I am sitting in the sweltering Nevada heat watching a man struggle to lift a bar over his head. If the man manages to do it, he will win $250,000.

The man is Boady Santavy — a two-time Olympic weight-lifting contestant from Canada — and he has muscles that look culled from the Marvel Cinematic Universe: massive, cartoonish arms that might as well belong to a superhero rather than a real human.

Santavy is attempting to beat the world record for the men’s snatch — a lift of 183 kilograms, or approximately 403 pounds. After a tortured few seconds, Santavy drops the bar — an official “no lift” — and, with a look of animated dismay on his face, hobbles away, visibly cursing.

Santavy is one of a small horde of 42 athletic contestants — weight lifters, swimmers, and track runners — that have gathered in Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend to compete in the Enhanced Games, a unique (and, by now, quite notorious) athletic competition in which almost all of the participating athletes are on performance enhancing drugs.

Broadly derided by critics as the “steroid Olympics,” the games have taken the deeply unprecedented step of juicing many of their athletes to the gills — anabolics, testosterone, peptides, human growth hormones, and more are all in circulation. All of that chemical enhancement has taken place under the watchful eye of a team of medical professionals. Indeed, the competitors — a hodgepodge of athletes from different ages, skill levels, and backgrounds — spent 12 weeks in the United Arab Emirates at an elite compound, where they trained for the weekend’s event while working closely with doctors who tailored their “protocols” — or drug cocktails — to their individual needs.

The athletes are also being paid “appearance fees” just to participate in the contest and, like Santavy, any competitor who happens to break a world record or place first during their competitive feats will be gifted extra cash — up to $1 million in the case of the 100 meter sprint and 50 meter freestyle.

In other words: Enhanced has taken the rulebook for professional athletic competition and aggressively spiraled it out the window.

Why am I, a technology journalist, covering this event?

Odd as it might seem for a place associated with weak-limbed nerds, Silicon Valley is largely to blame for Enhanced. Indeed, the bizarre spectacle is the work of a former startup that was founded by veterans of crypto, AI, and biotech firms, and that has been backed by the likes of mega-investor Peter Thiel and former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan. The event is also at the forefront of a growing industry that Silicon Valley has embraced with open arms — that of human enhancement, in which injectable drugs and ingestible supplements serve as a source of both physical empowerment and good business.

Traditional athletic health organizations, of course, hate it. The World Anti-Doping Agency — the regulatory body for the Olympics — has called the Enhanced Games “dangerous,” and Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, describes it as a “clown show that puts profit over people.”

Steroids have long been viewed warily by the international health community, and even federally approved consumer drugs have stirred some concern among health professionals.

However, Enhanced’s organizers argue that they are actually the good guys — that they are trying to fix a persistent bug in organized sports that has existed since forever. That bug is that a whole lot of athletes are already doping — they’re just doing it secretly. The secrecy increases risk, as there may be limited medical oversight of how the athletes are using them. Conversely, in the Enhanced version of sport, athletes self-admittedly do the drugs under the careful supervision of a team of medical professionals.

If Enhanced were merely trying to improve sports safety, that would be one thing. But the truth is that it isn’t just an athletic competition — it’s also a business. The games are the work of Enhanced Group, Inc., a newly public company that enjoyed an IPO earlier this month at a $1.2 billion valuation. Enhanced sells personalized health treatments, including peptides, GLP-1s for weight loss, testosterone injections, and other physically “enhancing” drugs. The company also recently partnered with an AI company, Rezolve Ai, to launch a digital telehealth platform.

Enhanced wants to take what it’s done in Vegas and transform it into a global business: a distribution network for consumers looking to bulk up and make themselves more youthful. The drugs that Enhanced sells have been cleared by the FDA, but there is some concern that by normalizing steroid use, the company could have a trickle-down effect on the wider culture, leading some consumers (notably young ones) to seek less regulated, more dangerous compounds that could end up having disastrous results. This concern hangs over Enhanced’s athletic competition, which has largely been read as a big advertisement for its own business — as well as the peptide industry itself.

One nation, under peptides

I am one of some 200 journalists from around the world who touch down in Vegas two days prior to the games. Enhanced, which provides us with a dedicated workspace, regular meals, and press time with athletes and Enhanced executives, is exceedingly nice to us but one can’t escape the nagging suspicion that it’s because we are an integral part of their business plan. As the skeptical oglers of this Barnum & Bailey-esque curiosity, our job is to report back to the masses, who will then know of its existence. In other words, we are free marketing for Enhanced’s business.

That business is part of an industry that is due for a gold-rush-like boom later this year, should a certain deregulatory deliverance occur.

