Flourish: The $500M Hunt for the Brain's 'Core Algorithm' Backed by Bezos

Flourish, a startup backed by Jeff Bezos, is trying to reinvent AI from the ground up by observing actual neurons in the brain under a microscope. The company has reportedly raised $500 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.

According to a detailed report by WIRED's Steven Levy, Flourish's goal is to discover the "fundamental principles of how the brain processes information (the core algorithm)" and apply them to AI architecture. If existing deep learning is an extremely crude imitation of how the human brain works, Flourish is aiming for a far more faithful reproduction.

No concrete research results have been published so far, and it will likely take time before we see anything more than an "ambitious bet." Still, the scale of the investment signals serious commitment, and if even part of the brain's computational principles can be unraveled, it could open the door to a new paradigm to replace today's transformer architecture.

Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis Jointly Call for DNA Security Legislation

Top tech leaders including Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) have called on the U.S. Congress to make screening of synthetic DNA orders a legal requirement.

According to The Decoder, AI systems are already demonstrating capabilities that exceed the experimental procedures of PhD-level virologists, and the risk of amateurs building bioweapons is becoming increasingly real. Today, screening synthetic DNA orders for dangerous sequences is left entirely to the discretion of providers, with no legal obligation to do so.

The request goes a step further than the recent "joint statement on bioweapon prevention." The fact that industry leaders themselves are calling for regulation suggests that AI's biological risks are increasingly recognized as a concrete policy issue rather than a purely theoretical concern.

Alpha School NYC: A $65,000-a-Year AI Education Hub That Isn't Legally a "School"

Alpha School, which touts AI-powered personalized learning, has opened a new campus in Manhattan, New York, with annual tuition of $65,000 (about ¥9.7 million). However, according to a WIRED investigation, the facility is legally operated not as a "school" but as a "homeschooling center."

Internal documents even surfaced a policy of "Opening date > safety," raising suspicions that safety measures have been deprioritized amid rapid expansion. As expectations for AI education grow, business models that exploit regulatory gaps are likely to face increasingly intense scrutiny.

LLM Memory Systems: High Recall, Precision Near Zero

A benchmark paper published on arXiv (arXiv:2605.11325) reported fascinating results on LLM memory systems. The systems tested scored high on "recall" — retrieving the information they need — but their "precision" was close to zero, meaning they also pulled in huge amounts of irrelevant information.

This shows that attempts to give LLMs long-term memory still face fundamental challenges. They can "retain a lot," but they cannot "retrieve only what's needed." For building practical agentic systems, memory selectivity stands out as an urgent research problem.

Gemma 4 QAT Release Appears Imminent

On Reddit's LocalLLaMA community, Omar from Google's Gemma team confirmed that a QAT (Quantization-Aware Training) version of Gemma 4 will be released soon. Since the release of Gemma 4 12B, the community has been busily producing its own quantizations, and an official QAT version would make more optimized quantized models available.

No specific release date has been revealed yet, but the statement carries weight coming from an official member of the Gemma team.

TSMC Chairman: Growth to Continue on Expanding AI Adoption

At TSMC's shareholders' meeting on June 4, Chairman and CEO C.C. Wei said that with AI adoption expanding, "the value of our leading-edge technology and manufacturing capabilities will continue to grow," expressing strong confidence in sustained growth over the next several years. He also made clear that business with Tokyo Electron will continue, underscoring once again that the entire semiconductor supply chain is being sustained by AI demand.

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Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain's 'Core Algorithm' (WIRED)

AI can now coach amateur virologists, and top tech leaders want Congress to act on DNA security (The Decoder)

Alpha School's Ritzy New York City Campus Costs $65,000 a Year—but Isn't Actually a School (WIRED)

LLM memory systems benchmark: high recall near-zero precision (arXiv:2605.11325)

Gemma 4 QAT confirmed to release soon! (Reddit LocalLLaMA)

TSMC shareholders' meeting (ITmedia AI+)