle. Likewise, those who primarily ride in urban areas might prefer a bit more low-end torque, while those who prefer to push the red line at the track might prefer something with more power at higher speeds. This makes the inline-four a less practical choice for those seeking a commuter who aren’t looking to get any speeding tickets on the highway.
2. Inline-fours can be wider and heavier
Motorcycles that use inline-four engines are exceptionally well balanced. This is because the pistons move in pairs along a single plane, so there’s always one in the up position and one in the down position on each side, creating a smooth counterbalance. That said, they aren’t exactly petite.
It’s true that the pistons themselves are generally smaller in an inline-four than they are in a two- or three-cylinder motorcycle, but there are more of them, which means that they still end up having more parts and taking up more space overall. That means the casing has to be bigger, which means more metal, which means more weight. That alone can cause a ripple of other issues, such as lowering fuel efficiency and making the bikes feel a little more intimidating to smaller or less confident riders who want something light.
What’s more, the vast majority of modern inline-four engines are mounted transversely. As a result, the straight row of four cylinders is mounted perpendicular to the bike’s frame, not parallel. This effectively makes the engine wider, with each side protruding farther from the centerline than you might get in a two- or three-cylinder engine. That, in turn, means the bike needs a wider frame to accommodate it. This is another factor that might be detrimental to smaller riders, as it can be difficult for them to comfortably place their feet flat on the ground when stopped if they need to straddle a significantly wider seat.
3. Inline-fours drive up price tags
Inline-four engines are complex machines that are meticulously engineered for smooth acceleration and raw horsepower. Four smaller pistons being attached to the crankshaft in a row create a constant state of balance within each revolution as the bike is consistently receiving power. This is how these engines can accelerate with minimal thumping, and it’s also why they produce that signature screaming exhaust sound. Getting this to work properly requires that all four cylinders be perfectly balanced to prevent them from ever falling out of sync, but that complexity comes at a cost.
We’ve already mentioned that inline-four engines are being used less because they are more expensive to manufacture than parallel twins and some other design styles, but it isn’t actually the manufacturers who swallow that cost. The 2026 Kawasaki Ninja 650, for instance, has a 649cc parallel-twin engine and retails for $7,599. Compare that to the 2026 Honda CBR650R, which runs on a 649cc inline-four. Both are Japanese sport bikes with the same displacement as well as comparable designs and features, but the Honda starts at $9,199. Then take a look at the supersports. The 2026 Kawasaki Ninja ZX6R has a 636cc inline-four engine and retails for $11,599. But despite having a lower displacement, it costs more than the $9,399 2026 Yamaha YZF-R7, which runs on a 689cc parallel-twin. Perhaps one of the most extreme examples might be within Kawasaki’s own line. The 2026 Ninja 500 has a 451cc parallel-twin and starts at $5,799 for the ABS model. The 2026 Ninja ZX-4RR has a 399cc inline-four cylinder engine and costs $9,999.
4. Inline-fours have higher maintenance costs
While we’ve discussed the fact that manufacturing costs drive up the prices of the bikes that run on inline-fours, you also might find that you’re spending a lot more at the mechanic than you were on your last motorcycle. The very intricacy of the inline-four’s design that makes it such a powerhouse can also drive up maintenance costs.
Part of this is simple math. More cylinders mean more parts that require maintenance (twice as many valves), so your mechanic will need to spend twice as long checking the cylinders simply because there are twice as many. This also means more expendable parts like spark plugs and gaskets, but this is only a small part of it. The bigger issue is the effort required to get inside the engine. The inline-four sitting horizontally across the motorcycle’s frame means that it isn’t easy to access from the outside. Mechanics will often need to remove the fairings and tank from the bike just to get to it, which can drive up labor costs quite a bit.
Then there’s the additional complexities of the design. A routine valve adjustment, for instance, might cost between $300 and $600 for an inline-four engine, which usually requires a shim-under-bucket style valve adjustment. That would only run you between $150 and $400 on a V-twin that uses a screw and locknut valve adjustment system. Some of them even use a hydraulic lift valve adjustment system that is self-adjusting and doesn’t need to be serviced at all unless it breaks.
