Additive Manufacturing UK (AMUK)’s first Members Forum of 2025 was held at Siemens’ UK headquarters in South Manchester earlier this year. The event featured presentations from AMUK members and offered attendees a chance to network and share insights.  Ahead of the day-long meetup, 3D Printing Industry caught up with Joshua Dugdale, Head of AMUK, to learn more about the current state of additive manufacturing and the future of 3D printing in Britain.  AMUK is the United Kingdom’s primary 3D printing trade organization. Established in 2014, it operates within the Manufacturing Technologies Association (MTA) cluster. Attendees at this year’s first meetup spanned the UK’s entire 3D printing ecosystem. Highlights included discussion on precious materials from Cookson Industrial, simulation software from Siemens, digital thread solutions from Kaizen PLM, and 3D printing services provided by ARRK.  With a background in mechanical engineering, Dugdale is “responsible for everything and anything AMUK does as an organization.” According to the Loughborough University alumnus, who is also Head of Technology and Skills at the MTA, AMUK’s core mission is to “create an environment in the UK where additive manufacturing can thrive.” He elaborated on how his organization is working to increase the commercial success of its members within the “struggling” global manufacturing environment. Dugdale shared his perspective on the key challenges facing 3D printing in the UK. He pointed to a “tough” operating environment hampered by global financial challenges, which is delaying investments.  Despite this, AMUK’s leader remains optimistic about the sector’s long-term potential, highlighting the UK’s success in R&D and annual 3D printing intellectual property (IP) output. Dugdale emphasized the value of 3D printing for UK defense and supply chain resilience, arguing that “defense will lead the way” in 3D printing innovation.  Looking ahead, Dugdale called on the UK Government to create a unified 3D printing roadmap to replace its “disjointed” approach to policy and funding. He also shared AMUK’s strategy for 2025 and beyond, emphasizing a focus on eductaion, supply chain visibility, and standards. Ultimately, the AMUK figurehead shared a positive outlook on the future of 3D printing in the UK. He envisions a new wave of innovation that will see more British startups and university spinouts emerging over the next five years.          Siemens’ Manchester HQ hosted the first AMUK Members Forum of 2025. Photo by 3D Printing Industry. What is the current state of additive manufacturing in the UK? According to Dugdale, the 3D printing industry is experiencing a challenging period, driven largely by global economic pressures. “I wouldn’t describe it as underperforming, I’d describe it as flat,” Dugdale said. “The manufacturing sector as a whole is facing significant challenges, and additive manufacturing is no exception.” He pointed to increased competition, a cautious investment climate, and the reluctance of businesses to adopt new technologies due to the economic uncertainty.  Dugdale specifically highlighted the increase in the UK’s National Insurance contribution (NIC) rate for employers, which rose from 13.8% to 15% on April 6, 2025. He noted that many British companies postponed investment decisions ahead of the announcement, reflecting growing caution within the UK manufacturing sector. “With additive manufacturing, people need to be willing to take risks,” added Dugdale. “People are holding off at the moment because the current climate doesn’t favor risk.”  Dugdale remains optimistic about the sector’s long-term potential, arguing that the UK continues to excel in academia and R&D. However, for Dugdale, commercializing that research is where the country must improve before it can stand out on the world stage. This becomes especially clear when compared to countries in North America and Asia, which receive significantly greater financial support. “We’re never going to compete with the US and China, because they have so much more money behind them,” he explained. In a European context, Dugdale believes the UK “is doing quite well.” However, Britain remains below Spain in terms of financial backing and technology adoption. “Spain has a much more mature industry,” Dugdale explained. “Their AM association has been going for 10 years, and it’s clear that their industry is more cohesive and further along. It’s a level of professionalism we can learn from.” While the Iberian country faces similar challenges in standards, supply chain, and visibility, it benefits from a level of cohesion that sets it apart from many other European countries. Dugdale pointed to the Formnext trade show as a clear example of this disparity. He expects the Spanish pavilion to span around 200 square meters and feature ten companies at this year’s event, a “massive” difference compared to the UK’s 36 square meters last year. AMUK’s presence could grow to around 70 square meters at Formnext 2025, but this still lags far behind. Dugdale attributes this gap to government support. “They get more funding. This makes it a lot more attractive for companies to come because there’s less risk for them,” he explained.   Josh Dugdale speaking at the AMUK Members Forum in Manchester. Photo by 3D Printing Industry. 3D printing for UK Defense  As global security concerns grow, the UK government has intensified efforts to bolster its defense capabilities. In this context, 3D printing is emerging as a key enabler. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) released its first Defence Advanced Manufacturing Strategy, outlining a plan to “embrace 3D printing,” with additive manufacturing expected to play a pivotal role in the UK’s future military operations.  Dugdale identified two key advantages of additive manufacturing for defense: supply chain resilience and frontline production. For the former, he stressed the importance of building localized supply chains to reduce lead times and eliminate dependence on overseas shipments. This capability is crucial for ensuring that military platforms, whether on land, at sea, or in the air, remain operational.  3D printing near the front lines offers advantages for conducting quick repairs and maintaining warfighting capabilities in the field. “If a tank needs to get back off the battlefield, you can print a widget or bracket that’ll hold for just five miles,” Dugdale explained. “It’s not about perfect engineering; it’s about getting the vehicle home.”  The British Army has already adopted containerized 3D printers to test additive manufacturing near the front lines. Last year, British troops deployed metal and polymer 3D printers during Exercise Steadfast Defender, NATO’s largest military exercise since the Cold War. Dubbed Project Bokkr, the additive manufacturing capabilities included XSPEE3D cold spray 3D printer from Australian firm SPEE3D.     Elsewhere in 2024, the British Army participated in Additive Manufacturing Village 2024, a military showcase organized by the European Defence Agency. During the event, UK personnel 3D printed 133 functional parts, including 20 made from metal. They also developed technical data packs (TDPs) for 70 different 3D printable spare parts. The aim was to equip Ukrainian troops with the capability to 3D print military equipment directly at the point of need. Dugdale believes success in the UK defense sector will help drive wider adoption of 3D printing. “Defense will lead the way,” he said, suggesting that military users will build the knowledge base necessary for broader civilian adoption. This could also spur innovation in materials science, an area Dugdale expects to see significant advancements in the coming years.     A British Army operator checks a part 3D printed on SPEE3D’s XSPEE3D Cold Spray 3D printer. Photo via the British Army. Advocating for a “unified industrial strategy” Despite promising growth in defence, Dugdale identified major hurdles that still hinder the widespread adoption of additive manufacturing (AM) in the UK.  A key challenge lies in the significant knowledge gap surrounding the various types of AM and their unique advantages. This gap, he noted, discourages professionals familiar with traditional manufacturing methods like milling and turning from embracing 3D printing. “FDM is not the same as WAAM,” added Dugdale. “Trying to explain that in a very nice, coherent story is not always easy.” Dugdale also raised concerns about the industry’s fragmented nature, especially when it comes to software compatibility and the lack of interoperability between 3D printing systems. “The software is often closed, and different machines don’t always communicate well with each other. That can create fear about locking into the wrong ecosystem too early,” he explained.  For Dugdale, these barriers can only be overcome with a clear industrial strategy for additive manufacturing. He believes the UK Government should develop a unified strategy that defines a clear roadmap for development. This, Dugdale argued, would enable industry players to align their efforts and investments.  The UK has invested over £500 million in AM-related projects over the past decade. However, Dugdale explained that fragmented funding has limited its impact. Instead, the AMUK Chief argues that the UK Government’s strategy should recognize AM as one of “several key enabling technologies,” alongside machine tooling, metrology, and other critical manufacturing tools.  He believes this unified approach could significantly boost the UK’s productivity and fully integrate 3D printing into the wider industrial landscape. “Companies will align themselves with the roadmap, allowing them to grow and mature at the same rate,” Dugdale added. “This will help us to make smarter decisions about how we fund and where we fund.”    AMUK’s roadmap and the future of 3D printing in the UK    When forecasting 3D printing market performance, Dugdale and his team track five key industries: automotive, aerospace, medical, metal goods, and chemical processes. According to Dugdale, these industries are the primary users of machine tools, which makes them crucial indicators of market health. AMUK also relies on 3D printing industry surveys to gauge confidence, helping them to spot trends even when granular data is scarce. By comparing sector performance with survey-based confidence indicators, AMUK builds insights into the future market trajectory. The strong performance of sectors like aerospace and healthcare, which depend heavily on 3D printing, reinforces Dugdale’s confidence in the long-term potential of additive manufacturing. Looking ahead to the second half of 2025, AMUK plans to focus on three primary challenges: supply chain visibility, skills development, and standards. Dugdale explains that these issues remain central to the maturation of the UK’s AM ecosystem. Education will play a key role in these efforts.  AMUK is already running several additive manufacturing upskilling initiatives in schools and universities to build the next generation of 3D printing pioneers. These include pilot projects that introduce 3D printing to Key Stage 3 students (aged 11) and AM university courses that are tailored to industry needs.  In the longer term, Dugdale suggests AMUK could evolve to focus more on addressing specific industry challenges, such as net-zero emissions or automotive light-weighting. This would involve creating specialized working groups that focus on how 3D printing can address specific pressing issues.  Interestingly, Dugdale revealed that AMUK’s success in advancing the UK’s 3D printing industry could eventually lead to the organization being dissolved and reabsorbed into the MTA. This outcome, he explained, would signal that “additive manufacturing has really matured” and is now seen as an integral part of the broader manufacturing ecosystem, rather than a niche technology. Ultimately, Dugdale is optimistic for the future of 3D printing in the UK. He acknowledged that AMUK is still “trying to play catch-up for the last 100 years of machine tool technology.” However, additive manufacturing innovations are set to accelerate. “There’s a lot of exciting research happening in universities, and we need to find ways to help these initiatives gain the funding and visibility they need,” Dugdale urged. As the technology continues to grow, Dugdale believes additive manufacturing will gradually lose its niche status and become a standard tool for manufacturers. “In ten years, we could see a generation of workers who grew up with 3D printers at home,” he told me. “For them, it will just be another technology to use in the workplace, not something to be amazed by.”  With this future in mind, Dugdale’s vision for 3D printing is one of broad adoption, supported by clear strategy and policy, as the technology continues to evolve and integrate into UK industry.  Take the 3DPI Reader Survey — shape the future of AM reporting in under 5 minutes. Who won the 2024 3D Printing Industry Awards? Subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter to keep up with the latest 3D printing news.You can also follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry Youtube channel to access more exclusive content.