In February, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on The Joe Rogan Experience and said he was a “big fan” of peptides. Kennedy (who, himself, can look enhanced at times) also implied that he planned to encourage the FDA to make some peptides more accessible to the public. Kennedy appears to have made good on that promise because, in July, the FDA will convene a pharmaceutical advisory committee that considers whether restrictions on certain previously banned peptides will be loosened.

Since then, the peptide industry has stood at a bizarre crossroads, in which some startups are reportedly conjuring products based on chemicals that currently reside in a legal “gray” zone, in the hopes of being first-to-market if and when the government eases up on them. Others are sticking to only FDA-approved products. A hot spot of this frenzy has been Silicon Valley, where techies are both using and investing in peptides with mutually aggressive gusto. Companies like Superpower, an AI longevity startup that sells FDA-approved peptides, and Noho Labs, a peptide startup backed by Elad Gil, have risen in prominence, while elite clubs like the AGI House have begun hosting peptide injecting “parties” — as personal use among the valley’s elite booms.

But peptides aren’t just gaining steam in the Bay Area; they’re also seeing a groundswell of use throughout the country, as fitness culture sees an aggressive upswing. Recent reports show that teens and twenty-somethings are turning to peptides to “looksmax” — the trendy new term that denotes any extreme effort to beautify one’s self — while the gym is increasingly seen as one of the key hubs of cultural life for young people. This country-wide push for self-improvement has been fueled by a social media landscape that champions the superficial. The progenitor of “looksmaxxing,” the 20-year-old online influencer “Clavicular,” has been a prominent, not to mention controversial, figure in the popularization of peptides. Yet he is only one in a sea of online voices, including podcasters like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman, who have recently promoted or platformed the topic.

This is all about “health,” right?

Peptide producers — including the executives at Enhanced — have sworn that their primary concern is consumer “health.” At the same time, they don’t seem to mind admitting that they’re also interested in money.

Maximilian Martin, the 29-year-old CEO and co-founder of Enhanced, is a calm defender of his company’s unconventional practices. Martin, who previously founded a bitcoin mining company and is always impeccably dressed in a suit and has an affable salesman’s smile, meets with journalists for a press conference on Saturday, where he answers questions with an even-keeled good nature, speaking soberly about how his company plans to monetize the creation of a new generation of chemically-altered mutants.

Appropriately, X-Men comes up.

“People have been using performance enhancements for a long time. If you look at, for example, Hollywood, and you look at Marvel superheroes, they’re all enhanced,” Martin offers. “Like Hugh Jackman doesn’t look like he looks at his age because he has such a clean diet and sleeps eight hours a night, right? So that market is already there. The peptide market in the U.S. today is already 85 million people. Most of that market is served by unsupervised, unregulated substances that people are taking. What we’re doing is we’re entering that market with a pathway for people to get to those benefits that they’re looking for in a safe and medically supervised way.”

Christian Angermayer, Enhanced’s billionaire co-founder and executive chairman, is more succinct. “I’m a capitalist,” he tells journalists bluntly. He doesn’t see a disconnect between profits and health. “There is no reason why something that is good should not also be a business.”

Let the games begin

May 24th, the actual day of the games, is a sweltering blur of events — all of which take place inside a miraculous $50 million open-air stadium that has been constructed in a matter of weeks for the express purpose of hosting the games. The complex houses a track, swimming pools, and an expansive pavilion for the weightlifters. Surrounding risers are filled with an audience that cheers enthusiastically despite the hot sun.

Yet while the scene may superficially call to mind the Olympics, the vibe is much less a serious sporting event than it is an uncomfortable cocktail of America’s Got Talent, WWE, and Gladiator. Beautiful influencers fill the stands in youthful, colorful herds, and an announcer narrates the day’s events with a sonorous boom that makes it feel vaguely like we’re all sitting court side at WrestleMania. Later in the evening, The Killers — a staple of Vegas entertainment culture — will play a brief concert to close out the games.

The athletes, meanwhile, stalk the grounds like mythical titans, their bulking, unreal muscles glistening in the sunlight.

Martin is seen throughout the day, walking to and fro in his impeccable suit. This suit becomes progressively more wet throughout the evening, as he keeps rushing down to the pool to hug the swimmers who win their races. Angermayer glides about the event with a breezy energy, a tranquil smile affixed to his face. He drops by the press tent briefly to glad-hand.

Other staples of the tech industry — like Bryan Johnson, the mega-wealthy biohacker who plans to live forever — are also involved. Despite no known professional athletic achievements, Johnson spends the night commentating on the spectacle in a Charles-Barkley-esque, retired athlete kind of way. Later he and his girlfriend (whose vagina Johnson regularly tweets about) are seen walking past the media tent; Johnson is dressed in a bizarre outfit that makes him look a little bit like the Sleepytime Bear from Celestial Seasonings.