5. Inline-fours are less fuel-efficient
Fuel efficiency wasn’t as big of a consideration for a lot of riders back in the inline-four’s heyday, but it’s definitely become a major factor in how people choose their motorcycles now. Unfortunately, inline-fours sacrifice a fair amount of fuel efficiency in favor of high-RPM power. This might not be that big a deal for the kinds of riders who only use their motorcycles at the track, but it’s definitely something to think about if you’re planning on riding one of these bikes for your daily commute.
Take a look at some of the most fuel-efficient motorcycles on the market, and you’ll quickly find that all of them, except of course for the electric and hybrid models, are powered by one- or two-cylinder engines. Of course, fuel efficiency can be affected by other factors, such as overall weight, gearbox type, chain drive, throttle control, tire pressure, modifications, cargo, and the rider’s weight. There are a few examples of inline-four bikes that are more fuel efficient than you might think, like the Kawasaki Z900, which can get up to 49 MPG. As a rule, however, inline-four bikes are consistently less fuel-efficient than most other engine types and often get city miles closer to those of an SUV than an economy vehicle. Even Honda, which is exceptionally well known for efficiency, can only offer about 40 MPG on its inline-four CBR600RR, while its parallel-twin CBR500R boasts over 65 MPG. Even the larger parallel-twin Kawasaki Ninja 650 is able to hit over 51 MPG.
How we listed these disadvantages
Inline-four engines are immensely popular, and they certainly have a lot of great things going for them. However, there are certain weaknesses that riders who are thinking about getting one should be aware of. There is a wide variety of inline-four engines that have been released over the years, and they are attached to an even wider variety of motorcycles. As such, it is difficult to make any universal claims about design or performance that won’t be disproven by at least one exception. That said, there are certain general rules of thumb that one can apply to the vast majority of them when looking at these weaknesses.
By taking a look at several different professional reviews, motorcycle forums, mechanic forums, and the raw stats of many of the inline-four motorcycles that are on the market today, we have rooted out five key weaknesses that appear to apply to most of them. Once we had our list of weaknesses, we sought to corroborate these claims by verifying them against specs, price comparisons, and reports from trusted sources. We then explained these weaknesses, breaking down why they are tied to the design and how they can serve as a detriment to the rider. In this way, we hope to arm prospective buyers with as much information as possible when weighing the pros and cons of a purchase.
Marvel capped off Saturday evening’s Hall H presentations at San Diego Comic-Con, giving audiences a small taste of what’s next on the menu. And we mean small. Kevin Feige and cast members teased out some movies (no TV shows, today), and we’re breaking it down for you here.
Footage from Avengers: Doomsday was shown, with Doom commanding sentinels and a history lesson on the dynamic between the Fantastic Four and the doctor. But there were only two other major announcements, and nothing for X-Men, and no chart outlining Phase 6 or Phase 7.
Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider
Johnny Blaze is making his MCU debut with Ryan Gosling in the role, which has been rumored for some time among Marvel’s fandom. Shawn Levy will be directing the new movie for the MCU after his successful run with Deadpool & Wolverine. Could this eventually segue into Midnight Sons? Fingers crossed, my friends.
Agent Carter in Avengers: Doomsday
Hayley Atwell is now officially confirmed to be in Avengers: Doomsday as Agent Peggy Carter, who was first introduced in the MCU in Captain America: The First Avenger. She was in Hall H during Marvel’s presentation for the film.
Black Panther 3 coming in 2028
Feige pretended to exit the stage for the night but then walked back out with one more update: Black Panther 3 will arrive in Dec. 2028. Actor David Jonsson will play T’Challa Jr. in the film, which is directed by Ryan Coogler. Jonsson is best known for roles as Andy in Alien: Romulus, Peter in The Long Walk and as Gus Sackey in Industry.
Warner Bros. Discovery filed a lawsuit this week accusing Amazon of interference with contractual relations, breach of contract, and unfair competition.
As reported by Deadline, the lawsuit alleges Amazon has been “hurriedly seeking to pirate away a number of contracted employees,” including Pia Barlow, an HBO Max marketing executive who recently joined Amazon MGM Studios. Warner Bros. (whose pending acquisition by Paramount has been paused for at least a few months) said Barlow’s employment contract was “not set to expire until October 31, 2027.”
