Watching a chatbot pass a test that was created more than 70 years ago by a man who wasn’t quite sure what he was designing has a subtly strange quality. It was dubbed the imitation game by Alan Turing. Eventually, everyone else referred to it as the Turing test. A language model that resides in a data center and generates text by predicting the next most likely word is said to have passed a version of it in a lab at the University of California, San Diego, rather than a humanoid robot with synthetic skin or some science fiction supercomputer.…
Author: Melissa Hogan
Melissa Hogan
Melissa Hogan is the Senior Editor at Temporaer, and quite possibly the person on the internet who has thought the most about what happens to your data when a hard disk drive fails. She is a self-described storage hardware obsessive — the kind of person who reads NVMe specification documents for fun, tracks NAND flash fab yield rates with genuine emotional investment, and has strong, considered opinions about why QLC cells are misunderstood by mainstream tech media. She came to technology writing the way many of the best specialists do: not through a newsroom, but through an obsession that simply refused to stay quiet.Melissa, a stay-at-home mother, is an example of what the technology industry frequently undervalues: the serious, self-made expert who exists entirely outside of the institutional pipeline. She developed her technological expertise solely through self-directed learning, practical hardware experimentation, and an extraordinary appetite for technical documentation. She doesn't have a degree in journalism or experience in corporate technology, but what she brings to her editorial work at Temporaer is something more uncommon: a sincere, unfulfilled passion for how computers store, retrieve, and safeguard data, along with the patience to fully comprehend it and the ability to articulate it.
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When reading the Anthropic announcement about their unreleased model, Mythos, there is a point at which the language seems too serene for what it is actually describing. The materials used in the press are measured. The technical documentation is accurate. The unspoken acknowledgement that no one trained this system to do what it did is hidden somewhere in the middle of it all. It just became smarter, and the others naturally followed. I’ve been thinking about that detail for days. CategoryDetailsPrimary SubjectArtificial Intelligence & Human CognitionKey OrganizationAnthropic (AI Safety Company, founded 2021)Model ReferencedClaude Mythos Preview — unreleased general-purpose AIResearch BasisNeuroscience,…
Something is drawing us in. The Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies are being physically pulled across space at a speed of more than two million kilometers per hour, not figuratively. For many years, scientists have been aware of this force. It’s known as the Great Attractor. They still don’t fully comprehend what it is, which is a subtly unsettling aspect. Studying this area of space was like trying to read a page with someone’s hand pressed flat over the center for years. The Milky Way, our own galaxy, which is stunning, enormous, and the subject of…
Most scientific discoveries have a point at which the researcher stops typing, leans back, and says something like, “That’s not supposed to happen.” Hugo Cui, a Harvard postdoctoral researcher, found that moment in the midst of statistical outputs and training data curves. Nothing dramatic was what his team was searching for. They were researching how language is processed by neural networks. They discovered something more akin to a change in personality. A simplified version of the self-attention mechanism, which powers transformer models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others that people use on a daily basis, was tracked in the study, which…
When you read a late-night dispatch from an observatory in the desert or sit quietly in a planetarium, the scope of what astronomers are truly studying finally dawns on you. Viscerally, not intellectually. Those moments have been occurring at an unusually high frequency thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. Furthermore, the most recent results from its ongoing surveys indicate that we are both humbled and genuinely perplexed about the universe we believed to be largely understood. Cosmologists’ reactions to Webb’s initial images of the early universe ranged from excitement to apprehension. There were galaxies in the data that shouldn’t…
More often than most leaders would like to acknowledge, a scene occurs in engineering meetings. Someone pulls up a model response from earlier in the week that the AI confidently generated and that initially appeared correct, and they attempt to explain why it acted that way. The room becomes silent. No one has a clear response. Once, it was successful. It doesn’t now. The logic isn’t there, but the log is. That moment is more important than it might seem, and it is starting to define modern software development. After years of developing systems where Input A plus Code B…
In Melbourne, Australia, there is a tiny data center that doesn’t resemble what most people think when they hear the term “data center.” There are no tall server racks humming with fans. There are no floor-to-ceiling blinking indicator lights. Rather, about 120 shoebox-sized devices sit silently, each containing living human brain cells—something more intimate and strange than any silicon chip. Growing neurons from stem cells and connecting them to electronic hardware is what Cortical Labs, an Australian start-up, is trying to do. It falls somewhere between biology and computer science, between engineering and neuroscience, in a field that had no…
In science, there is a silent, nearly undetectable moment when an idea that no one has yet considered is already concealed within the data. Beneath decades’ worth of published papers and citations, it waits patiently for someone to make the necessary connections. Only humans were able to connect in that way for the majority of human history. It might no longer be the case. Researchers at the University of Chicago created an AI model that predicted scientific discoveries before human scientists did, which is still a little unsettling to comprehend. The study was published in Nature Human Behaviour. Not a…
Something is emanating from the Milky Way’s center. It is a signal rather than a message or a disaster, at least not as far as anyone is aware. Actually, there were three of them. Astronomers have been observing these weak, continuous emissions from deep within our galaxy for years with the unsettling knowledge that none of the conventional explanations fully account for them. Cosmic rays, stellar remnants, supernovae—everything the textbooks suggest has been tried and failed. Researchers at King’s College London now think they might be getting close to a solution. It won’t be merely a footnote in an astrophysics…
When something in a research lab works that wasn’t supposed to, there’s a certain silence. It’s more like the group holding their breath before anyone dares to say it aloud than a celebration, at least not yet. On October 22, 2025, Google Quantum AI’s 105-qubit Willow processor finished a calculation that, based on the majority of reasonable timelines in the field, shouldn’t have been possible for another ten years. That’s about how I imagine the room felt. The majority of announcements about quantum computing are theatrical. Strong statistics, well-crafted press releases, and then a protracted period of silence during which…