“I want to make a big announcement,” said Faryar Shirzad, the chief policy officer of Coinbase, to a nearly empty room. His words echoed across the massive hall at the Bitcoin Conference, deep in the caverns of The Venetian Expo in Las Vegas, and it wasn’t apparent how many people were watching on the livestream. Then again, somebody out there may have been interested in the panelists he was interviewing, one of whom was unusual by Bitcoin Conference standards: Chris LaCivita, the political consultant who’d co-chaired Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. “I am super proud to say it on this stage,” Shirzad continued, addressing the dozens of people scattered across 5,000 chairs. “We have just become a major sponsor of the America250 effort.” My jaw dropped. Coinbase, the world’s largest crypto exchange, the owner of 12 percent of the world’s Bitcoin supply, and listed on the S&P 500, was paying for Trump to hold a military parade.No wonder they made the announcement in an empty room. Today was “Code and Country”: an entire day of MAGA-themed panels on the Nakamoto Main Stage, full of Republican legislators, White House officials, and political operatives, all of whom praised Trump as the savior of the crypto world. But Code and Country was part of Industry Day, which was VIP only and closed to General Admission holders — the people with the $199 tickets, who flocked to the conference seeking wisdom from brilliant technologists and fabulously wealthy crypto moguls, who believed that decentralized currency on a blockchain could not be controlled by government authoritarians. They’d have drowned Shirzad in boos if they saw him give money to Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and they would have stormed the Nakamoto stage if they knew the purpose of America250. America250 is a nonprofit established by Congress during Barack Obama’s presidency with a mundane mission: to plan the nationwide festivities for July 4th, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “Who remembers the Bicentennial in 1976?” the co-chair, former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, asked the crowd. “I remember it like it was yesterday, and this one is going to be bigger and better.” But then Trump got re-elected, appointed LaCivita as co-chair, and suddenly, the party was starting earlier. The week before the conference, America250 announced that it would host a “Grand Military Parade” on June 14th to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, releasing tickets for prime seats along the parade route and near the Washington Monument on their website, hosting other festivities on the National Mall, and credentialing the press covering the event. (Their celebrations and events are a different operation from the U.S. Army, which had never planned for a parade to celebrate its 250th birthday, much less a military parade, but is now spending up to $45 million in taxpayer dollars to make the parade happen.) According to the most recent statements from Army officials, the parade will include hundreds of cannons, dozens of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, fighter jets, bombers, and 150 military vehicles, including Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Stryker Fighting Vehicles, Humvees, and if the logistics work out, 25 (or more) M1 Abrams tanks. Trump had spent years trying to get the government to throw a military parade — primarily because he’d attended a Bastille Day parade in France and became jealous — and now that he was back in office, he’d finally eliminated everyone in the government who previously told him that the budget didn’t exist for such a parade, that the tank treads would ruin the streets and collapse the bridges, that the optics of tanks, guns and soldiers marching down Constitution Avenue were too authoritarian and fascist. June 14th also happens to be Donald Trump’s birthday.And Coinbase, whose CEO once told his employees to stop bringing politics into the workplace, was now footing the bill — if not for this military parade watch party, then for the one inevitably happening next year, when America actually turns 250, or any other festivities between now and then that may or may not fall on Trump’s birthday. (This wasn’t the first party they helped fund, though. Earlier this year, Coinbase wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inauguration committee. One month later, the SEC announced that it was dropping an investigation into Coinbase.) I had to keep reminding myself that I was at the Bitcoin Conference. I’d been desperately looking for the goofy, degenerate party vibes that my coworkers who’d covered previous crypto conferences told me about: inflated swans with QR codes. Multimillionaires strolling around the Nakamoto Stage in shiba inu pajamas. Folks who communicated in memes and acronyms. Celebrity athletes who were actual celebrities. “Bitcoin yoga,” whatever that was. Afterparties with drugs, lots of drugs, and probably the mind-bending designer kind. And hey, Las Vegas was the global capital of goofy, degenerate partying. But no, I was stuck in a prolonged flashback to every single Republican event I’ve covered over the past ten years – Trump rallies, conservative conferences, GOP conventions, and MAGA fundraisers, with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” playing on an endless loop. There was an emcee endlessly praising Trump, encouraging the audience to clap for Trump, and reminding everyone about how great it was that Trump spoke at the Conference last year, which all sounds even stranger when said in an Australian accent. In addition to LaCivita, there were four GOP Congressmen, four GOP Senators, one Trump-appointed SEC Commissioner, one Treasury Official, two senior White House officials (including David Sacks, the White House crypto and A.I. czar), and two of Trump’s sons. All of them, too, spent time praising Trump as the first “crypto president.” (Vice President J.D. Vance would be speaking the next day to the general admission crowd, but he was probably going to praise Trump, too.) The titles of the panels seemed to be run through some sort of MAGA generative AI system: The Next Golden Age of America. The American Super Grid. Making America the Global Bitcoin Superpower. The New Declaration of Independence: Bitcoin and the Path Out of the U.S. National Debt Crisis. (Speaker: Vivek Ramaswamy.) Uncancleable: Bitcoin, Rumble & Free Speech Technology. (Speaker: Donald Trump Jr.) The only difference was that this MAGA conference was funded by crypto. And if crypto was paying for a MAGA conference, and they had to play “God Bless the USA,” they were bringing in a string quartet.Annoyed that I had not yet seen a single Shiba Inu — no, Jim Justice’s celebrity bulldog was not the same thing — I left Nakamoto and went back to the press area. It hadn’t turned into Fox News yet, but I could see MAGA’s presence seeping into the world of podcasters and vloggers. A Newsmax reporter (great blowout, jewel-toned sheath dress, heels to the heavens, very camera-ready) was interviewing White House official Bo Hines (clean-cut, former Yale football player and GOP congressional candidate, nice suit), right before he was hustled onstage for a panel with a member of the U.S. Treasury. Soon, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) was doing an interview gauntlet while his senior aides stood by, one wearing a pink plaid blazer that could have easily been Brooks Brothers. Over on the Genesis Stage, the CEO of PragerU, a right wing media company that attacks higher education, was interviewing the CEO of the 1792 Exchange, a right-wing nonprofit that attacks companies for engaging in “woke business practices” such as diversity initiatives. (Leveraging Bitcoin’s Values to Shift the Culture in America.) I walked into the main expo center, past a crypto podcaster in a sequined bomber jacket talking to a Wall Street Journal reporter. For some reason, his presence was a relief. Even though he was clearly a Trump supporter — his jacket said TRUMP: THE GOLDEN AGE on the back — there was something more janky and homegrown, less corporate, about him. But the moment I looked up and saw a massive sign that said STEAKTOSHI, the unease returned. A ghoulish-looking group of executives from Steak ‘n Shake, the fast food company with over 450 locations across the globe, had gathered under the sign in a replica of the restaurant. They were selling jars of beef tallow, with a choice of grass-fed or Wagyu, and giving out a MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN hat with every purchase an overt embrace of the right-wing conspiracy that cooking with regular seed oils would lower one’s testosterone. (Relevant to the conference: they were also advertising that their restaurants now accepted Bitcoin.)Andrew Gordon, the head of Main Street Crypto PAC, had been to five previous Bitcoin Conferences and worked on crypto tax policy since 2014. He’d seen Trump speak at the last conference in Nashville during the election, and the audience – not typically unquestioning MAGA superfans – had melted into adoring goo in Trump’s presence. But now that Trump was using his presidential powers to establish a Bitcoin reserve, roll back federal investigations into crypto companies, and order massive changes to financial regulatory policies — in short, changing the entire market on crypto’s behalf with the stroke of a pen — Gordon clocked a notable vibe shift this year. “There are people wearing suits at a Bitcoin conference,” he told me wryly back in the press lounge. (He, too, was wearing a suit). The change wasn’t due to a new breed of Suit People flooding in. It was the Bitcoin veterans the ones who’d been coming to the conference for years, dressed in loud Versace jackets or old holey t-shirts – who were now in business attire. “They’re now recognizing the level of formality and how serious it is.”According to the Bitcoin Conference organizers, out of the 35,000-plus attendees in Vegas this year, 17.1 percent of them were categorized as “institutional and corporate decision-makers” — a vague way to describe politicians, corporate executives, and the rest of the C-suite world. Whenever they weren’t speaking onstage, they were conducting interviews with outlets hand-selected from dozens of media requests that had been filtered through the conference organizers, or in Q&A sessions with people who’d bought the $21,000 Whale Pass and could access the VIP Lounge. (Yes, the industry-only day of the conference had an even more exclusive tier.) They were sidebarring with crypto CEOs outside the conference for round tables, privately meeting Senators for lunch and White House officials for dinner. Gordon himself had just held a private breakfast for industry insiders, with GOP Senators Marsha Blackburn and Cynthia Lummis as special guests. And for the very, very wealthy, MAGA Inc., Trump’s primary super PAC, was holding a fundraising dinner in Vegas that night, with Vance, Don Jr., and Eric Trump in attendance. That ticket, according to The Washington Post, cost $1 million per person.It was the kind of amoral, backroom behavior that would have sent the General Admission attendees into a rage — and they did the next day, when the convention opened to them. During one extremely packed talk at the Genesis Stage called Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sycophants of the State?, a moderator asked the four panelists what they’d like to say to Vance and Sacks and all the politicians who’d been there yesterday. And Erik Cason erupted.“‘What you’re doing is actually immoral and bad. You hurt people. You actively want to use the state to implement violence against others.’ 
That’s like, fucked up and wrong,” said Cason, the author of “Cryptosovereignty,” to a crowd of hundreds. “If you personally wanna like, go to Yemen and try to stab those people, that’s on you. But asking other people to go do that – it is a fucked up and terrible thing.” He grew more heated. “And also fuck you. You’re not, like, a king. You’re supposed to be liable to the law, too. 
And I don’t appreciate you trying to think that that you just get to advance the state however the fuck you want, because you have power.”“These are the violent thugs who killed hundreds of millions of people over the last century,” agreed Bruce Fenton of Chainstone Labs. “They have nothing on us. All we wanna do is run some code and trade it around our nerd money. Leave us alone.”The audience burst into cheers and applause. Bitcoin was the promise of freedom from the government, who’d murdered and stolen and tried to control their lives, and now that their wealth was on the blockchain, no one could take their sovereignty. “Personally, I don’t really care what they [the politicians] think,” said American HODL, whose title on the conference site was “guy with 6.15 bitcoin,” the derision clear in his voice. “They are employees who work for us, so their thoughts and opinions on the matter are irrelevant. Do what the fuck we tell you to do.