“In blatant disregard of established California law, Amazon has gone rogue by attempting to induce Plaintiffs’ employees with term employment agreements to breach those agreements with impunity, backed up with the ready assurance that Amazon will defend and indemnify them should they be held to account for their blatantly unlawful acts,” Warner Bros. said.
The company also accused Amazon of seeking to “tortiously induce another WBD employee to breach their term employment agreement, which was not set to expire until December 2027,” although that executive (believed to be HBO programming executive Francesca Orsi) ultimately stayed at Warner Bros.
Deadline noted that this lawsuit is likely to renew debates about whether term employment agreements are actually enforceable under California law.
Amazon MGM Studios declined to comment.
Both 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air laptops are on sale at B&H this week, with new markdowns slashing up to $200 off a variety of configurations and color options.
Each of the triple-digit MacBook Air discounts highlighted below also includes free 2-day shipping within the contiguous U.S. so you can begin using your new laptop right away.
Save up to $200 on M5 MacBook Airs
The models range from the 13-inch spec with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage to an upgraded 15-inch config with 24GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. You can also compare prices in our 13-inch M5 MacBook Air Price Guide and 15-inch MacBook Air Price Guide.
13-inch MacBook Air deals at B&H
- 13″ M5 (8C GPU, 16GB, 512GB, 70W Power Adapter; Silver, Midnight, or Sky Blue): $1,199 ($120 off)
- 13″ M5 (10C GPU, 16GB, 512GB, 40W Power Adapter, Midnight): $1,249 ($150 off)
- 13″ M5 (10C GPU, 16GB, 1TB, 70W Power Adapter, Midnight): $1,549 ($70 off)
- 13″ M5 (10C GPU, 24GB, 512GB, 40W Power Adapter, Silver): $1,349 ($150 off)
15-inch MacBook Air discounts
- 15″ M5 (10C GPU, 16GB, 512GB, 70W Power Adapter, Midnight): $1,349 ($170 off)
- 15″ M5 (10C GPU, 16GB, 1TB, 35W Dual USB-C Power Adapter, Midnight): $1,649 ($170 off)
- 15″ M5 (10C GPU, 24GB, 512GB, 40W Power Adapter, Midnight): $1,499 ($200 off)
- 15″ M5 (10C GPU, 24GB, 512GB, 35W Dual USB-C Power Adapter, Midnight): $1,599 ($120 off)
- 15″ M5 (10C GPU, 24GB, 1TB, 70W Power Adapter, Midnight): $1,849 ($170 off)
- 15″ M5 (10C GPU, 24GB, 1TB, 35W Dual USB-C Power Adapter, Midnight): $1,869 ($150 off)
Our roundup of the best MacBook Air deals is also home to discounts across new and closeout models.
A new, adult T’Challa is joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kevin Feige hit the stage for Marvel’s Hall H Comic-Con showing on Saturday and, toward the end, gave the audience an update on Black Panther 3. Director Ryan Coogler and actors Winston Duke and Letitia Wright were on hand to welcome David Jonsson to the MCU, who will play T’Challa’s son, T’Challa Jr.
Jonsson has appeared in films such as Alien: Romulus and The Long Walk. While no official title has been shared, Feige revealed that Black Panther 3 is due to hit theaters Dec. 15, 2028.
Coogler, who’s writing and directing the next installment of the series, has reportedly begun production. He helmed the first two Black Panther movies, which brought the late Chadwick Boseman to the screen as the royal hero. T’Challa Jr. appeared as a child at the end of Black Panther 2, and the character will clearly be aged up for the new movie.
It’s rumored that X-Men character Storm will be in the mix, who has a history with Wakanda (and Black Panther) in the comic books. With a standalone X-Men movie in the works and renewed enthusiasm for the mutants since the release of the animated X-Men ‘97 series, an interconnected storyline would make sense for the MCU. Also rumored to appear in the superhero film is Brother Voodoo, a sorcerer-superhero (like Doctor Strange) who also works with the dead.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (aka Black Panther 2) introduced Tenoch Huerta’s Namor and his underwater kingdom into the MCU, and he’s slated to surface in this year’s Avengers: Doomsday, along with the new Black Panther, Shuri (played by Wright).
