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Anthropic has officially surpassed OpenAI to become the most valuable AI startup on the planet. That's a significant milestone, and it signals that the race for AI dominance is far from settled. Investors are clearly betting that Claude's maker has the edge in the long game.
On the topic of AI costs, a senior Netflix engineer named Tejas Chopra has built a tool that trims the token bloat out of AI agent instructions before they reach the model, and then open sourced it for everyone. It's a quiet but meaningful contribution at a moment when companies like Uber and Microsoft are learning the hard way that aggressive AI adoption can quietly drain budgets faster than it saves them.
And from the research world, Northwestern University scientists have found that memory decline following menopause is tied specifically to the loss of estrogen production within brain tissue itself, not just in the body broadly. That distinction matters enormously for how treatments might eventually be designed, and it's a reminder that the most consequential tech stories aren't always about software.
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