Igor Mordatch is working to build machines that can carry on a conversation. That’s something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword. But Mordatch is different. He’s not a linguist. He doesn’t deal in the AI techniques that typically reach for language. He’s a roboticist who began his career as an animator.

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Next month, a venture capital firm called Blockchain Capital plans to do something that could change the way companies get funded—and perhaps even the way they operate. Instead of an Initial Public Offering, in which a company sells stock via a regulated exchange like Nasdaq, the San Francisco-based VC firm is making an Initial Coin Offering, selling its own digital token as a way of raising money for its latest venture fund. Anyone who buys a token will be buying into the fund.

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Have you heard? Uber is hiring. CEO Travis Kalanick wants a chief operating officer. Heapparently came to this decision in the midst of the company’s worst PR crisis yet. Accusations of a misogynistic company culture,aGoogle lawsuit, and allegations that it misled regulators with phantom rides leave the company in an almost permanent state of damage control.Hiring a COO almost certainly is Kalanick’s attempt to show that he, and his company, can grow up.

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The Congressional Budget Office just released its much-awaited report analyzing the possible effects of the American Health Care Act, the GOP plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. The verdict is a doozy. Twenty-four million fewer Americans would have health insurance by 2026, according to the CBO, with 14 million of them losing coverage in 2018.

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Imagine a world where Comcast slows video streaming from Fox News’s website to a pixelated crawl while boosting Rachel Maddow—who happens to star on Comcast-owned MSNBC. What if Verizon, which owns the liberal Huffington Post, charged you more to visit right-wing Breitbart. Or maybe Google Fiber bans access to the alt-right social network Gab.

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Here’s a math problem: Ten startup founders and CEOs hurtle down the long highway from Omaha to Lincoln, Nebraska, in a cornflower blue bus. One of the execs builds construction management software. Another runs a blog-hosting startup. A third makes medical devices used in colon surgeries. They sit facing each other on two banquettes, swapping war stories and offering each other advice on hiring and raising money.

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For decades, two companies worked side by side to build the very foundation of personal computing. Microsoft built the operating system—Windows—and Intel built the chips. But Wintel is no more. Sure, Windows will continue to run on Intel chips. But Wintel as a mighty alliance has died. It’s been fading for years, and this week Microsoft snuffed out the last of it.

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Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the FCC, doesn’t like the net neutrality rules enforced by the agency President Trump named him to lead. He voted against them as a commissioner in 2015, and in a speech after Trump’s election said their days arenumbered. But until this week, Pai hasn’t explainedhow he would go about reversing the rules.

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Lester Packingham Jr. registered as a sex offender in 2002 after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl when he was 21. But that offense isn’t what brought Packingham to the Supreme Court of the United States on Monday. The crime this time around? A Facebook post. The post itself was benign enough. In 2010, Packingham took to Facebook to celebrate a recently dismissed parking ticket. “Praise be to GOD, WOW!” he wrote.

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Within the next five years, Google will produce a viable quantum computer. That’s the stake the company has just planted. In the pages of Nature late last week, researchers from Google’s Quantum AI Laboratory told the world that a machine leveraging the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics will soon outperform traditional computers on certain tasks.

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