TL;DR
China fines Trip.com $765 million for forcing hotel partners into exclusive deals and controlling their pricing
China’s market regulator fined Trip.com Group $765 million on Saturday after concluding that the country’s largest online travel platform abused its dominant market position. The State Administration for Market Regulation said Trip.com used its traffic allocation algorithms, platform rules and technology to restrict hotel operators from listing on competing services and to control the prices they could charge. The penalty, totaling roughly five billion yuan, includes confiscated gains, a separate fine and an order to refund hotel security deposits.
SAMR launched the investigation in January after receiving complaints that Trip.com was forcing hotel partners into exclusive arrangements and demanding they offer their lowest online rates only on its platform. The regulator found the company had engaged in these practices since 2020, leveraging its control of about 56 percent of China’s online travel market to pressure operators who depended on it for visibility and bookings. Trip.com said in a statement on its official WeChat account that it accepts the decision and will implement rectification measures.
The fine is the largest antitrust penalty SAMR has imposed on a single Chinese tech company since it fined Alibaba 18 billion yuan in 2021 for similar abuse of market dominance. That case, which forced Alibaba to abandon exclusive dealing arrangements with merchants, set the template for Beijing’s broader crackdown on platform monopolies. The Trip.com penalty signals that the regulator’s appetite for enforcement has not waned, even as Beijing has shifted its messaging toward calibrated oversight rather than blanket crackdowns.
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The case also reflects regulators’ concern that fierce competition among online travel platforms has been squeezing hotel operators’ margins and contributing to deflationary pressure in parts of the Chinese economy. Beijing has been rewriting its e-commerce law to bring platform companies under tighter domestic oversight, with draft amendments published earlier this month proposing expanded regulatory tools for overseeing algorithms, traffic rules and pricing practices. Trip.com’s penalty lands squarely within that framework.
Founded in 1999, Trip.com operates through brands including Ctrip and Skyscanner and has grown into the world’s largest online booking platform by transaction volume. Its dominance in China gave it leverage to dictate terms to hotel partners, but that same market power made it a regulatory target as Beijing moved to curb what it views as monopolistic behaviour across its technology sector. The company has been ordered to undertake a comprehensive rectification plan, though the specifics of those changes have not yet been disclosed.
The US semiconductor and computing giant declared a revenue of $16.1bn for the period.
Intel has published markedly strong financial results for the second quarter of 2026 that exceeded financial analysts’ expectations.
The US semiconductor and computing giant declared a revenue of $16.1bn for the period, up by 25pc from $12.9bn in Q2 2025 and more than the anticipated ceiling of $14.8bn declared at the end of the first quarter of 2026.
“AI is driving unprecedented demand for compute, and as we continue to execute, Intel is well-positioned to capture sustainable growth across our CPU franchise, ASICs, advanced packaging and vast wafer foundry network,” said Lip-Bu Tan, Intel’s CEO.
“Our Q2 results represent our strongest revenue growth in more than 15 years, enabled by greater speed, accountability and customer focus.”
Gross margin grew to around 40pc from around 28pc year-on-year, while Intel generated $7bn in cash from operations during the recent quarter, it said.
Intel’s Foundry revenue for Q2 was up 31pc year-on-year to $5.8bn; its Client Computing and Physical AI Group grew by 13pc to $8.9bn; and the division for data centres and AI was up 59pc to $6.3bn.
“AI-driven compute continues to strengthen, and to support expected growth this year and next across products and foundry, we are meaningfully increasing our investments in equipment, clean room space and substrates,” said Dave Zinsner, Intel’s CFO.
The company anticipates revenue in the third quarter of 2026 to hit between $15.8bn and $16.8bn, and projects a gross margin of 41pc.
The company’s share price increased by up to 4pc during trading hours yesterday following publication of its financial results.
Intel is estimated to have reduced its headcount by more than 35,000 employees since 2024, with major cuts announced in both 2024 and 2025.
Earlier this month, the company announced a major investment in its Kildare, Ireland facility, where Intel intends to spend €5bn on the Leixlip campus.