 I don’t work for you. I’m not underneath you. You’re underneath me.” But the politicians weren’t going to listen to them, much less talk to them. The politicians spent the conference surrounded by aides and security who stopped people from approaching – I’m sorry, the Senator has to leave for an engagement now – or safely inside the VIP rooms with the $21,000-dollar Whale Pass holders and the million-dollar donors. By the time American HODL said that the politicians worked for him, they were on flights out of Vegas, having gotten what they wanted from Code and Country, an event that was closed to General Admission pass holders.Coinbase’s executives were at Code and Country, however. Coinbase held over 984,000 Bitcoin, more coins than American HODL could mine in a lifetime. And Coinbase was now a sponsor of Donald Trump’s birthday military parade. The Nakamoto Stage during Code + Country at the Bitcoin Conference.After David Sacks and the Winklevoss twins finished explaining how Trump had saved the crypto industry from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (or as one Winklevoss called her, “Pocahontas”), I was jonesing for a drink. A few other reporters on the ground had told me about “Code, Country and Cocktails,” the America250 afterparty held at the Ayu Dayclub at Resort World, and I signed up immediately. Reporters at past Bitcoin Conferences had promised legendary side-event depravity, and I hoped I would find it there. As I entered the lush, tropical nightclub, I saw two white-gloved hands sticking out the side of the wall, each holding a glass of champagne at crotch level. I reached out for a flute, thinking it was maybe just a fucked-up piece of art, and gasped as the hand let go of the stem, disappeared into the hole, and emerged seconds later with another full champagne glass. Past the champagne glory hole wall — there was really no other way to describe it — was a massive outdoor swimming pool, surrounded by chefs serving up endless portions of steak frites, unguarded magnums of Moët casually stacked in ice buckets, the professional Beautiful Women of Las Vegas draped around Peter Schiff, the famous economist/podcaster/Bitcoin skeptic. When not booked for private events, the crescent-shaped pool at Ayu would be filled with drunk people in swim suits, dancing to DJ Kaskade. No one was in the pool tonight. Depravity was not happening here. In fact, there was more networking going on than partying, and it was somehow more engaging than Bone Thugs-N-Harmony suddenly appearing onstage to perform. And it was distinctly not just about making money in crypto. A good percentage of this crowd wore some derivative of a MAGA hat, and anyone who could show off their photos of them with Trump did so. This, I realized, was how crypto bros did politics — a new game for them, where success and influence was not necessarily quantifiable. “Crypto got Trump elected,” Greg Grseziak, an agent who manages crypto influencers, told me, showing me his Trump photo opp. “In four years, this is going to be the biggest event in the presidential race.”Grzesiak walked off to do more networking, I finished my glory hole champagne, and in the meantime, Bone Thugs had started performing “East 1999”. A fellow reporter leaned over. “Who do you think those guys are?” he asked, pointing to a group of extremely tall white men in suits and lanyards, standing behind a velvet rope to the left of the stage.I walked over to investigate. They looked like the group of Steak ‘n Shake executives I met at the Expo Hall — the ones with the beef tallow jars and derivative MAGA hats — and they were lurking next to the stage, watching the rappers like vultures but barely moving to the music. This scene was too preposterous to actually be real: Steak ‘n Shake executives, at the Bitcoin Conference, attending a party for America250, in the VIP section, during a Bone Thugs-n-Harmony set? “Shout out to Steak ‘n Shake for being the first fast food restaurant to accept Bitcoin!” announced one of the Bones. The company logo appeared on a screen above his head.No flashy Vegas magic (or dancers in cow costumes, now shimmying onstage with Steak ‘n Shake signs) could mask what I just saw. This party was co-sponsored by a MAGA-branded fast-food chain owned by Sardar Biglari, a businessman who had purchased Maxim, became its editor-in-chief, and used the smutty magazine to endorse Trump in 2024. So was Frax, the stablecoin exchange, and Exodus, one of the biggest crypto wallet companies in the market. Bitcoin Magazine’s logo flashed across the stage at one point, as editor-in-chief David Bailey, in his own derivative MAGA hat, tried to hype up the crowd for J.D. Vance’s speech the next day. (“You only get to live history once,” he said, to faint cheers.)For some unknown reason, these companies were all putting their money into America250, and as I had to keep reminding myself, America250 — the government nonprofit in charge of planning the country’s celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing — was currently working to get tanks in the streets of Washington DC for Donald Trump’s birthday. I went for one last champagne flute from the glory hole, just for the novelty, and as the hand disappeared back into the wall, I caught something I’d missed earlier: above the hole was a logo for TRON, the blockchain exchange run by billionaire Justin Sun. He had faced several fraud investigations from the SEC that magically disappeared after he invested $75 million in a Trump family crypto company, and seemed more than happy to keep throwing crypto money at Trump. Recently, he won the $TRUMP meme coin dinner, spending over $16 million on the token in exchange for a private and controversial dinner with the president.TRON was also cosponsoring the America250 party.Earlier, I’d run into the Australian emcee in the elevator of The Palazzo. She’d spent the day teetering across the Nakamoto Stage in dainty kitten heels, a pinstriped blazer and miniskirt suit set, and given the gratuitous Trump praising and the fact she was blonde, I had stereotyped her as MAGA to the core. But the program was over and she was holding her heels by their ankle straps, barefoot and sighing in relief. This was not her usual style, she told an attendee. She’d take a pair of sneakers over heels if she could. But the conference organizers had told her to dress up because there were senators in attendance. “Tomorrow, the real Bitcoiners are coming,” she said, and she’d get to wear flat shoes. And the next morning, on the day of Vance’s speech, I found myself stuck outside the conference with the “real Bitcoiners.” In spite of all the emails that the conference had sent me reminding me of how strict security measures would be, possibly to overcorrect from last year’s utter shitshow around Trump’s appearance, I’d woken up too late, eaten my bagel too leisurely, got sidetracked by a police officer-turned-Bitcoin investor excited I was wearing orange (whoops), and barely missed the cutoff for the Secret Service to let me in. But the conference had set up televisions with a live feed of Vance’s speech, and the rest of the general admission attendees were remarkably chill about it, opting to mingle in the hallways until the Secret Service left. I found myself in a smaller crowd near the expo hall door, next to a young man carrying a live miniature Shiba Inu (“It’s a tiny doge!” he said proudly), and the podcaster I’d seen earlier in the sequined bomber jacket. He introduced himself as Action CEO, and with nothing else to do but wait — “You can watch the [Vance] replay,” he reassured me, “these events are mainly about networking” — we got to talking. “I’m actually excited that Trump isn’t even here, I’ll be honest with you,” he said, speaking with a rapid cadence. Trump was ultimately just one guy, and the fact that he sent his underlings and political allies — the ones who could actually implement his grand promises for the crypto industry — proved he hadn’t just been paying lip service. That said, it had come with some uncomfortable changes, including the re-emergence of Justin Sun. “It’s a little bit concerning when you say, All right, we don’t care what you did in the past. Come on out, clean slate,” he continued. “That’s the concern right now for most people. Seeing people that did wrong by the space coming back and acting like nothing happened? That’s a little concerning.” And not just that: Sun was back in the United States, having dinner with Trump, and giving him millions of dollars. “If you’re sitting in a room and having a conversation, people are literally gonna go, yeah, it’s kind of sketch that this guy is back here after everything that’s happened. You’re not gonna see it published, because it’s not a popular opinion, but we’re all definitely talking about it.” If Action’s friends weren’t comfortable talking about it openly, that fraudsters with enough money were suddenly back in the mix, it was certainly not the kind of conversation the CEOs were going to have in front of the General Admission crowd. (Though it did mean that the emcee, looking much happier than she did the day before, got to wear low-heeled boots and shorts.) But behind closed doors — or at least at the Code and Country panels, where the base pass attendees couldn’t boo them — they gave a sense of what their backroom conversations with the Trump administration did look like.“I was actually at a dinner last night and one of the things that someone from the admin said was, What if we give you guys everything you want and then you guys forget? Because there’s midterms in 2026, and hopefully 2028, and beyond,” said Sam Kazemian, the founder and CEO of Frax, which had sponsored the America250 party. “But one of the things I said was: We as an industry are very, very loyal. The crypto community has a very, very, very strong memory. And once this industry is legalized, is transparent, is safe, all of the big players understand that this wasn’t possible without this administration, this Congress, this Senate. We’re lifelong, career-long allies.”“Loyalty” is a dangerous concept with this president, who’s cheated on his three wives, stopped paying the legal fees for employees who’d taken the fall for him, ended the careers of sympathetic MAGA Republicans for insufficiently coddling him, withdrew security for government employees experiencing death threats for the sin of contradicting him in public by citing facts. It was only weeks ago that he and Vance were publicly screaming at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was at the White House to request more aid in the war against Russia, for not saying “thank you” in front of the cameras. It would be less than a week before he began threatening to cancel all of Elon Musk’s government contracts when the billionaire criticized the size of Trump’s budget, even though Musk had given him millions and helped him purge the government. And if you were to find a photo of any political leader, billionaire or CEO standing vacant-eyed next to Trump and shaking his hand, the circumstances are practically a given: they had recently made him unhappy, either for criticizing him, making an imagined slight, or simply asserting themselves. The only way they could avoid public humiliation, or their businesses being crushed via executive order, was to go to Mar-a-Lago, tell the world that the president was wonderful, and underwrite a giant party for his birthday military parade. Maybe Kazemian knew he was being tested, or maybe the 32-year old Ron Paul superfan had no idea what the administration was asking of him. Either way, he responded correctly. At least one person at the conference was thinking about ways that the government could betray the Bitcoin community. As the panel on Bitcoiners becoming sycophants of the state wrapped up, and the other panelists finished telling the government pigs to go fuck themselves and keep their hands off their nerd money, the moderator turned to Casey Rodarmor, a software engineer-turned-crypto influencer, for the last question: “Tell everyone here why Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens.”“Oh, man, I don’t know if Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens,” he responded, frowning. He had already gamed out one feasible situation where Bitcoin lost: “If we all of a sudden saw a very rapid inflation in a lot of fiat currencies, and there was a plausible scapegoat in Bitcoin all over the world, and they were able to make a sort of marketing claim that Bitcoin is causing this — Bitcoin is making your savings go to zero, it’s causing this carnage to the economy — 
If that happens worldwide, I think that’s really scary.” The moderator froze, the crowd murmured nervously, and I thought about the number of times Trump had blamed a group of people for problems they’d never caused. An awful lot of them were now being deported. “I take that seriously,” Rodarmor continued. “I don’t know that Bitcoin will succeed. I think that Bitcoin is incredibly strong, it’s incredibly difficult to fuck up. But in that case… man, I don’t know.” I had asked Action CEO earlier if Kazemian, the Frax CEO, was right — if the crypto world was unquestioningly loyal to Trump, if their support of him was unconditional. “Oh, it’s definitely conditional,” he said without hesitation, as his Trump jacket glittered under the fluorescent lights. “It’s a matter of, are you going to be doing the right things by us, by the people who are here?” We walked down the expo hall, past booths promising life-changing technological marvels, alongside thousands of people flooding into Nakamoto Hall, ready to learn how to become unfathomably rich, who paid $199 to be there.The audience of “Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sychophants of the State?”, Day Two of the Bitcoin ConferenceSee More:

