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Chinese AI Models Undercut OpenAI and Anthropic by Up to 9x in Pricing

And don’t assume “cheaper” means “worse.” On the SWE-bench Pro—the gold standard benchmark for coding agent capabilities—Zhipu’s GLM 5.2 scored a 62.1, beating OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 at 58.6.

Running the same AI workload through Anthropic’s Claude costs $4,811. Running it through Zhipu’s GLM model costs $544. That’s nearly a 9x price difference for equivalent work, and enterprise customers have started doing the math.

Chinese AI companies are undercutting OpenAI and Anthropic so aggressively on price that the two most prominent US AI firms are now scrambling to respond. OpenAI is reportedly considering major token price cuts, and Anthropic is expected to follow. The timing could not be worse: both companies are preparing for public market debuts.

A comparison of workload costs across leading AI models paints a stark picture. Anthropic’s Claude rings in at $4,811 per workload. OpenAI’s ChatGPT comes in lower at $3,357, but still far above the Chinese alternatives. DeepSeek prices the same workload at $1,071. Moonshot’s Kimi model does it for $948. And Zhipu’s GLM sits at just $544.

The Zoo Hypothesis and the Fermi Paradox… Are We Being Watched?

Are aliens watching us? The Zoo Hypothesis suggests advanced civilizations may be hiding, enforcing a galactic quarantine, or masking reality itself. Explore the Fermi Paradox, Dyson dilemma, and the unsettling possibility we are not alone—but observed.

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Credits:
The Zoo Hypothesis and the Fermi Paradox: Are We Being Watched?
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Music Courtesy of Chris Zabriskie & Stellardrone.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.

Chapters.
0:00 Intro — Silence as Deliberate Choice.
2:15 The Zoo Hypothesis and Time Asymmetry.
4:30 The Dyson Dilemma (Reframed)
5:54 Heavy Stealth and the Expansion of the Zoo.
8:33 Who Are the Zookeepers?
12:23 Why Build a Zoo?
16:37 Enforcement: How the Zoo Is Maintained.
20:39 Heavy Stealth: Hiding by Overwhelming Force.
24:54 Cracks in the Glass: Can the Zoo Be Detected?
29:12 Gods & Monsters.
30:08 Leakage: Accidents, Dissidents, and the Cost of Perfection.
33:22 Graduation or Exposure: How the Zoo Ends.
37:27 What It Means If We’re Being Watched — Or Never Were.
39:15 The Bars Are Made of Time.

Silk sticker is noninvasive way to monitor babies’ health

In the neonatal intensive care unit, the most fragile patients in medicine are often the most heavily wired. Premature babies, some weighing less than a pound, can be tethered to a tangle of cables, monitors and sensors. Each blood draw to check sugar levels or electrolytes means another needle, another bandage, another moment of stress for an infant whose skin is still forming.

A team of researchers from Tufts University’s Silklab, Helmholtz Munich, Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich and the Technical University of Munich have developed a radically gentler alternative: a featherlight, silk-based sticker, smaller than a coin, that quietly reads four critical health signals at once just by changing color.

The work, published in ACS Sensors, describes a wearable patch that captures temperature, pH, sodium and glucose from the wisps of fluid that pass naturally through a baby’s still-developing skin. An AI system reads the patch’s color shifts through any standard camera, even in the dim, humid, hard-to-photograph environment of an incubator, and translates them into precise numbers a clinician can act on.

PARP1-specific inhibitor displays PARP1-detrapping activity

(Cell Reports 45, 117350; May 26, 2026)

In the originally published version of this article, there was an error with Figure 3H that occurred during the final preparation of the manuscript, where some of the cellular images were displayed as black panels. The figure has been replaced with a corrected Figure 3H where the cellular images are now visible.

The authors regret this error.

Abstract: 1 Holman Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism, Department of Medicine, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York, New York, USA

1 Holman Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism, Department of Medicine, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York, New York, USA.

2Keenan Centre for Biomedical Research, St. Michael’s Hospital, and Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.

3Department of Foundations of Medicine, Diabetes and Obesity Research Center, New York University Grossman Long Island School of Medicine, Mineola, New York, USA.

