This week’s world-famous news haiku competition™ is about how the average retail price for a pound of roast coffee has risen to $10. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers.

And now, the news!

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

News You Need2Know

• Check your 401(k) as two-week ceasefire holds

• Meta spends $14 billion to produce an AI model tha …

• NYT reporter claims to have unmasked Bitcoin's cre …

• And you thought your corporate retreat sucked

• Anthropic built an AI so scary they won’t release …

What’s the stock market up to, eh?*

$SPX ( ▼ 0.14% ) $DJI ( ▼ 0.5% ) $NDX ( ▲ 0.22% )  

Companies mentioned in today’s newsletter

$DJI ( ▲ 3.99% )   $UAL ( ▼ 1.64% )  $DAL ( ▼ 0.16% )  $CCL ( ▼ 0.32% )  $AAPL ( ▼ 0.2% )  $AMZN ( ▲ 1.76% )  $MSFT ( ▼ 0.73% )  $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.48% )  $CSCO ( ▼ 1.49% )  $AVGO ( ▲ 5.46% )  

Check your 401(k) as two-week ceasefire holds

Break out the champagne! Your retirement account just had its best day in months because — and I cannot stress this enough — we've agreed to maybe not escalate a war for a whole 14 days. The Dow $DJI ( ▲ 3.99% ) surged 1,000 points Wednesday, oil plunged 15.9% to $95 per barrel, and investors everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Another thousand points and we’ll be back where we were, Dow-wise, on March 1. 🤷

"There is a reason to be optimistic, but it is still too early to tell, because, as you know, after all, it is Trump," said Takashi Hiroki, chief strategist at MONEX, talking to the Associated Press.

United Airlines $UAL ( ▼ 1.64% ) soared 9.7%, trimming its year-to-date loss from 20.1%. Delta $DAL ( ▼ 0.16% ) climbed 5.5% after reporting solid quarterly results. Carnival $CCL ( ▼ 0.32% ) cruise ships bobbed up 11.3%, presumably because people are excited to book vacations now that the Strait of Hormuz might be marginally less explode-y.

Your 401(k) looks better today. Enjoy it! Aaaaaand I’ll see you in two weeks.

Meta spends $14 billion to produce an AI model that's 'good'

Meta $META ( ▼ 0.56% ) stock jumped 4% Wednesday as the company released “Muse Spark,” its first major AI model in over a year. In an industry where competitors ship models monthly, Meta took 15 months and one benchmark-cheating scandal to produce this one.

"Nine months ago, we founded Meta Superintelligence Labs with the goal of putting personal superintelligence in everyone's hands," Mark Zuckerberg posted on Threads. "We believe that empowering people to pursue their individual aspirations is how humanity has always made progress."

The announcement marks a milestone for Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO hired for $14 billion to clean up after the previous model, “Llama 4,” and its disastrous launch. That model achieved the rare distinction of being both disappointing and fraudulent after Meta admitted to gaming benchmarks.

According to internal tests, Muse Spark outscored Google's Gemini on some benchmarks and was "competitive" with OpenAI and Anthropic. Zuckerberg promises "increasingly advanced models that push the frontier” from here on.

Song of the Day: Jay-Z, ‘Dead Presidents’

This is widely considered one of the most essential recordings in hip-hop history. Originally released in February 1996, it’s been reissued to commemorate the 30th anniversary.

NYT reporter claims to have unmasked Bitcoin's creator after 16-year mystery

After 16 years of speculation about who created Bitcoin, a New York Times investigation claims to have finally solved crypto's greatest mystery, and the answer was hiding in plain sight.

The investigation identifies Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer and prominent Bitcoin figure, as “Satoshi Nakamoto.” The evidence? A trail of linguistic breadcrumbs spanning decades.

The reporter analyzed over 34,000 users from cryptography mailing lists, systematically filtering for Satoshi's distinctive writing quirks: British spellings, specific hyphenation errors, phrases like "burning the money," and the outdated habit of putting two spaces between sentences.

After applying these filters, only one name remained: Adam Back.

"Clearly I'm not Satoshi, that's my position," Back told the reporter when confronted. But during the interview, he appeared to slip: when asked about Satoshi's quote "I'm better with code than with words," Back responded as if he'd written it himself.

Perhaps most damning: Back outlined nearly every component of Bitcoin on cryptography mailing lists a full decade before Satoshi's 2008 white paper appeared. He then mysteriously went silent when Bitcoin launched — only to resurface weeks after “Satoshi” vanished.

Back denies everything. But if true, he's sitting on 1.1 million Bitcoins worth $118 billion. No wonder he’s remaining tight-lipped.

And you thought your corporate retreat sucked

Complaining about your company's trust falls and icebreaker games? Please. Let me introduce you to Plexcon 2017, a $500,000 tropical nightmare chronicled by the Wall Street Journal this week through interviews with…ahem…survivors.

The trip to Honduras was for staff at free streaming platform Plex. It started awkwardly: The hotel's general manager and head chef both quit weeks before arrival. Employees were bused down dirt roads past guard towers with armed men. Just as staffers arrived, CEO Keith Valory was in his bathroom with E. coli from a salad, losing 10 pounds while a doctor nailed an IV bag to his bedpost.

Things did not improve from there.

A former Navy SEAL was hired to "pump up" this decidedly unfit group of remote workers. "People are passing out," recalled one executive. One employee landed on a fire ant hill and required antihistamine injected into her butt cheek. Someone spotted an alligator on the golf course. An engineer discovered a Mexican hairy dwarf porcupine had crashed through his ceiling into the shower. The kitchen served raw meat and boiled vegetable slop. The event planner's heart started failing from stress.

The grand finale? Eighteen employees got stranded on an island at sunset because the runway had no lights.

"Still one of the most fun trips ever," one survivor recalled.

I’d prefer a Microsoft Teams happy hour, to be honest, and that’s saying something.

Quote of the Day

Anthropic built an AI so scary they won’t release it to the public

In a move that's either admirably responsible or deeply terrifying (why not both?), Anthropic announced Tuesday that its new AI model, “Claude Mythos Preview,” is simply too dangerous for public release. Instead, they're sharing it with 40 tech giants to help find security vulnerabilities before the “bad guys” do (people like Apple $AAPL ( ▼ 0.2% ) Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 1.76% ) Microsoft $MSFT ( ▼ 0.73% ) Google $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.48% ) Cisco $CSCO ( ▼ 1.49% ) and Broadcom $AVGO ( ▲ 5.46% ) ).

The model has already discovered thousands of bugs in every major operating system and browser — including many that humans have missed entirely. Logan Graham, who tests Anthropic's models for dangerous capabilities, called it "the starting point for what we think will be an industry change point or reckoning."

CrowdStrike CTO Elia Zaitsev offered this comforting assessment: "What once took months now happens in minutes with AI."

The kicker? Anthropic chief scientist Jared Kaplan cheerfully reminded everyone: "As the slogan goes, this is the least capable model we'll have access to in the future."

Updating my iOs now, and just to be safe, also, my will.

Free yourself from advertising forever!

Should you check your 401(k) today?

👍️ 

What did I say up at the top, there, mate? Were you not paying attention? Hmmm?

Poll of the day: Is this guy lying or what?

Poll of the day: Take these up an inch!

We asked: “Do you value a good tailor?”

You answered:

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes. I love to get a pair of pants hemmed and a skirt taken in or out. (486)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No. Tailors are an anachronism in the age of fast fashion. (84)

570 Votes via @beehiiv polls

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