Taurine supplements have been considered promising for delaying ageing, but that may not be the caseShutterstock / Eugeniusz Dudzinski The amino acid taurine was once thought to decline with age, and animal research suggested that taurine supplements could delay ageing. But a new study shows that the decline doesn’t happen consistently. In fact, taurine levels tend to increase in people over time, suggesting that low levels of the nutrient aren’t a driver of ageing. Previous research has shown that taurine concentrations decline in men as they age and that people with higher taurine levels at 60 years old tend to have better health outcomes. This, along with evidence that taurine supplements extend lifespan in mice and monkeys, suggested that low taurine contributes to ageing.Advertisement The trouble is that taurine fluctuates in response to other factors too, such as illness, stress and diet – therefore, declines in this key amino acid may not be due to ageing. Maria Emilia Fernandez at the National Institute on Aging in Maryland and her colleagues analysed taurine levels in 742 people between 26 and 100 years old. The participants, about half of whom were women, didn’t have underlying health conditions and provided three to five blood samples between January 2006 and October 2018. On average, taurine levels were almost 27 per cent higher in women at 100 years old than at 26 years old and rose about 6 per cent in men between the ages of 30 and 97. Similar results were seen in 32 monkeys that underwent three to seven blood draws between 3 and 32 years of age. Between 5 and 30 years of age, taurine levels rose 72 per cent in female monkeys and 27 per cent in male monkeys, on average. Together, these findings indicate that taurine levels are not a reliable indication of ageing. What’s more, taurine levels also varied widely between people and even within individuals over time, suggesting that other environmental factors influence them, says Fernandez. Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday. Sign up to newsletter However, some people may still benefit from taurine supplementation, says Fernandez, pointing to studies that show it helps regulate blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes or obesity. But whether it can delay ageing in otherwise healthy people is an open question. Vijay Yadav at Rutgers University in New Jersey says he and his colleagues are currently conducting a clinical trial of taurine supplementation in middle-aged adults. “We hope to finish the trial by the end of 2025,” he says. “Hopefully it will generate sufficiently rigorous data to show whether or not taurine supplementation delays the pace of ageing in humans or increases health and fitness.” Journal reference:Science DOI: 10.1126/science.adl2116 Article amended on 5 June 2025We corrected Vijay Yadav's affiliationTopics:

Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them.  There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website. Many of these have emerged in just the last two months, following in the footsteps of Manus—a general AI agent that sparked weeks of social media frenzy for invite codes after its limited-release launch in early March.  These emerging AI agents aren’t large language models themselves. Instead, they’re built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks—booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research—by using external tools and remembering instructions.  China could take the lead on building these kinds of agents. The country’s tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base could provide a favorable environment for embedding AI into daily life.  For now, its leading AI agent startups are focusing their attention on the global market, because the best Western models don’t operate inside China’s firewalls. But that could change soon: Tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent are preparing their own AI agents that could bake automation directly into their native super-apps, pulling data from their vast ecosystem of programs that dominate many aspects of daily life in the country.  As the race to define what a useful AI agent looks like unfolds, a mix of ambitious startups and entrenched tech giants are now testing how these tools might actually work in practice—and for whom. Set the standard It’s been a whirlwind few months for Manus, which was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. The company raised $75 million in a funding round led by the US venture capital firm Benchmark, took the product on an ambitious global roadshow, and hired dozens of new employees.  Even before registration opened to the public in May, Manus had become a reference point for what a broad, consumer‑oriented AI agent should accomplish. Rather than handling narrow chores for businesses, this “general” agent is designed to be able to help with everyday tasks like trip planning, stock comparison, or your kid’s school project.  Unlike previous AI agents, Manus uses a browser-based sandbox that lets users supervise the agent like an intern, watching in real time as it scrolls through web pages, reads articles, or codes actions. It also proactively asks clarifying questions, supports long-term memory that would serve as context for future tasks. “Manus represents a promising product experience for AI agents,” says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, that’s building computer use agents, AI agents that control a virtual computer. “I believe Chinese startups have a huge advantage when it comes to designing consumer products, thanks to cutthroat domestic competition that leads to fast execution and greater attention to product details.” In the case of Manus, the competition is moving fast. Two of the most buzzy follow‑ups, Genspark and Flowith, for example, are already boasting benchmark scores that match or edge past Manus’s.  Genspark, led by former Baidu executives Eric Jing and Kay Zhu, links many small “super agents” through what it calls multi‑component prompting. The agent can switch among several large language models, accepts both images and text, and carries out tasks from making slide decks to placing phone calls. Whereas Manus relies heavily on Browser Use, a popular open-source product that lets agents operate a web browser in a virtual window like a human, Genspark directly integrates with a wide array of tools and APIs. Launched in April, the company says that it already has over 5 million users and over $36 million in yearly revenue. Flowith, the work of a young team that first grabbed public attention in April 2025 at a developer event hosted by the popular social media app Xiaohongshu, takes a different tack. Marketed as an “infinite agent,” it opens on a blank canvas where each question becomes a node on a branching map. Users can backtrack, take new branches, and store results in personal or sharable “knowledge gardens”—a design that feels more like project management software (think Notion) than a typical chat interface. Every inquiry or task builds its own mind-map-like graph, encouraging a more nonlinear and creative interaction with AI. Flowith’s core agent, NEO, runs in the cloud and can perform scheduled tasks like sending emails and compiling files. The founders want the app to be a “knowledge marketbase”, and aims to tap into the social aspect of AI with the aspiration of becoming “the OnlyFans of AI knowledge creators”. What they also share with Manus is the global ambition. Both Genspark and Flowith have stated that their primary focus is the international market. A global address Startups like Manus, Genspark, and Flowith—though founded by Chinese entrepreneurs—could blend seamlessly into the global tech scene and compete effectively abroad. Founders, investors, and analysts that MIT Technology Review has spoken to believe Chinese companies are moving fast, executing well, and quickly coming up with new products.  Money reinforces the pull to launch overseas. Customers there pay more, and there are plenty to go around. “You can price in USD, and with the exchange rate that’s a sevenfold multiplier,” Manus cofounder Xiao Hong quipped on a podcast. “Even if we’re only operating at 10% power because of cultural differences overseas, we’ll still make more than in China.” But creating the same functionality in China is a challenge. Major US AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have opted out of mainland China because of geopolitical risks and challenges with regulatory compliance. Their absence initially created a black market as users resorted to VPNs and third-party mirrors to access tools like ChatGPT and Claude. That vacuum has since been filled by a new wave of Chinese chatbots—DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi—but the appetite for foreign models hasn’t gone away.  Manus, for example, uses Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet—widely considered the top model for agentic tasks. Manus cofounder Zhang Tao has repeatedly praised Claude’s ability to juggle tools, remember contexts, and hold multi‑round conversations—all crucial for turning chatty software into an effective executive assistant. But the company’s use of Sonnet has made its agent functionally unusable inside China without a VPN. If you open Manus from a mainland IP address, you’ll see a notice explaining that the team is “working on integrating Qwen’s model,” a special local version that is built on top of Alibaba’s open-source model.  An engineer overseeing ByteDance’s work on developing an agent, who spoke to MIT Technology Review anonymously to avoid sanction, said that the absence of Claude Sonnet models “limits everything we do in China.” DeepSeek’s open models, he added, still hallucinate too often and lack training on real‑world workflows. Developers we spoke with rank Alibaba’s Qwen series as the best domestic alternative, yet most say that switching to Qwen knocks performance down a notch. Jiaxin Pei, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Institute for Human‑Centered AI, thinks that gap will close: “Building agentic capabilities in base LLMs has become a key focus for many LLM builders, and once people realize the value of this, it will only be a matter of time.” For now, Manus is doubling down on audiences it can already serve. In a written response, the company said its “primary focus is overseas expansion,” noting that new offices in San Francisco, Singapore, and Tokyo have opened in the past month. A super‑app approach Although the concept of AI agents is still relatively new, the consumer-facing AI app market in China is already crowded with major tech players. DeepSeek remains the most widely used, while ByteDance’s Doubao and Moonshot’s Kimi have also become household names. However, most of these apps are still optimized for chat and entertainment rather than task execution. This gap in the local market has pushed China’s big tech firms to roll out their own user-facing agents, though early versions remain uneven in quality and rough around the edges.  ByteDance is testing Coze Space, an AI agent based on its own Doubao model family that lets users toggle between “plan” and “execute” modes, so they can either directly guide the agent’s actions or step back and watch it work autonomously. It connects up to 14 popular apps, including GitHub, Notion, and the company’s own Lark office suite. Early reviews say the tool can feel clunky and has a high failure rate, but it clearly aims to match what Manus offers. Meanwhile, Zhipu AI has released a free agent called AutoGLM Rumination, built on its proprietary ChatGLM models. Shanghai‑based Minimax has launched Minimax Agent. Both products look almost identical to Manus and demo basic tasks such as building a simple website, planning a trip, making a small Flash game, or running quick data analysis. Despite the limited usability of most general AI agents launched within China, big companies have plans to change that. During a May 15 earnings call, Tencent president Liu Zhiping teased an agent that would weave automation directly into China’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat.  Considered the original super-app, WeChat already handles messaging, mobile payments, news, and millions of mini‑programs that act like embedded apps. These programs give Tencent, its developer, access to data from millions of services that pervade everyday life in China, an advantage most competitors can only envy. Historically, China’s consumer internet has splintered into competing walled gardens—share a Taobao link in WeChat and it resolves as plaintext, not a preview card. Unlike the more interoperable Western internet, China’s tech giants have long resisted integration with one another, choosing to wage platform war at the expense of a seamless user experience. But the use of mini‑programs has given WeChat unprecedented reach across services that once resisted interoperability, from gym bookings to grocery orders. An agent able to roam that ecosystem could bypass the integration headaches dogging independent startups. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant behind the Qwen model series, has been a front-runner in China’s AI race but has been slower to release consumer-facing products. Even though Qwen was the most downloaded open-source model on Hugging Face in 2024, it didn’t power a dedicated chatbot app until early 2025. In March, Alibaba rebranded its cloud storage and search app Quark into an all-in-one AI search tool. By June, Quark had introduced DeepResearch—a new mode that marks its most agent-like effort to date.  ByteDance and Alibaba did not reply to MIT Technology Review’s request for comments. “Historically, Chinese tech products tend to pursue the all-in-one, super-app approach, and the latest Chinese AI agents reflect just that,” says Li of Simular, who previously worked at Google DeepMind on AI-enabled work automation. “In contrast, AI agents in the US are more focused on serving specific verticals.” Pei, the researcher at Stanford, says that existing tech giants could have a huge advantage in bringing the vision of general AI agents to life—especially those with built-in integration across services. “The customer-facing AI agent market is still very early, with tons of problems like authentication and liability,” he says. “But companies that already operate across a wide range of services have a natural advantage in deploying agents at scale.”