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Mojave Air and Space Port sits in the high desert where the air stays dry and the runways stretch long enough for machines that refuse ordinary limits. On a recent morning there, a prototype Porsche Cayenne Turbo Electric rolled into position under the shadow of Stratolaunch’s Roc. Six jet engines sat silent for the moment. The SUV waited between the twin fuselages of an aircraft whose wings span 385 feet.
Roc is designed to carry enormous payloads into the sky for hypersonic experiments and spacecraft launches. Even when empty, with its six Pratt & Whitney engines cranking out a staggering 340,500 pounds of thrust, the plane can take off at a maximum weight of 1.3 million pounds, which is enormous when compared to modern airliners. Porsche’s new Cayenne has just arrived with a pair of electric motors that provide 1,139 horsepower and 1,500 Nm of torque, an outstanding spec sheet. It takes 2.4 seconds to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph, which is incredible. When things get hairy, the Cayenne has active aerodynamics and, as an option, very heavy-duty carbon-ceramic brakes ready to bail it out.
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- 1 PORSCHE DRIVER MINIFIGURE – Kids can place the driver minifigure with helmet and red Porsche Track Day Experience outfit behind the wheel to stage…
Stratolaunch’s engineers had been monitoring the airflow near Roc. During takeoff and landing, a strange small pocket of still air emerges directly behind the main landing gear and just ahead of the tail, and this bubble follows the plane. In principle, a car that was both fast and stable enough could simply sit in the center of this bubble and remain there. That concept evolved into a hunch, which led to a strategy. Straotlaunch had a volunteer driver lined up, none other than former Porsche factory driver Patrick Long. He was joined by crew chiefs Shauntel Williams and John McKinney, who were keeping radio contact with the flight deck crew, as well as Orlando Bloom and a lucky automotive journalist Mat Watson.
The first run began with Long carefully positioning the Cayenne in just the perfect area, applying almost little throttle at all. Roc’s engines burst into life. At roughly 100 mph, he put the Cayenne into boost mode and flew after the plane, matching its stride for stride. The SUV remained right beneath the plane’s gear as it pulled away, and it was apparent as day that the vehicle had the stability to endure the turbulence when the engines lowered. Long later described how, when the engines began to descend after takeoff, he felt a great jolt and the car continued to go as if nothing had happened. He glanced down at the speedometer, and holy moly, the needle was over 170 before he yanked his foot off the throttle and slapped on the carbon-ceramic brakes to reduce the speed before the runway ended.
Landing, on the other hand, is a completely other story since time is everything. Roc is massive, making visual cues scarce, so Long had to merge onto the runway at precisely the exact moment, skillfully maneuvering between the plane’s fuselage such that the automobile appeared under the gear just as the plane touched down. The Stratolaunch crew commanders were right there in the cabin, keeping Long on track with continuous radio calls. The pattern repeated itself over two takeoffs and landings, with all four landings going off as planned. The Cayenne utilized only 13 percent of its battery charge the entire time.
Patrick Long described it as one of the most focused moments he’d ever had in a car. He trusted the data, the automobile, and the pilots. And it appears that the trust paid off, since Jonathan Bearce, the plane’s principal test pilot, was also impressed. From the cockpit, all he could see was a Cayenne-sized black hole, but the footage subsequently revealed it was spot on. Bearce even got to drive the thing himself later on, and he stated it accelerated so quickly that it surprised him. Overall, it was an eye-opening exercise in demonstrating the importance of precision over raw speed.
The idea that cancer could behave like a contagious disease may seem absurd; in humans, cancer cannot be transmitted from one person to another. Yet nature is still full of surprises. In exceptional cases, cancer cells themselves can pass from one individual to another and continue to multiply in a new host. This rare phenomenon has been detected in animals such as dogs, Tasmanian devils, and some species of mollusks, and it seems we can add one more to that exclusive club: catfish.
An international team of researchers has identified a transmissible melanoma in the brown catfish (Ameiurus nebulosus)—the first documented case in fish and also the first recorded in a freshwater ecosystem. Their findings were reported this month in the journal Nature.
An Impossible Pattern
The story began in 2012, when fishermen and biologists detected an unusually high number of catfish with black lesions in Lake Memphremagog, a body of water straddling Vermont and Quebec. Previous studies revealed that these spots were malignant melanomas, and that between 23 percent and 37 percent of the specimens examined had these tumors—an unusually high incidence for this species.