The actual competitions are thrilling enough — and, in general, there seem to be a couple categories of athletes that have come to compete.

There are people like James Magnussen, a retired swimmer from Australia who has won Olympic medals in the past and sees the games as an opportunity to get back in on the action. Magnussen, an image of whose massive body spread virally throughout the web earlier this year, has spoken supportively of the peptide industry, and once said that the combination of peptides and testosterone made him feel like he was “18 again.” He will fail to break any records, however, and places last in two races.

Then there are people like Hafthor “Thor” Bjornsson — a massive Nordic body builder and competitive weight-lifter who has self-admittedly done a lot of steroids in the past and sees this competition as an opportunity to do them under closer, safer supervision.

Bjornsson is recognizable to many because he starred in Game of Thrones as Ser Gregor Clegane, the brutal knight who does the dirty work of the Lannister family and whose go-to fight move is to crush his opponents’ skulls with his bare hands. (On press day, a female journalist asks Bjornsson if he will crush her skull, and he politely obliges with a pantomimed head combustion.) During the games, Bjornsson thrillingly attempts a world record deadlift of 1,135.4 pounds, but ultimately fails to muster the strength.

Finally, there are a few competitors like American swimmer Hunter Armstrong, who are abstaining from any supplemental intake altogether. Why is Armstrong even competing? It’s pretty simple: the money, Armstrong tells journalists. That’s the answer that a lot of athletes have given for their participation, in fact. Armstrong has Olympic ambitions and wants to keep himself in the running by not tainting his record. He also has a personal aversion to doping.

“The Olympic movement is something that is very important to me,” Armstrong tells the journalists. “Outside of personal reasons, if I were to go into some kind of protocol I would lose that opportunity.”

Armstrong is one of several competitors who will win their races (in the swimmer’s case, the 50-meter backstroke) despite not being “enhanced.”

The day’s events unfold at a steady pace and, despite organizers’ promise of a titanic extravaganza of unlocked human potential, the event, while entertaining, largely pales in comparison to the Olympics or even, say, a really thrilling football game. The whole thing ends on a weirdly convenient high-point: the competition’s last race of the night — the men’s 50-meter swimming freestyle — culminates with Enhanced’s first and only world-record. Kristian Gkolomeev, a hulking colossus from Greece (he is six feet, eight inches tall), cuts across the pool at a breakneck 20.81 seconds, besting the previous record by 0.07 seconds. The entire crowd erupts in cheers and the venue’s lights blare red in a gameshow-style spasm of celebration. The other swimmers pump their fists in the air victoriously, and Martin again rushes the field in his suit, intent on hugging the dripping Gkolomeev.

The future is enhanced?

The critics of the Enhanced Games say it isn’t really about health, it’s about money. Yet it’s difficult to escape the sense that the games are also about something else, which is vanity — both that of America and the event’s organizers. America has always been the country where fitness culture extends beyond health into the realm of self-aggrandizement, and the Enhanced Games — a showy pageant embodying that principle — fits right in with the next big era of American self-regard. After all, the location of the event — the nation’s hedonism-fueled “Sin City” — hardly screams “health.” Las Vegas is the locale of spectacle and consumption — of barely-remembered nights in which revelers live for the moment, not the long-term. The organizers could have set the games in the symbolically purifying environs of the Swiss countryside or Joshua Tree, but instead they chose to set it in a place where people commonly risk their futures over a game of cards for a fleeting chance at glory.

Similarly, injecting yourself with drugs to make your muscles big doesn’t necessarily seem to be about long-term wellness as much as it’s about looking good in the moment — tomorrow’s potential health consequences be damned.

The glory for the event’s organizers, meanwhile, resides in their ability to usher in a new industry, commemorating it — as they have — with an extravagant ritual that, in their own words, heralds future “scientific breakthroughs” and “human advancement” (not to mention revenue). The gamble for them is on whether this industry does or does not blossom in the coming months, but like the consumers of their supplements, they appear to be living in the moment.

One place where limited glory is felt is the press corps towards the end of Enhanced’s three-day extravaganza. Around midnight, when the games are finally over and the crowd is dispersing, our hot and tired cohort retreats blearily to the media center — a florescent-lit workroom in the nearby Resorts World hotel. As I’m readying to leave, I make a pitstop to the bathroom and, after some necessary relief, turn a corner and run smack into Martin. He appears to be in a brand new suit (or perhaps the one he’s been wearing has simply dried), and he is admiring it in the bathroom mirror. He is undoubtedly preparing for the late-night press conference that’s scheduled to occur soon.