Nanopattern method unlocks precise control of disorder for wave-guiding devices

A research team has developed a methodology to precisely design and control the “degree of disorder” in nanopattern arrays using metal-infiltrated block copolymer (BCP) thin films. The work was led by Professor So Youn Kim of the Seoul National University College of Engineering Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, in collaboration with Professor Su-Mi Hur’s team at DGIST and Professor S. Joon Kwon’s team at Sungkyunkwan University. The paper is published in the journal Nature Communications. The study was selected as an Editors’ Highlight in materials science and chemistry.

This disordered nanopattern fabrication technology is regarded as an innovative approach that enables precise control of nanoscale disorder structures—previously difficult to regulate—thereby opening new possibilities in the design of nano-optical and nanoelectronic devices.

In ordered structures, waves propagate over long distances, whereas in disordered structures, repeated scattering can lead to localization, where waves remain confined within a specific region. Such disordered structures exhibit unique functionalities that can induce localization phenomena for various types of waves, including light, sound and heat.

Google Just Revealed a 100% Stable Quantum Computer — AI is Obsolete

Google has unveiled a quantum computing breakthrough that could reshape the future of artificial intelligence, cryptography, medicine, and global technology. But does this really mean AI is becoming obsolete?

In this video, we break down Google’s Willow quantum chip, the revolutionary error-correction milestone it achieved, and why experts believe this could be one of the biggest advances in computing history. We also explain what the headlines get wrong, how quantum computing actually differs from AI, and why the future is likely to be a combination of both technologies rather than a competition.

You’ll discover:
• What makes Google’s Willow chip so significant.
• How quantum computers differ from classical AI
• Why the \.

Germany’s New Photonic NPU Just Made NVIDIA’s Billion Dollar GPUs Look Like TRASH!

Photonic chips are no longer just a lab experiment, and in this video, we break down why a new photonic NPU could become one of the biggest shifts in AI hardware, data centers, and supercomputing. Instead of using electricity and transistors like a traditional GPU, this new class of processor uses light to perform computation, opening the door to dramatically faster matrix math, far lower energy use, and almost no on-chip heat. From the growing power crisis in AI infrastructure to the limits of silicon, Moore’s Law, and the memory wall, this story explores why photonic computing is suddenly becoming one of the most important technologies to watch. If you’re interested in photonic chips, optical computing, AI chips, NPUs, GPUs, data center efficiency, and the future of semiconductor technology, this video gives you the full picture. We also explore what makes these chips different from conventional silicon. The video covers photons instead of electrons, wavelength-division multiplexing, optical interference, thin-film lithium niobate, and why companies like Q.ANT are now deploying photonic processors in real supercomputing environments instead of just talking about them on research slides. We look at Q.ANT’s Native Processing Unit at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Germany, the jump from first-generation to second-generation performance, and why benchmarks showing huge gains in throughput, AI inference, and energy efficiency are making people take photonic hardware much more seriously. More importantly, this is not just another faster chip story. It is about whether the AI industry can keep scaling without running straight into an energy wall. With GPUs demanding more power, more cooling, and more data movement every year, photonic co-processors may be the first real alternative that changes the economics of compute itself. The technology still has serious challenges, especially memory and optical-electrical conversion, but this may be the moment when computing with light stopped sounding like science fiction and started becoming real infrastructure.

Inducing cell death in pancreatic cancer cells

Researchers have discovered a previously unknown mechanism that makes most pancreatic cancer cells susceptible to a form of programmed cell death. The team showed that cancer cells with mutations in the KRAS gene develop a vulnerability which can be used to eliminate tumor cells in preclinical models. The findings open up new perspectives for treating pancreatic cancer. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer and has so far shown only limited response to available treatments. In approximately 90 percent of cases, these tumors carry mutations in the KRAS gene that drive cancer growth. Due to the ageing population and the lack of effective therapies, physicians, clinicians, and researchers expect pancreatic carcinoma to become one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide in the coming years. With the discovery of this newly identified vulnerability, a therapeutically promising approach has now been identified for treating this disease following future clinical trials.

The researchers discovered that KRAS-mutated tumor cells continuously activate signals from the innate immune system. This primes the cancer cells for an inflammatory form of cell death known as necroptosis. In order to survive, tumor cells rely heavily on the protein caspase-8, which usually inhibits necroptosis. If caspase-8 is blocked, the tumor cells die. “KRAS-mutated tumors have a previously unknown Achilles heel,” says the senior author of the study. “By switching off the tumor cells’ defence mechanisms, we can significantly kill these tumors.”

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