“That was surprising,” said Julie Dragon, a researcher at the University of Vermont and co-lead author of the study. “We wanted to know how a bottom-dwelling fish was getting a cancer we associate with exposure to too much sunlight.”
Initially, it was thought that the cause might be some toxic substance or a pathogen linked to pollution. One suspicion was that the flooding caused by Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 had degraded water quality by washing environmental pollutants into the lake. There were also concerns about the health of the lake, which supplies drinking water to more than 175,000 people. However, initial genetic analyses began to point in an unexpected direction.
It was then that the researchers wondered whether the tumors were descended from a single original cancer that had learned to spread among individual fish, rather than arising independently in each fish.
To test this unusual hypothesis, the team sequenced the complete genomes of tumors and healthy tissues from affected fish, and compared the data with that from healthy specimens from different populations.
The results indicated that the tumor cells from different fish were much more closely related to one another than to the animals in which they developed. In other words, the tumors shared their own genetic identity, distinct from that of their hosts. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of genetic variants appeared repeatedly in the tumors but were absent from the healthy tissues of the same fish.
Such a pattern would be virtually impossible if each melanoma had arisen independently. By way of comparison, the researchers analyzed hundreds of human melanomas and found that nearly all of their mutations were unique to each patient. In contrast, most of the mutations present in the tumors of these fish were shared by numerous individuals—a hallmark of a transmissible clonal cancer.
The big picture: AMD had a busy week, announcing the Ryzen 7 7700X3D CPU for gaming PCs and the Epyc Venice lineup for agentic AI workloads in data centers and high-end workstations. The company also launched the Helios rack-scale AI system at its Advancing AI 2026 event in San Francisco and previewed its next-generation Zen 7 and Zen 8 CPU architectures.
In her keynote speech, AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed that Zen 7 will debut in 2028 with the 7th-generation Epyc “Florence” processors for enterprise and AI data centers. The new core architecture will be divided into classic (Zen 7) and compute-optimized (Zen 7c) versions, with both expected to be manufactured on TSMC’s cutting-edge A16 or A14 process node.
AMD did not reveal any architectural details about Zen 7, but confirmed that Epyc Florence will include both Zen 7 and Zen 7c cores. The Florence processors will also be the first processors in AMD’s portfolio to support the next iterations of MRDIMM and LPDDR memory standards, as well as ACE AI Compute Extensions to accelerate matrix multiplication and AI workloads across the x86 ecosystem.
Epyc Florence will cover the existing SP7 and SP8 platforms, with the SP7 chips delivering high-core-count and flagship performance, while the SP8 versions will offer optimized performance with a focus on value. Both versions will power AMD’s next-gen AI rack solution, “Ferrara,” which will be optimized for high-performance AI host nodes.
Moving beyond Zen 7, AMD added that it has started work on its Zen 8 core architecture, which will debut in 2030 with the company’s 8th-generation Epyc chips, codenamed “Ravenna.” The company did not reveal anything else about either Zen 8 or Epyc Ravenna, including architectural details, process node, core count, or memory support.
Team Red also unveiled the Instinct MI455X AI accelerator with CDNA 5 compute architecture and confirmed that the CDNA 6-based MI500 will debut in 2027, followed by the MI600 in 2028. The company has yet to confirm the CDNA generation, memory configurations, and compute specifications for the MI600.
Moving to the Helios AI rack roadmap, the first-generation models are set to launch this year, powered by Epyc Venice CPUs and the new MI455X accelerator. Helios 500 is slated to arrive in 2027 with Epyc Verano CPUs and Instinct MI500 GPUs, followed by Helios 600 in 2028, powered by Epyc Ferrara and Instinct MI600.
Earlier this week, AMD launched its latest 3D V-Cache CPU, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D. Aimed at gamers on a budget, the new processor comes with 8 Zen 4 cores, 16 threads, and 96MB of L3 cache. The company also unveiled the Zen 6-based Epyc Venice CPUs and revealed key details about its Arm-based Vera CPU, designed specifically for agentic AI workloads in data centers.
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