Having not actually spoken to him yet, I am at a bit of a conversational loss. What sort of patter can two men who are essentially strangers offer one another in a public bathroom late at night? How can I sum up the last 72 hours? “Congratulations,” my tired brain lands on, as I head for the door.

“Thank you,” he says, nodding briefly, then turns back to the mirror.

“We trained the bots. We did the grind. Now we’re being left behind,” chanted a horde of contract workers who gathered outside Meta’s offices in Dublin, Ireland, on Friday afternoon. Waving flags, brandishing signs, and armed with whistles and vuvuzelas, they were out to protest a round of planned layoffs.

The workers are employed by Dublin-based company Covalen, which handles content moderation and data labeling services that help Meta to fine-tune its AI products. In April, Covalen told 700 employees that their jobs were at risk, citing “reduced demand,” WIRED reported.

A large swath of the affected workers won’t receive any severance because they’ve been employed for less than two years. The rest are being offered the minimum payout required under local labor laws—two weeks’ pay for every year of employment—according to the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU), whose members include Covalen employees.

“We’re just getting the crumbs here,” Aadel Obaid, a team manager at Covalen who is part of the planned layoffs, tells WIRED. “Give us a little bit of the pie.”

Photograph: Joel Khalili

To try to compel Covalen into revising the severance package, workers voted to strike outside the company’s corporate office, before marching to Meta’s nearby European headquarters. According to John Bohan, an organizer at the CWU, Meta could use its leverage as an anchor client to pressure Covalen into offering its employees an enhanced severance package. The workers are asking for double what’s currently being offered—and at least some form of payment for workers who don’t meet the two-year threshold.

The company could also release Covalen workers from a “cooldown period” preventing them from working on another Meta account for six months after being laid off, Bohan says. (Meta previously described the cooldown period to WIRED as an industry standard.)

At 1 pm local time on Friday, the striking workers began to gather outside Covalen’s corporate headquarters, a red-brick office building on an otherwise largely residential street in the heart of Dublin. The protests began with a wall of sound: The workers beat drums, booed, whistled, shouted, and catcalled. Then came a volley of call-and-response chants led by a worker with a megaphone. The building’s security guard watched, bemused, from inside the lobby, hands on his hips.

Two hours later, the group—now more than 150 people—began to march down the center of the mile-long stretch of road to Meta’s campus, slowing the trailing traffic to a crawl. Dubliners enjoying the early onset of summer stopped to gawp; some applauded. When the protesters arrived at Meta’s complex, two security guards stood with crossed arms, blocking the way. The group set up at the gates and began another round of chants: “We scrub the feed. We take the pain. Meta profits from our strain.”

The fight over who makes the world’s chips is increasingly a fight over the parts of a chip nobody photographs. India has just landed one of them.

Intel and 3D Glass Solutions have signed an agreement to build a roughly $3.3 billion substrate-manufacturing plant in the eastern state of Odisha, the government announced on Friday.

The memorandum of understanding, signed between the Odisha government, Intel Corporation and 3DGS Inc., covers an advanced-packaging glass-core substrate facility in the Bhubaneswar-Khurda region, to be built over five to six years.

India’s electronics and IT minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, framed it as one of the largest high-technology manufacturing commitments the country has secured.

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Substrates are the unglamorous layer that makes modern chips work. They are the engineered base a processor is mounted on, routing power and signals between the silicon and the circuit board, and as chipmakers hit the limits of shrinking transistors, the packaging around the silicon has become where much of the performance gain now lives.

Glass-core substrates, the technology at the centre of this plant, are seen as a leap over today’s organic materials, offering tighter, faster interconnections for the densest designs.

The plant’s output targets reflect that ambition. According to the government, it is expected to produce around 70,000 glass substrates a year, some 50 million assembled units, and close to 13,000 advanced 3D heterogeneous-integration modules, the stacked, multi-die packages that pack several chips into one.

It is also expected to create more than 1,800 direct high-skilled jobs, with wider indirect employment around it.

The deal does not stand alone. It was approved under the India Semiconductor Mission, the programme through which New Delhi has pledged billions in subsidies to pull chip manufacturing onshore, and the official project cost is put at about ₹1,943 crore, with central fiscal support of roughly ₹799 crore and additional state backing.

The subsidy structure is the mechanism: India is buying its way into a supply chain it has historically had to import.

For Intel, the move is a smaller, sharper bet than a full fabrication plant, and a notable one given the company’s wider retrenchment.

Backing a substrate facility lets it plant a manufacturing flag in a fast-growing market and in a part of the stack, advanced packaging, where it has staked much of its technological case, without the tens of billions a leading-edge fab would demand.