If you’ve ever wondered whether the food on your plate could shape your brain’s future, the science is starting to say: yes, it might. While healthy eating has long been linked to better brain health, new research is getting more specific about which diets help, and when you should start following them.At this year’s annual Nutrition conference in Orlando, Florida, researchers presented findings that add weight to the growing link between diet and dementia. According to a news release, study author Song-Yi Park of the University of Hawaii at Manoa said, “Our study findings confirm that healthy dietary patterns in mid to late life and their improvement over time may prevent Alzheimer’s and related dementias. This suggests that it is never too late to adopt a healthy diet to prevent dementia.”The research focused on nearly 93,000 U.S. adults from the long-running Multiethnic Cohort Study. Participants were between 45 years and 75 years old when they entered the study in the 1990s. Over time, more than 21,000 developed Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias — but those who closely followed a specific eating plan, the MIND diet, were significantly less likely to be among them.Combining the Mediterranean Diet and DASH DietThe MIND diet (short for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) blends the best elements of two established eating plans: the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet.The Mediterranean diet is inspired by the traditional cuisines of countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain. It focuses on plant-based foods (fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains), healthy fats like olive oil, and moderate amounts of fish, poultry, and dairy, with red meat eaten sparingly. It’s been linked to a lower risk of heart disease and is also environmentally friendly.The DASH diet, originally designed to lower blood pressure, shares many similarities but puts extra emphasis on limiting sodium and increasing intake of nutrients like potassium, magnesium, and calcium. It includes low-fat dairy and lean protein sources and doesn’t rely on any hard-to-find foods.The MIND diet specifically promotes brain-healthy foods like leafy greens, berries, nuts, and olive oil, combining benefits of both approaches with a focus on protecting cognitive health.Read More: Is the Mediterranean Diet Healthy?The MIND Diet Over TimeAccording to Park and her team, people who scored highest in MIND diet adherence at the study’s start had a 9 percent lower risk of developing dementia. That number was even higher with around 13 percent for African American, Latino, and White participants. Looking at those who improved their adherence to the MIND diet over time, showed a 25 percent reduction in dementia risk compared to those whose dietary habits declined, which was consistent no matter the age or racial background.“We found that the protective relationship between a healthy diet and dementia was more pronounced among African Americans, Latinos, and Whites, while it was not as apparent among Asian Americans and showed a weaker trend in Native Hawaiians,” Park said in the press release. “A tailored approach may be needed when evaluating different subpopulations’ diet quality.”Interestingly, Asian Americans also tend to have lower dementia rates overall, which researchers believe could mean other cultural eating patterns might offer similar protection than the MIND diet for that group.The Best Time to Start Is NowOne of the most encouraging findings was that starting late still helped. Participants who began following the MIND diet more closely over a 10-year period, regardless of how old they were when they began, saw benefits. This suggests that even if you didn’t grow up eating brain-boosting foods, it’s not too late to change course.It’s worth noting that the study is observational, so, by itself, it can’t prove this specific diet causes better brain health. Study author Park notes that the next step is conducting interventional studies to verify these promising results.Still, the evidence is mounting. Whether you're 45 or 75, choosing greens over greasy snacks could make a real difference when it comes to aging with or without dementia.This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:National Institute of Aging. What Do We Know About Diet and Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease?Harvard Health Publishing. A practical guide to the Mediterranean dietNational Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Following the DASH Eating PlanHaving worked as a biomedical research assistant in labs across three countries, Jenny excels at translating complex scientific concepts – ranging from medical breakthroughs and pharmacological discoveries to the latest in nutrition – into engaging, accessible content. Her interests extend to topics such as human evolution, psychology, and quirky animal stories. When she’s not immersed in a popular science book, you’ll find her catching waves or cruising around Vancouver Island on her longboard.

Many don’t like it, but (almost) everybody agrees it’s the future.“Vibe Coding” is everywhere. Tools and game engines are implementing AI-assisted coding, vibe coding interest skyrocketed on Google search, on social media, everybody claims to build apps and games in minutes, while the comment section gets flooded with angry developers calling out the pile of garbage code that will never be shipped.A screenshot from Andrej Karpathy with the original “definition” of Vibe CodingBUT, how do professionals feel about it?This is what I will cover in this article. We will look at:How people react to the term vibe coding,How their attitude differs based on who they are and their professional experienceThe reason for their stance towards “vibe coding” (with direct quotes)How they feel about the impact “vibe coding” will have in the next 5 yearsIt all started with this survey on LinkedIn. I have always been curious about how technology can support creatives and I believe that the only way to get a deeper understanding is to go beyond buzzwords and ask the hard questions. That’s why for over a year, I’ve been conducting weekly interviews with both the founders developing these tools and the creatives utilising them. If you want to learn their journeys, I’ve gathered their insights and experiences on my blog called XR AI Spotlight.Driven by the same motives and curious about people’s feelings about “vibe coding”, I asked a simple question: How does the term “Vibe Coding” make you feel?Original LinkedIn poll by Gabriele RomagnoliIn just three days, the poll collected 139 votes and it was clear that most responders didn’t have a good “vibe” about it. The remaining half was equally split between excitement and no specific feeling.But who are these people? What is their professional background? Why did they respond the way they did?Curious, I created a more comprehensive survey and sent it to everyone who voted on the LinkedIn poll.The survey had four questions:Select what describes you best: developers, creative, non-creative professionalHow many years of experience do you have? 1–5, 6–10, 11–15 or 16+Explain why the term “vibe coding” makes you feel excited/neutral/dismissive?Do you think “vibe coding” will become more relevant in the next 5 years?: It’s the future, only in niche use cases, unlikely, no idea)In a few days, I collected 62 replies and started digging into the findings, and that’s when I finally started understanding who took part in the initial poll.The audienceWhen characterising the audience, I refrained from adding too many options because I just wanted to understand:If the people responding were the ones making stuffWhat percentage of makers were creatives and what developersI was happy to see that only 8% of respondents were non-creative professionals and the remaining 92% were actual makers who have more “skin in the game“ with almost a 50/50 split between creatives and developers. There was also a good spread in the degree of professional experience of the respondents, but that’s where things started to get surprising.Respondents are mostly “makers” and show a good variety in professional experienceWhen creating 2 groups with people who have more or less than 10 years of experience, it is clear that less experienced professionals skew more towards a neutral or negative stance than the more experienced group.Experienced professionals are more positive and open to vibe codingThis might be because senior professionals see AI as a tool to accelerate their workflows, while more juniors perceive it as a competitor or threat.I then took out the non-professional creatives and looked at the attitude of these 2 groups. Not surprisingly, fewer creatives than developers have a negative attitude towards “vibe coding” (47% for developers Vs 37% for creatives), but the percentage of creatives and developers who have a positive attitude stays almost constant. This means that creatives have a more indecisive or neutral stance than developers.Creatives have a more positive attitude to vibe coding than developersWhat are people saying about “vibe coding”?As part of the survey, everybody had the chance to add a few sentences explaining their stance. This was not a compulsory field, but to my surprise, only 3 of the 62 left it empty (thanks everybody). Before getting into the sentiment analysis, I noticed something quite interesting while filtering the data. People with a negative attitude had much more to say, and their responses were significantly longer than the other group. They wrote an average of 59 words while the others barely 37 and I think is a good indication of the emotional investment of people who want to articulate and explain their point. Let’s now look at what the different groups of people replied.😍 Patterns in Positive Responses to “Vibe Coding”Positive responders often embraced vibe coding as a way to break free from rigid programming structures and instead explore, improvise, and experiment creatively.“It puts no pressure on it being perfect or thorough.”“Pursuing the vibe, trying what works and then adapt.”“Coding can be geeky and laborious… ‘vibing’ is quite nice.”This perspective repositions code not as rigid infrastructure, but something that favors creativity and playfulness over precision.Several answers point to vibe coding as a democratizing force opening up coding to a broader audience, who want to build without going through the traditional gatekeeping of engineering culture.“For every person complaining… there are ten who are dabbling in code and programming, building stuff without permission.”“Bridges creative with technical perfectly, thus creating potential for independence.”This group often used words like “freedom,” “reframing,” and “revolution.”.😑 Patterns in Neutral Responses to “Vibe Coding”As shown in the initial LinkedIn poll, 27% of respondents expressed mixed feelings. When going through their responses, they recognised potential and were open to experimentation but they also had lingering doubts about the name, seriousness, and future usefulness.“It’s still a hype or buzzword.”“I have mixed feelings of fascination and scepticism.”“Unsure about further developments.”They were on the fence and were often enthusiastic about the capability, but wary of the framing.Neutral responders also acknowledged that complex, polished, or production-level work still requires traditional approaches and framed vibe coding as an early-stage assistant, not a full solution.“Nice tool, but not more than autocomplete on steroids.”“Helps get setup quickly… but critical thinking is still a human job.”“Great for prototyping, not enough to finalize product.”Some respondents were indifferent to the term itself, viewing it more as a label or meme than a paradigm shift. For them, it doesn’t change the substance of what’s happening.“At the end of the day they are just words. Are you able to accomplish what’s needed?”“I think it’s been around forever, just now with a new name.”These voices grounded the discussion in the terminology and I think they bring up a very important point that leads to the polarisation of a lot of the conversations around “vibe coding”.🤮 Patterns in Negative Responses to “Vibe Coding”Many respondents expressed concern that vibe coding implies a casual, unstructured approach to coding. This was often linked to fears about poor code quality, bugs, and security issues.“Feels like building a house without knowing how electricity and water systems work.”“Without fundamental knowledge… you quickly lose control over the output.”The term was also seen as dismissive or diminishing the value of skilled developers. It really rubbed people the wrong way, especially those with professional experience.“It downplays the skill and intention behind writing a functional, efficient program.”“Vibe coding implies not understanding what the AI does but still micromanaging it.”Like for “neutral” respondents, there’s a strong mistrust around how the term is used (especially on social media) where it’s seen as fueling unrealistic expectations or being pushed by non-experts.“Used to promote coding without knowledge.”“Just another overhyped term like NFTs or memecoins.”