White House Announces UFO Disclosure and Google Launches Gemini 3.1 Pro

The White House scolded former President Obama for taking information that aliens "are real" out of classified channels, then directed the Secretary of War and other agencies to begin releasing government files on extraterrestrial life, UAPs, and UFOs.

The White House is reportedly holding a speech detailing alien life and spaceships for an upcoming date, with the State of the Union address only a few days away.

Some are noting disclosure was "forced on us because of the AI curve," since developing superintelligence could be relevant to any non-human intelligence with access to Earth.

The publisher of Skeptic Magazine is preparing to concede a $1,000 Long Bet to Avi Loeb.

Google launched Gemini 3.1 Pro with top scores of 44.4% on Humanity's Last Exam without tools, 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2, and 94.3% on GPQA Diamond. Humanity's Last Exam is a benchmark of extremely difficult questions across many fields, and GPQA Diamond tests graduate-level science knowledge.

Artificial Analysis ranked it the new Intelligence Index leader, noting its evaluations cost less than half those of Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.2.

OpenAI's Codex engineering lead predicts today's coding agents will look "funny" within ten weeks.

RentAHuman now has 500,000 people signed up to do physical tasks for AI agents.

Arc Institute's MULTI-evolve framework achieved 10-fold improvements in protein directed evolution with a single round of ML guidance. Directed evolution is a technique for engineering proteins by mimicking natural selection in the lab, and ML guidance means using machine learning to predict which mutations will work best.

The AI boom has pushed US imports from Taiwan past those from China for the first time since 1992, driven by semiconductors.

AMD is backstopping a $300 million loan to Crusoe using AI chips as collateral, the first known example of AMD GPUs as a financial instrument.

Amazon has dethroned Walmart as the world's largest company by revenue, powered by data center growth.

Data centers are spawning off-grid natural gas plants, since solar and wind variability is hard to manage without backup.

SoftBank is forming a consortium for a $33 billion gas-fired plant on the Ohio-Kentucky border. At 9.2 GW, it would be the largest in the US.

Type One Energy submitted a licensing application for its Infinity One stellarator in Tennessee, targeting a working fusion prototype by 2029. A stellarator is a type of fusion reactor that uses twisted magnetic fields to contain hot plasma.

Ethiopia banned fossil fuel vehicle imports in 2024 and has watched EV adoption surge from under 1% to nearly 6%.

Research finds businesses are replacing Upwork and Fiverr freelancers with AI at a rate of $1 of human labor for $0.03 in AI spending.

Epoch AI projects Anthropic, growing at 10x per year, may surpass OpenAI's revenue by mid-2026.

Nvidia is reportedly close to finalizing a $30 billion investment in OpenAI.

BAFTA has introduced "human achievement" as a guiding principle for its awards, the first major cinematic institution to formally distinguish human creativity from AI.

Corporate restructuring costs 62 months of salary per employee in Spain versus 7 in the US.

Research Revival has launched to rescue neglected research, offering grants to recover buried hypotheses from Soviet archives to Mao-era antimalarials.

California's legislature has introduced a bill requiring all 3D printers sold in the state to be DOJ-certified as equipped with "firearm blocking technology."

Newborn chickens have been found to exhibit the same "bouba-kiki" effect seen in human linguistics, associating round shapes with round sounds and spiky shapes with spiky ones. This suggests cross-modal abstraction, which is the ability to connect information across different senses, may be older than language itself.