The strategic logic is the same one driving chip policy from Brussels to Washington. The EU’s Chips Act and the US CHIPS Act are both attempts to localise a supply chain that the pandemic and geopolitics exposed as dangerously concentrated, and India is now running the same playbook from further behind.

An MoU is a starting line, not a finished plant, and the five-to-six-year horizon leaves room for the usual slippage. But the direction is unmistakable: the map of where chips, and the things chips sit on, get made is being redrawn, and Odisha has just been added to it.

Photo credit: Indecent Vehicles
Polish builder Indecent Vehicles has started taking orders for a conversion that gives the 991-generation Porsche 911 a shooting brake body. The work adds roughly $350,000 to the price of a donor car and sits on top of the company’s existing widebody package.

Within the 991.1 and 991.2 lines, you can choose from the Turbo, Turbo S, or GT2 RS versions. This first one began life as a 991.2 Turbo and featured a familiar twin-turbo 3.8-liter flat-six engine capable of producing 533 horsepower. Unless the owner specifically wants otherwise, power and engine layout remain unchanged.

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The real job begins for the body as Indecent stretches the roofline to position it further back. In this case, they replace the conventional vented engine cover with a custom hatch that also serves as a tailgate and rear fender widening to complement the rest of the widebody treatment. The resulting car appears quite elegant, with a longer and more usable profile that is reminiscent of a smaller Panamera Sport Turismo while maintaining all of the proper 911 proportions. The good news is that rear passengers now have additional headroom, and storage space behind the seats has increased, allowing you to fit gear, luggage, or even a dog without sacrificing any of the fundamental 911 driving experience. Renders show the car looking slick in bright orange paint, with aftermarket wheels and a double rear spoiler that emphasizes the new design.

Designing the tailgate was a difficult task since it had to cope with airflow; after all, the flat-six engine is right back there, so Indecent had to come up with a new design that addressed the cooling needs that the original vented panel handled. With extensive experience with body mods on 991s, Indecent was well-positioned to resolve the issue while maintaining structural integrity and panel fit.

Each additional build following the prototype will take up to four months to complete. Indecent widebody projects already replace or mold practically all of the body panels save the front hood, top, and doors, thus the shooting brake conversion fits seamlessly into an established workflow. Of course, complete personalization is always a possibility. Owners can still choose from a variety of suspension, wheel, brake, and interior trim improvements, as well as power increases, all provided by the same crew.

Every finished car has its own unique serial number, and what this essentially means is taking that method one step further into a body design that many 911 owners have desired for years but have been unable to obtain from the manufacturer. The prototype is anticipated to be unveiled in public sometime next year, after which anyone with a convenient donor car and a hefty budget can place an order for their own.
[Source]

Samsung Electronics and LG Uplus signed a memorandum of understanding on 27 May to jointly develop Integrated Sensing and Communication, or ISAC, a technology that would allow mobile network base stations to double as environmental sensors. The agreement was signed at LG Science Park in Magok, Seoul, with Samsung Research, the advanced R&D division within Samsung’s Device eXperience unit, leading the development effort.

ISAC works by analysing wireless signals as they reflect off nearby objects, extracting information about an object’s speed, distance, and direction of movement. In practical terms, it means a cell tower could detect a drone, track a vehicle, or monitor foot traffic without any dedicated sensing hardware. The technology uses the same signals that already carry voice and data, turning existing communications infrastructure into a sensing platform.

Why it matters

Environmental sensing today relies on dedicated equipment. LiDAR systems use laser light to measure distance, while radar uses radio waves. Both require separate hardware that must be installed, powered, and maintained independently of the communications network. ISAC eliminates that requirement by piggybacking sensing on the wireless infrastructure that mobile operators have already built.

The International Telecommunication Union’s Radiocommunication Sector, which sets the global framework for mobile standards, has designated ISAC as one of six usage scenarios for IMT-2030, the formal name for 6G. It sits alongside immersive communication, hyper-reliable low-latency communication, massive communication, ubiquitous connectivity, and AI-integrated communication. The inclusion signals that 6G networks are being designed from the outset to sense the physical world, not just move data through it.

What they will test

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The collaboration will initially focus on human detection for safety applications and on improving network operational efficiency. The two companies plan to validate ISAC performance on LG Uplus’s existing 5G networks first, then move to the 7 GHz band, a candidate frequency for 6G that offers a balance between the wide coverage of lower bands and the high bandwidth of millimetre-wave spectrum.

Over time the partnership will combine ISAC-generated wireless data, including location, speed, and density information, with camera imagery to improve detection accuracy. That work will involve developing multimodal AI models that integrate and analyse diverse forms of sensing data. Samsung Research will handle core ISAC and AI technology development, while LG Uplus will provide data and field-testing infrastructure from its commercial network.