“It feels like a joke that went too far.”Ultimately, I decided to compare attitudes that are excited (positive) and accepting (neutral) of vibe coding vs. those that reject or criticise it. After all, even among people who were neutral, there was a general acceptance that vibe coding has its place. Many saw it as a useful tool for things like prototyping, creative exploration, or simply making it easier to get started. What really stood out, though, was the absence of fear that was very prominent in the “negative” group and saw vibe coding as a threat to software quality or professional identity.People in the neutral and positive groups generally see potential. They view it as useful for prototyping, creative exploration, or making coding more accessible, but they still recognise the need for structure in complex systems. In contrast, the negative group rejects the concept outright, and not just the name, but what it stands for: a more casual, less rigorous approach to coding. Their opinion is often rooted in defending software engineering as a disciplined craft… and probably their job.😍 “As long as you understand the result and the process, AI can write and fix scripts much faster than humans can.”🤮 “It’s a joke. It started as a joke… but to me doesn’t encapsulate actual AI co-engineering.”On the topic of skill and control, the neutral and positive group sees AI as a helpful assistant, assuming that a human is still guiding the process. They mention refining and reviewing as normal parts of the workflow. The negative group sees more danger, fearing that vibe coding gives a false sense of competence. They describe it as producing buggy or shallow results, often in the hands of inexperienced users.😑 “Critical thinking is still a human job… but vibe coding helps with fast results.”🤮“Vibe-Coding takes away the very features of a good developer… logical thinking and orchestration are crucial.”Culturally, the divide is clear. The positive and neutral voices often embrace vibe coding as part of a broader shift, welcoming new types of creators and perspectives. They tend to come from design or interdisciplinary backgrounds and are more comfortable with playful language. On the other hand, the negative group associates the term with hype and cringe, criticising it as disrespectful to those who’ve spent years honing their technical skills.😍“It’s about playful, relaxed creation — for the love of making something.”🤮Creating a lot of unsafe bloatware with no proper planning.”What’s the future of “Vibe Coding”?The responses to the last question were probably the most surprising to me. I was expecting that the big scepticism towards vibe coding would align with the scepticism on its future, but that was not the case. 90% of people still see “vibe coding” becoming more relevant overall or in niche use cases.Vibe coding is here to stayOut of curiosity, I also went back to see if there was any difference based on professional experience, and that’s where we see the more experienced audience being more conservative. Only 30% of more senior Vs 50% of less experienced professionals see vibe coding playing a role in niche use cases and 13 % Vs only 3% of more experienced users don’t see vibe coding becoming more relevant at all.More experienced professionals are less likely to think Vibe Coding is the futureThere are still many open questions. What is “vibe coding” really? For whom is it? What can you do with it?To answer these questions, I decided to start a new survey you can find here. If you would like to further contribute to this research, I encourage you to participate and in case you are interested, I will share the results with you as well.The more I read or learn about this, I feel “Vibe Coding” is like the “Metaverse”:Some people hate it, some people love it.Everybody means something differentIn one form or another, it is here to stay.What professionals really think about “Vibe Coding” was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Scientific research across fields like chemistry, biology, and artificial intelligence has long relied on human experts to explore knowledge, generate ideas, design experiments, and refine results. Yet, as problems grow more complex and data-intensive, discovery slows. While AI tools, such as language models and robotics, can handle specific tasks, like literature searches or code analysis, they rarely encompass the entire research cycle. Bridging the gap between idea generation and experimental validation remains a key challenge. For AI to autonomously advance science, it must propose hypotheses, design and execute experiments, analyze outcomes, and refine approaches in an iterative loop. Without this integration, AI risks producing disconnected ideas that depend on human supervision for validation. Before the introduction of a unified system, researchers relied on separate tools for each stage of the process. Large language models could help find relevant scientific papers, but they didn’t directly feed into experiment design or result analysis. Robotics can assist in automating physical experiments, and coding libraries like PyTorch can help build models; however, these tools operate independently of each other. There was no single system capable of handling the entire process, from forming ideas to verifying them through experiments. This led to bottlenecks, where researchers had to connect the dots manually, slowing progress and leaving room for errors or missed opportunities. The need for an integrated system that could handle the entire research cycle became clear. Researchers from the NovelSeek Team at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory developed NovelSeek, an AI system designed to run the entire scientific discovery process autonomously. NovelSeek comprises four main modules that work in tandem: a system that generates and refines research ideas, a feedback loop where human experts can interact with and refine these ideas, a method for translating ideas into code and experiment plans, and a process for conducting multiple rounds of experiments. What makes NovelSeek stand out is its versatility; it works across 12 scientific research tasks, including predicting chemical reaction yields, understanding molecular dynamics, forecasting time-series data, and handling functions like 2D semantic segmentation and 3D object classification. The team designed NovelSeek to minimize human involvement, expedite discoveries, and deliver consistent, high-quality results. The system behind NovelSeek involves multiple specialized agents, each focused on a specific part of the research workflow. The “Survey Agent” helps the system understand the problem by searching scientific papers and identifying relevant information based on keywords and task definitions. It adapts its search strategy by first doing a broad survey of papers, then going deeper by analyzing full-text documents for detailed insights. This ensures that the system captures both general trends and specific technical knowledge. The “Code Review Agent” examines existing codebases, whether user-uploaded or sourced from public repositories like GitHub, to understand how current methods work and identify areas for improvement. It checks how code is structured, looks for errors, and creates summaries that help the system build on past work. The “Idea Innovation Agent” generates creative research ideas, pushing the system to explore different approaches and refine them by comparing them to related studies and previous results. The system even includes a “Planning and Execution Agent” that turns ideas into detailed experiments, handles errors during the testing process, and ensures smooth execution of multi-step research plans. NovelSeek delivered impressive results across various tasks. In chemical reaction yield prediction, NovelSeek improved performance from a baseline of 24.2% (with a variation of ±4.2) to 34.8% (with a much smaller variation of ±1.1) in just 12 hours, progress that human researchers typically need months to achieve. In enhancer activity prediction, a key task in biology, NovelSeek raised the Pearson correlation coefficient from 0.65 to 0.79 within 4 hours. For 2D semantic segmentation, a task used in computer vision, precision improved from 78.8% to 81.0% in just 30 hours. These performance boosts, achieved in a fraction of the time typically needed, highlight the system’s efficiency. NovelSeek also successfully managed large, complex codebases with multiple files, demonstrating its ability to handle research tasks at a project level, not just in small, isolated tests. The team has made the code open-source, allowing others to use, test, and contribute to its improvement. Several Key Takeaways from the Research on NovelSeek include: NovelSeek supports 12 research tasks, including chemical reaction prediction, molecular dynamics, and 3D object classification. Reaction yield prediction accuracy improved from 24.2% to 34.8% in 12 hours. Enhancer activity prediction performance increased from 0.65 to 0.79 in 4 hours. 2D semantic segmentation precision improved from 78.8% to 81.0% in 30 hours. NovelSeek includes agents for literature search, code analysis, idea generation, and experiment execution. The system is open-source, enabling reproducibility and collaboration across scientific fields. In conclusion, NovelSeek demonstrates how combining AI tools into a single system can accelerate scientific discovery and reduce its dependence on human effort. It ties together the key steps, generating ideas, turning them into methods, and testing them through experiments, into one streamlined process. What once took researchers months or years can now be done in days or even hours. By linking every stage of research into a continuous loop, NovelSeek helps teams move from rough ideas to real-world results more quickly. This system highlights the power of AI not just to assist, but to drive scientific research in a way that could reshape how discoveries are made across many fields. Check out the Paper and GitHub Page . All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 95k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our Newsletter. NikhilNikhil is an intern consultant at Marktechpost. He is pursuing an integrated dual degree in Materials at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Nikhil is an AI/ML enthusiast who is always researching applications in fields like biomaterials and biomedical science. With a strong background in Material Science, he is exploring new advancements and creating opportunities to contribute.Nikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces ARM and Ada-GRPO: Adaptive Reasoning Models for Efficient and Scalable Problem-SolvingNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces WEB-SHEPHERD: A Process Reward Model for Web Agents with 40K Dataset and 10× Cost EfficiencyNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces MMaDA: A Unified Multimodal Diffusion Model for Textual Reasoning, Visual Understanding, and Image GenerationNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces Differentiable MCMC Layers: A New AI Framework for Learning with Inexact Combinatorial Solvers in Neural Networks

In June, we hosted a webinar featuring experts from Arm, the Unity Accelerate Solutions team, and SYBO Games, the creator of Subway Surfers. The resulting roundtable focused on profiling tips and strategies for mobile games, the business implications of poor performance, and how SYBO shipped a hit mobile game with 3 billion downloads to date.Let’s dive into some of the follow-up questions we didn’t have time to cover during the webinar. You can also watch the full recording.We hear a lot about the Unity Profiler in relation to CPU profiling, but not as much about the Profile Analyzer (available as a Unity package). Are there any plans to improve it or integrate it into the core Profiler toolset?There are no immediate plans to integrate the Profile Analyzer into the core Editor, but this might change as our profiling tools evolve.Does Unity have any plans to add an option for the GPU Usage Profiler module to appear in percentages like it does in milliseconds?That’s a great idea, and while we can’t say yes or no at the time of this blog post, it’s a request that’s been shared with our R&D teams for possible future consideration.Do you have plans for tackling “Application Not Responding” (ANR) errors that are reported by the Google Play store and don’t contain any stack trace?Although we don’t have specific plans for tracking ANR without stack trace at the moment, we will consider it for the future roadmap.How can I share my feedback to help influence the future development of Unity’s profiling tools?You can keep track of upcoming features and share feedback via our product board and forums. We are also conducting a survey to learn more about our customers’ experience with the profiling tools. If you’ve used profiling tools before (either daily or just once) or are working on a project that requires optimization, we would love to get your input. The survey is designed to take no more than 5–10 minutes to complete.By participating, you’ll also have the chance to opt into a follow-up interview to share more feedback directly with the development team, including the opportunity to discuss potential prototypes of new features.Is there a good rule for determining what counts as a viable low-end device to target?A rule of thumb we hear from many Unity game developers is to target devices that are five years old at the time of your game’s release, as this helps to ensure the largest user base. But we also see teams reducing their release-date scope to devices that are only three years old if they’re aiming for higher graphical quality. A visually complex 3D application, for example, will have higher