The spectrum race behind 6G

The 7 GHz band is increasingly described as the “golden band” for 6G because it offers enough bandwidth for high-speed data while still propagating far enough for practical coverage. South Korea is actively exploring the 7.125 to 8.4 GHz range as a primary 6G candidate. The World Radiocommunication Conference in 2023 identified portions of the 6.425 to 7.125 GHz band for mobile use in several regions, and the 7.125 to 8.4 GHz range is on the agenda for WRC-27.

In the United States, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration must complete its study of the 7.125 to 7.4 GHz band by the end of 2026 before it can be opened to commercial wireless. Europe is pursuing the upper 6 GHz range. The allocation decisions at WRC-27 will largely determine which countries have the spectrum to deploy 6G at scale and which do not. For South Korea, whose economy is deeply exposed to shifts in global tech supply chains, securing early 6G spectrum and standards influence is a strategic priority.

Samsung’s 6G positioning

Samsung has been building its 6G credentials methodically. The company published a 6G white paper outlining its vision for AI-native and sustainable communications, demonstrated 6G technologies alongside global partners at the Silicon Valley Future Wireless Summit in November 2025, and showcased AI-RAN capabilities at Mobile World Congress in March 2026. The ISAC collaboration with LG Uplus extends that work from lab demonstrations to field validation on a live commercial network.

The partnership pairs Samsung’s research capabilities with LG Uplus’s operational infrastructure, a combination that matters because ISAC performance in controlled environments may differ significantly from real-world networks with interference, building reflections, and variable traffic loads. Samsung’s broader ambitions in AI and semiconductor manufacturing give it a vertically integrated stake in 6G infrastructure that few competitors can match.

Commercial 6G deployment is not expected until the early 2030s, and ISAC will need to clear both technical and regulatory hurdles before it replaces dedicated sensing equipment at scale. But the technology represents a genuine shift in what a wireless network can do, and Samsung and LG Uplus are now testing whether the physics holds up outside the lab.

The Detroit Apple Developer Academy’s fifth year is underway, with the next generation of iPhone developers joining a program whose expense and success have been questioned.

The only developer academy of its kind in North America, the developer academy is a collaboration between Apple, Michigan State University, and the Gilbert Family Foundation. It offers a range of free programs, including the option for a full nine-month learning experience.

The Detroit academy is just one of 19 around the world. All of them help students learn how to design and create their apps, with an eye on turning them into full-fledged businesses.

In a newsroom post announcing the fifth commencement, Apple notes that more than 70% of the people who start the free academy go on to complete the program.

A history of (some) success

Apple talks a big game, but the results speak for themselves. Saamer Mansoor was part of the academy’s original cohort as the world continued to get to grips with the COVID pandemic. After he and his teammates realized they all knew someone with hearing difficulties, they set about creating BeAware Deaf Assistant.

Using Apple’s Neural Engine to handle real-time transcription and translation, the app became a hit. It’s now been translated into 25 spoken languages and is used by institutions including the George Washington University.

Mansoor wasn’t a one-off, either. Courey Jiminez is a 2026 academy graduate and Swift Student Challenge winner who credits the academy with teaching her the skills she needed.

“I had never heard of challenge-based learning prior to coming here. It taught me to dig deeper into the research and to be OK with pivoting if my idea shifts along the way,” the Detroit native noted.

Now, Jiminez is in project management, supporting coders and designers while managing the overall vision of the app being worked on.

If you’re keen to learn more and perhaps get involved with an Apple Developer Academy near you, Apple’s dedicated website is a good place to start.

Question marks

However, its academies aren’t without their detractors. The Detroit academy in particular has come under fire. Huge costs and questions around its ability to set students up for a job in the future left some wondering whether it’s worth the expense.

For Apple’s part, the academies are a key aspect of its continued success. They may be free to students, but Apple knows that teaching them to build apps for its platforms is good business sense for the future of those platforms.

As for the students, Apple is quick to tout its wins, but some have questioned whether it is the outright success it’s claimed to be.

from the fighting-works dept

It was just a week or so ago that we were talking about the absurd situation in Knox County, Tennessee, where local government used Tennessee’s book-banning laws to remove the book Roots from school libraries. Yes, this is the book by Alex Haley that spawned the 1970s miniseries of the same name and served as a cultural touchpoint for the understanding of American history and race relations across the country. Haley lived in Knox County himself. He even has a bronze statue placed in his honor in Morningside Park in Knoxville. Yet the book that earned him that statue was being banned in public schools.

The backlash to this occurring was swift and severe. It came from both local politicians and from the public around the country. The purity of just how bad and wrong this was hit a nerve. And, now, the county has caved to that pressure and have immediately reinstated Roots back onto public school bookshelves.