device requirements than a simple 2D application. This approach allows for a higher “min spec,” but reduces the size of the initial install base. It’s essentially a business decision: Will it cost more to develop for and support old devices than what your game will earn running on them?Sometimes the technical requirements of your game will dictate your minimum target specifications. So if your game uses up large amounts of texture memory even after optimization, but you absolutely cannot reduce quality or resolution, that probably rules out running on phones with insufficient memory. If your rendering solution requires compute shaders, that likely rules out devices with drivers that can’t support OpenGL ES 3.1, Metal, or Vulkan.It’s a good idea to look at market data for your priority target audience. For instance, mobile device specs can vary a lot between countries and regions. Remember to define some target “budgets” so that benchmarking goals for what’s acceptable are set prior to choosing low-end devices for testing.For live service games that will run for years, you’ll need to monitor their compatibility continuously and adapt over time based on both your actual user base and current devices on the market.Is it enough to test performance exclusively on low-end devices to ensure that the game will also run smoothly on high-end ones?It might be, if you have a uniform workload on all devices. However, you still need to consider variations across hardware from different vendors and/or driver versions.It’s common for graphically rich games to have tiers of graphical fidelity – the higher the visual tier, the more resources required on capable devices. This tier selection might be automatic, but increasingly, users themselves can control the choice via a graphical settings menu. For this style of development, you’ll need to test at least one “min spec” target device per feature/workload tier that your game supports.If your game detects the capabilities of the device it’s running on and adapts the graphics output as needed, it could perform differently on higher end devices. So be sure to test on a range of devices with the different quality levels you’ve programmed the title for.Note: In this section, we’ve specified whether the expert answering is from Arm or Unity.Do you have advice for detecting the power range of a device to support automatic quality settings, particularly for mobile?Arm: We typically see developers doing coarse capability binning based on CPU and GPU models, as well as the GPU shader core count. This is never perfect, but it’s “about right.” A lot of studios collect live analytics from deployed devices, so they can supplement the automated binning with device-specific opt-in/opt-out to work around point issues where the capability binning isn’t accurate enough.As related to the previous question, for graphically rich content, we see a trend in mobile toward settings menus where users can choose to turn effects on or off, thereby allowing them to make performance choices that suit their preferences.Unity: Device memory and screen resolution are also important factors for choosing quality settings. Regarding textures, developers should be aware that Render Textures used by effects or post-processing can become a problem on devices with high resolution screens, but without a lot of memory to match.Given the breadth of configurations available (CPU, GPU, SOC, memory, mobile, desktop, console, etc.), can you suggest a way to categorize devices to reduce the number of tiers you need to optimize for?Arm: The number of tiers your team optimizes for is really a game design and business decision, and should be based on how important pushing visual quality is to the value proposition of the game. For some genres it might not matter at all, but for others, users will have high expectations for the visual fidelity.Does the texture memory limit differ among models and brands of Android devices that have the same amount of total system memory?Arm: To a first-order approximation, we would expect the total amount of texture memory to be similar across vendors and hardware generations. There will be minor differences caused by memory layout and alignment restrictions, so it won’t be exactly the same.Is it CPU or GPU usage that contributes the most to overheating on mobile devices?Arm: It’s entirely content dependent. The CPU, GPU, or the DRAM can individually overheat a high-end device if pushed hard enough, even if you ignore the other two completely. The exact balance will vary based on the workload you are running.What tips can you give for profiling on devices that have thermal throttling? What margin would you target to avoid thermal throttling (i.e., targeting 20 ms instead of 33 ms)?Arm: Optimizing for frame time can be misleading on Android because devices will constantly adjust frequency to optimize energy usage, making frame time an incomplete measure by itself. Preferably, monitor CPU and GPU cycles per frame, as well as GPU memory bandwidth per frame, to get some value that is independent of frequency. The cycle target you need will depend on each device’s chip design, so you’ll need to experiment.Any optimization helps when it comes to managing power consumption, even if it doesn’t directly improve frame rate. For example, reducing CPU cycles will reduce thermal load even if the CPU isn’t the critical path for your game.Beyond that, optimizing memory bandwidth is one of the biggest savings you can make. Accessing DRAM is orders of magnitude more expensive than accessing local data on-chip, so watch your triangle budget and keep data types in memory as small as possible.Unity: To limit the impact of CPU clock frequency on the performance metrics, we recommend trying to run at a consistent temperature. There are a couple of approaches for doing this:Run warm: Run the device for a while so that it reaches a stable warm state before profiling.Run cool: Leave the device to cool for a while before profiling. This strategy can eliminate confusion and inconsistency in profiling sessions by taking captures that are unlikely to be thermally throttled. However, such captures will always represent the best case performance a user will see rather than what they might actually see after long play sessions. This strategy can also delay the time between profiling runs due to the need to wait for the cooling period first.With some hardware, you can fix the clock frequency for more stable performance metrics. However, this is not representative of most devices your users will be using, and will not report accurate real-world performance. Basically, it’s a handy technique if you are using a continuous integration setup to check for performance changes in your codebase over time.Any thoughts on Vulkan vs OpenGL ES 3 on Android? Vulkan is generally slower performance-wise. At the same time, many devices lack support for various features on ES3.Arm: Recent drivers and engine builds have vastly improved the quality of the Vulkan implementations available; so for an equivalent workload, there shouldn’t be a performance gap between OpenGL ES and Vulkan (if there is, please let us know). The switch to Vulkan is picking up speed and we expect to see more people choosing Vulkan by default over the next year or two. If you have counterexamples of areas where Vulkan isn’t performing well, please get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you.What tools can we use to monitor memory bandwidth (RAM <-> VRAM)?Arm: The Streamline Profiler in Arm Mobile Studio can measure bandwidth between Mali GPUs and the external DRAM (or system cache).Should you split graphical assets by device tiers or device resolution?Arm: You can get the best result by retuning assets, but it’s expensive to do. Start by reducing resolution and frame rate, or disabling some optional post-processing effects.What is the best way to record performance metric statistics from our development build?Arm: You can use the Performance Advisor tool in Arm Mobile Studio to automatically capture and export performance metrics from the Mali GPUs, although this comes with a caveat: The generation of JSON reports requires a Professional Edition license.Unity: The Unity Profiler can be used to view common rendering metrics, such as vertex and triangle counts in the Rendering module. Plus you can include custom packages, such as System Metrics Mali, in your project to add low-level Mali GPU metrics to the Unity Profiler.What are your recommendations for profiling shader code?You need a GPU Profiler to do this. The one you choose depends on your target platform. For example, on iOS devices, Xcode’s GPU Profiler includes the Shader Profiler, which breaks down shader performance on a line-by-line basis.Arm Mobile Studio supports Mali Offline Compiler, a static analysis tool for shader code and compute kernels. This tool provides some overall performance estimates and recommendations for the Arm Mali GPU family.When profiling, the general rule is to test your game or app on the target device(s). With the industry moving toward more types of chipsets (Apple M1, Arm, x86 by Intel, AMD, etc.), how can developers profile and pinpoint issues on the many different hardware configurations in a reasonable amount of time?The proliferation of chipsets is primarily a concern on desktop platforms. There are a limited number of hardware architectures to test for console games. On mobile, there’s Apple’s A Series for iOS devices and a range of Arm and Qualcomm architectures for Android – but selecting a manageable list of representative mobile devices is pretty straightforward.On desktop it’s trickier because there’s a wide range of available chipsets and architectures, and buying Macs and PCs for testing can be expensive. Our best advice is to do what you can. No studio has infinite time and money for testing. We generally wouldn’t expect any huge surprises when comparing performance between an Intel x86 CPU and a similarly specced AMD processor, for instance. As long as the game performs comfortably on your minimum spec machine, you should be reasonably confident about other machines. It’s also worth considering using analytics, such as Unity Analytics, to record frame rates, system specs, and player options’ settings to identify hotspots or problematic configurations.We’re seeing more studios move to using at least some level of automated testing for regular on-device profiling, with summary stats published where the whole team can keep an eye on performance across the range of target devices. With well-designed test scenes, this can usually be made into a mechanical process that’s suited for automation, so you don’t need an experienced technical artist or QA tester running builds through the process manually.Do you ever see performance issues on high-end devices that don’t occur on the low-end ones?It’s uncommon, but we have seen it. Often the issue lies in how the project is configured, such as with the use of fancy shaders and high-res textures on high-end devices, which can put extra pressure on the GPU or memory. Sometimes a high-end mobile device or console will use a high-res phone screen or 4K TV output as a selling point but not necessarily have enough GPU power or memory to live up to that promise without further optimization.If you make use of the current versions of the C# Job System, verify whether there’s a job scheduling overhead that scales with the number of worker threads, which in turn, scales with the number of CPU cores. This can result in code that runs more slowly on a 64+ core Threadripper™ than on a modest 4-core or 8-core CPU. This issue will be addressed in future versions of Unity, but in the meantime, try limiting the number of job worker threads by setting JobsUtility.JobWorkerCount.What are some pointers for setting a good frame budget?Most of the time when we talk about frame budgets, we’re talking about the overall time budget for the frame. You calculate 1000/target frames per second (fps) to get your frame budget: 33.33 ms for 30 fps, 16.66 ms for 60 fps, 8.33 ms for 120 Hz, etc. Reduce that number by around 35% if you’re on mobile to give the chips a chance to cool down between each frame. Dividing the budget up to get specific sub-budgets for different features and/or systems is probably overkill except for projects with very specific, predictable systems, or those that make heavy use of Time Slicing.Generally, profiling is the process of finding the biggest bottlenecks – and therefore, the biggest potential performance gains. So rather than saying, “Physics is taking 1.2 ms when the budget only allows for 1 ms,” you might look at a frame and say, “Rendering is taking 6 ms, making it the biggest main thread CPU cost in the frame. How can we reduce that?”It seems like profiling early and often is still not common knowledge. What are your thoughts on why this might be the case?Building, releasing, promoting, and managing a game is difficult work on multiple fronts. So there will always be numerous priorities vying for a developer’s attention, and profiling can fall by the wayside. They know it’s something they should do, but perhaps they’re unfamiliar with the tools and don’t feel like they have time to learn. Or, they don’t know how to fit profiling into their workflows because they’re pushed toward completing features rather than performance optimization.Just as with bugs and technical debt, performance issues are cheaper and less risky to address early on, rather than later in a project’s development cycle. Our focus is on helping to demystify profiling tools and techniques for those developers who are unfamiliar with them. That’s what the profiling e-book and its related blog post and webinar aim to support.Is there a way to exclude certain methods from instrumentation or include only specific methods when using Deep Profiling in the Unity Profiler? When using a lot of async/await tasks, we create large stack traces, but how can we avoid slowing down both the client and the Profiler when Deep Profiling?You can enable Allocation call stacks to see the full call stacks that lead to managed allocations (shown as magenta in the Unity CPU Profiler Timeline view). Additionally, you can – and should! – manually instrument long-running methods and processes by sprinkling ProfilerMarkers throughout your code. There’s currently no way to automatically enable Deep Profiling or disable profiling entirely in specific parts of your application. But manually adding ProfilerMarkers and enabling Allocation call stacks when required can help you dig down into problem areas without having to resort to Deep Profiling.As of Unity 2022.2, you can also use our IgnoredByDeepProfilerAttribute to prevent the Unity Profiler from capturing method calls. Just add the IgnoredByDeepProfiler attribute to classes, structures, and methods.Where can I find more information on Deep Profiling in Unity?Deep Profiling is covered in our Profiler documentation. Then there’s the most in-depth, single resource for profiling information, the Ultimate Guide to profiling Unity games e-book, which links to relevant documentation and other resources throughout.Is it correct that Deep Profiling is only useful for the Allocations Profiler and that it skews results so much that it’s not useful for finding hitches in the game?Deep Profiling can be used to find the specific causes of managed allocations, although Allocation call stacks can do the same thing with less overhead, overall. At the same time, Deep Profiling can be helpful for quickly investigating why one specific ProfilerMarker seems to be taking so long, as it’s more convenient to enable than to add numerous ProfilerMarkers to your scripts and rebuild your game. But yes, it does skew performance quite heavily and so shouldn’t be enabled for general profiling.Is VSync worth setting to every VBlank? My mobile game runs at a very low fps when it’s disabled.Mobile devices force VSync to be enabled at a driver/hardware level, so disabling it in Unity’s Quality settings shouldn’t make any difference on those platforms. We haven’t heard of a case where disabling VSync negatively affects performance. Try taking a profile capture with VSync enabled, along with another capture of the same scene but with VSync disabled. Then compare the captures using Profile Analyzer to try to understand why the performance is so different.How can you determine if the main thread is waiting for the GPU and not the other way around?This is covered in the Ultimate Guide to profiling Unity games. You can also get more information in the blog post, Detecting performance bottlenecks with Unity Frame Timing Manager.Generally speaking, the telltale sign is that the main thread waits for the Render thread while the Render thread waits for the GPU. The specific marker names will differ depending on your target platform and graphics API, but you should look out for markers with names such as “PresentFrame” or “WaitForPresent.”Is there a solid process for finding memory leaks in profiling?Use the Memory Profiler to compare memory snapshots and check for leaks. For example, you can take a snapshot in your main menu, enter your game and then quit, go back to the main menu, and take a second snapshot. Comparing these two will tell you whether any objects/allocations from the game are still hanging around in memory.Does it make sense to optimize and rewrite part of the code for the DOTS system, for mobile devices including VR/AR? Do you use this system in your projects?A number of game projects now make use of parts of the Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS). Native Containers, the C# Job System, Mathematics, and the Burst compilerare all fully supported packages that you can use right away to write optimal, parallelized, high-performance C# (HPC#) code to improve your project’s CPU performance.A smaller number of projects are also using Entities and associated packages, such as the Hybrid Renderer, Unity Physics, and NetCode. However, at this time, the packages listed are experimental, and using them involves accepting a degree of technical risk. This risk derives from an API that is still evolving, missing or incomplete features, as well as the engineering learning curve required to understand Data-Oriented Design (DOD) to get the most out of Unity’s Entity Component System (ECS). Unity engineer Steve McGreal wrote a guide on DOTS best practices, which includes some DOD fundamentals and tips for improving ECS performance.How do you go about setting limits on SetPass calls or shader complexity? Can you even set limits beforehand?Rendering is a complex process and there is no practical way to set a hard limit on the maximum number of SetPass calls or a metric for shader complexity. Even on a fixed hardware platform, such as a single console, the limits will depend on what kind of scene you want to render, and what other work is happening on the CPU and GPU during a frame.That’s why the rule on when to profile is “early and often.” Teams tend to create a “vertical slice” demo early on during production – usually a short burst of gameplay developed to the level of visual fidelity intended for the final game. This is your first opportunity to profile rendering and figure out what optimizations and limits might be needed. The profiling process should be repeated every time a new area or other major piece of visual content is added.Here are additional resources for learning about performance optimization:BlogsOptimize your mobile game performance: Expert tips on graphics and assetsOptimize your mobile game performance: Expert tips on physics, UI, and audio settingsOptimize your mobile game performance: Expert tips on profiling, memory, and code architecture from Unity’s top engineersExpert tips on optimizing your game graphics for consolesProfiling in Unity 2021 LTS: What, when, and howHow-to pagesProfiling and debugging toolsHow to profile memory in UnityBest practices for profiling game performanceE-booksOptimize your console and PC game performanceOptimize your mobile game performanceUltimate guide to profiling Unity gamesLearn tutorialsProfiling CPU performance in Android builds with Android StudioProfiling applications – Made with UnityEven more advanced technical content is coming soon – but in the meantime, please feel free to suggest topics for us to cover on the forum and check out the full roundtable webinar recording.

Fresh fava–also called faba–beans in Spain. The season for harvesting fresh faba beans in this region lasts from September into November. CREDIT: Carlos Castro/Europa Press via Getty Images. Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Beef production is a significant source of planet-warming greenhouse gasses, and its land use often leads to deforestation. Plant-based food products are thus widely considered to be a more sustainable alternative. But there’s one problem: to most people, they don’t taste nearly as good as a juicy ribeye steak.  In particular, people don’t like fava beans (also called faba beans) because of their bitterness and the dry sensation they cause in the mouth, according to a Finnish consumer study reported by the University of Helsinki.The legume, however, has incredible potential. It’s highly nutritious and provides a great source of amino acids. What’s more, dried faba beans have more protein than red meat, and some studies have even suggested that eating them improves the motor skills of patients with Parkinson’s disease. “People avoid faba beans in cooking and in the food industry especially because of their bitterness. In their current form, faba bean products have not sold very well either,” Fabio Tuccillo, a sensory and consumer scientist conducting his doctoral research at the University of Helsinki, explained in a statement. “They are often also heavily seasoned to cover the bitter taste. Therefore, it is important to identify the compounds that cause unpleasant flavours.”  [ Related: A new ingredient could revolutionize white bread. ] The idea is that if scientists discover the compounds behind these flavors, they can modify them through new technologies, processing methods, and even plant-breeding approaches to make fava beans a better-tasting ingredient for plant-based foods. In this spirit, Tuccillo reveals in his doctoral thesis that the bitterness and mouth-drying feeling is associated with compounds called vicine and convicine, in addition to several amino acids including phenylalanine, according to the university. He also identified compounds responsible for the beans’ cereal-like smell.  Fava beans “can be used in a diverse range of food products, such as bread, pastry and other products. Once we know how to reduce the unpleasant flavour and sensation, we can produce increasingly pleasant faba bean raw materials,” explained Tuccillo, who is defending his doctoral thesis today. “Improving the sensory quality of raw materials made from faba beans is necessary, if the aim is to succeed in the food market with products supporting sustainable development and plant-based diets.”  Perhaps we’ll all be enjoying delicious fava bread sooner than you think. 

What just happened? The Department of Energy has announced plans for a new supercomputer designed to significantly accelerate research across a wide range of scientific fields. The initiative highlights the growing convergence between commercial AI development and the computational demands of cutting-edge scientific discovery. The advanced system, to be housed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and scheduled to become operational in 2026, will be named "Doudna" in honor of Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, whose groundbreaking work on CRISPR gene editing has revolutionized molecular biology. Dell Technologies has been selected to deliver the Doudna supercomputer, marking a significant shift in the landscape of government-funded high-performance computing. While companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise have traditionally dominated this space, Dell's successful bid signals a new chapter. "A big win for Dell," said Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, in an interview with The New York Times, noting the company's historically limited presence in this domain. Dell executives explained that the Doudna project enabled them to move beyond the longstanding practice of building custom systems for individual laboratories. Instead, they focused on developing a flexible platform capable of serving a broad array of users. "This market had shifted into some form of autopilot. What we did was disengage the autopilot," said Paul Perez, senior vice president and technology fellow at Dell. The Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A defining feature of Doudna will be its use of Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform, engineered to combine the strengths of traditional scientific simulations with the power of modern AI. Unlike previous Department of Energy supercomputers, which relied on processors from Intel or AMD, Doudna will incorporate a general-purpose Arm-based CPU from Nvidia, paired with the company's Rubin AI chips designed specifically for artificial intelligence and simulation workloads. // Related Stories The architecture aims to meet the needs of the laboratory's 11,000 users, who increasingly depend on both high-precision modeling and rapid AI-driven data analysis. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, described the new system with enthusiasm. "Doudna is a time machine for science – compressing years of discovery into days," he said, adding that it will let "scientists delve deeper and think bigger to seek the fundamental truths of the universe." In terms of performance, Doudna is expected to be over 10 times faster than the lab's current flagship system, making it the Department of Energy's most powerful resource for training AI models and conducting advanced simulations. Jonathan Carter, associate lab director for computing sciences at Berkeley Lab, said the system's architecture was shaped by the evolving needs of researchers – many of whom are now using AI to augment simulations in areas like geothermal energy and quantum computing. Doudna's design reflects a broader shift in supercomputing. Traditional systems have prioritized 64-bit calculations for maximum numerical accuracy, but modern AI workloads often benefit from lower-precision operations (such as 16-bit or 8-bit) that enable faster processing speeds. Dion Harris, Nvidia's head of data center product marketing, noted that the flexibility to combine different levels of precision opens new frontiers for scientific research. The supercomputer will also be tightly integrated with the Energy Sciences Network, allowing researchers nationwide to stream data directly into Doudna for real-time analysis. Sudip Dosanjh, director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, described the new system as "designed to accelerate a broad set of scientific workflows."