Knox County Schools Superintendent Jon Rysewyk said the district will return the 1976 novel to school library shelves, walking back a decision that had added Roots to a growing list of banned books and ignited debate about race, history and the reach of state law into public school libraries.

In a memo to the Knox County Board of Education dated May 26, 2026, Rysewyk said the decision to return Roots to shelves was effective immediately and that the initial removal “was in no way a commentary on the historical, cultural, or literary value of the novel.

And that’s bullshit, of course. Many of the other quotes from Rysewyk are very carefully lawyered, but this one stands out as obvious nonsense. Removing a book, any book, from school shelves is absolutely a commentary on the historical, cultural, and literary value of that book. You’re making a decision to hide away a literary work from children. If the work had value to those children, you wouldn’t be banning it.

Rysewyk goes on to note that he consulted with many lawyers on the passage that led to the book being banned and that there was no consensus whether that passage actually violated Tennessee’s law or not and that that’s why he reinstated it. Then he dropped this gem.

“Removing any book from circulation is, and should be, an immense decision. Our intent will always be to err on the side of access, which is the decision I have made with regard to “Roots,”” Rysewyk said.

No. No it won’t. Because last week was part of “always” and the initial decision was to err on the side of not pissing off racist goobers and removing access. Nice try, though. It was only when the revolt started coming from within the school board itself that Rysewyk was forced to walk this all back.

Knox County School board member Katherine Bike sent a memo to her colleagues demanding the book’s return. 

“Removing Roots is not a neutral act,” Bike wrote. “It sends a message to our students, particularly our Black students, about whose history is worth protecting. I don’t believe that is the message any of us intends to send. Intent and impact are two different things.” 

On Tuesday after the reversal was announced, State Rep. Sam McKenzie, whose district includes the Haley statue, called the ban a grave injustice and said he was disappointed but not surprised. 

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“’Roots’ won a Pulitzer Prize and became a cultural touchstone that inspired and united millions of Americans,” McKenzie said. “I knew that taking it out of the hands of thousands of schoolchildren in Knox County would be a grave injustice.”

Now, what this should immediately result in is a recognition that public backlash can reverse bad policy. There are over 120 other books that are currently on the Knox County banned book list, not to mention similar anti-literature lists from the state’s other counties. Every one of them should get similar backlash. Banning Roots failed to work because of the name recognition of the book, the local interest in its author, and its obvious value to children. I have no reason to believe that there aren’t plenty of other works of literature in the other 120-plus books on the list worthy of defending.

That’s where the work actually needs to be done, now. Because the only thing we should be banning is the banning of books.

Filed Under: alex haley, book bans, culture, knox county, knox county schools, roots, tennessee

A security lead at a large enterprise* told me last week, when I asked whether they had any interest in Grok: “The revenge porn edgelord LLM? Yeah, imagine that; our bank wants nothing to do with it.”

A couple of other people I put the question to seemed genuinely surprised I’d brought it up at all, the way you’d react if someone wandered into a board meeting and asked whether anyone wanted to expense a timeshare.

So that’s the current state of enterprise demand for Grok, as measured by the unscientific but reliable method of asking the people who actually sign the cloud contracts. It lands somewhere between “no” and “why would you ask me that?”

Which is awkward, because Business Insider reported this week that AWS is “in talks” to add SpaceX’s Grok models to Bedrock, joining Anthropic, Meta, Cohere, and the OpenAI models AWS is in the process of bolting on. SpaceX has reportedly already shipped the models to AWS. There’s no launch date, which in AWS announcement terms puts us squarely at the “intention to perhaps one day announce an announcement” stage.

But is it any good? (No)

Let me dispatch the obvious objection: maybe nobody wants Grok because they haven’t tried it, and it’s secretly excellent. I’ve run blind tests of the frontier models on some of my own deeply stupid side projects—the shitposting.ai family, where the entire design goal is to be edgier and weirder than the current discourse will tolerate. If there’s a use case purpose-built to let Grok flex its whole “we say the things others won’t” positioning, it’s mine.

Grok loses. It’s fast — legitimately, impressively fast — but it’s just not as good. It’s the energy drink of frontier models: it’ll keep you up, but you won’t enjoy the experience and you’ll regret it in the morning.

So we’ve got a model that enterprise buyers actively don’t want, that underperforms even on the single axis it’s purportedly optimized for, attached to a company whose image generator reportedly was used to produce roughly three million sexualized images of real people over an eleven-day stretch, including an estimated 23,000 depicting apparent minors, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, triggering regulatory action in more than a dozen jurisdictions and a Dutch court injunction carrying a €100,000-per-day penalty. That part isn’t a joke, and I’m not going to make one.

Then layer on the fact that nobody sensible wants to take a hard dependency on Elon Musk’s org chart. In roughly a year, the thing has been reorganized into oblivion — X (the rebranded Twitter) sold to Grok-producing xAI, xAI swallowed by SpaceX, with the whole AI unit then being dissolved into a division called SpaceXAI. All eleven original cofounders have left. More than fifty researchers walked after the SpaceX absorption. The API endpoint you’d integrate against, api.x.ai, is migrating to a SpaceX-branded URL on a timeline nobody’s published. Building production infrastructure on top of that is like renting an apartment in a building that keeps changing its name, its address, its compliance with the fire code, and its landlord while you’re still unpacking.

And here’s the part that should bother whoever greenlit this. Bedrock’s entire pitch— the reason anyone pays the wrapper tax instead of hitting a model’s API directly— is governance: IAM, PrivateLink, CloudTrail, encryption, guardrails, and an audit trail you can wave at a regulator. The model is almost secondary to those things for those customers. And the enterprises that actively value that stack are precisely the ones telling me they wouldn’t touch Grok with a borrowed keyboard.

The startups that hypothetically *do* want Grok — for the edge, for the speed, for whatever a founder talks themselves into at 2 a.m. — could not care less about CloudTrail. They want it cheap, fast, and now, and they can already have it: Grok is one curl to a public endpoint away, same as every other model on the shelf. Bedrock has no monopoly on third-party models; it never did. So sketch the Venn diagram. One circle is “wants Grok,” the other is “wants Bedrock’s governance.” Grok-on-Bedrock is built to serve only the gap where they don’t overlap.

So who asked for this?

Nobody. Which is the interesting part.

When customer demand can’t explain a decision, follow the corpdev. And AWS has run this exact play twice already this year, in public, with the numbers attached.

With Anthropic: a commitment to spend more than $100 billion on AWS over ten years and secure up to five gigawatts of Trainium capacity, with Amazon putting in another $5 billion immediately and up to $20 billion more on milestones — on top of the $8 billion it had already sunk in, for a cumulative stake somewhere around $33 billion.

With OpenAI: an existing $38 billion agreement expanded by another $100 billion, OpenAI committing to roughly two gigawatts of Trainium, and Amazon writing a $50 billion check on top.

The pattern is identical both times. Amazon invests, the lab commits to gigawatts of Trainium, and the model shows up on Bedrock as the consumer-facing bow on top. The Bedrock listing is the gift wrap. The Trainium commitment is the gift.

So here’s the way I’m thinking about it: AWS isn’t trying to sell Grok to your bank, but rather trying to sell Trainium to SpaceXAI — a company currently training Grok on something like 550,000 Nvidia GPUs in a Memphis facility the size of the chip on my shoulder. Peel even a fraction of that onto Amazon silicon ahead of the SpaceX IPO and the deal pencils out, regardless of whether a single human ever calls the Grok endpoint in anger. Bedrock becomes little more than a sales funnel with infuriatingly bad documentation.

The part where I say something nice

Because the strategy is clever, and I try to say so when it’s earned. Amazon is now bankrolling both leading independent AI labs at once, on its own chips, through its own model marketplace, while positioning itself as neutral infrastructure for whoever ends up winning. Against the roughly $200 billion in capex Amazon is torching in 2026, getting frontier labs to pre-commit to the silicon is about the only thing that makes that spreadsheet survivable. It worked twice. Why not go for three?

The third just happens to be a satellite-internet competitor. Amazon Leo – Amazon’s own years-later answer to Starlink – is out there signing Delta, JetBlue, AT&T, Vodafone, and NASA. So AWS would be cutting a relationship check to the one company it’s simultaneously trying to chase out of low Earth orbit. This seems fine. This is normal! Everybody in this industry is everybody else’s landlord, tenant, competitor, and shelf-mate, frequently within the same quarter and occasionally within the same press release. There will never be a problem that this arrangement causes.

The caveat that keeps me honest

I have no inside information here past “casual conversations with enterprise execs.” I haven’t seen a term sheet. There’s no public Trainium commitment from SpaceXAI, and Colossus runs on Nvidia today. So I can’t prove this is silicon corpdev rather than, say, AWS executives wanting a seat at the IPO table, or a marketing org that needs to put “every frontier model” on a slide. What I can tell you is that customer demand doesn’t explain it, because there isn’t any – and AWS has shown you, twice and with receipts, what its other explanation tends to look like.

So when Grok eventually lands on Bedrock with no fanfare and no launch date, and then is never mentioned again, don’t read it as AWS believing you want Grok. Read the S-1. If there’s a Trainium number in it, you’ll know what the model was really for.

* Specifics have been fuzzed to protect confidentiality. ®