.jpg)
Welcome to The AI Loop #18. We launched a new healthcare-focused quest, minted Soulbound Tokens for our CAPTCHA champions. Meanwhile, a Turing Award winner raised a billion dollars for "world models," an 88-year-old legend published a paper crediting AI for solving open math, and Google Gemini became the fastest-growing AI site on the planet. Let's get into it.
Perle Labs Update
New Quests, Soulbound Tokens, and a Founder on Stage
This week we shipped something new for the healthcare community: the Clinical Documentation Error Detection Quest, a task where contributors identify safety-critical errors in clinical notes to help train AI systems that assist medical professionals. It's one of our most specialized quests yet, and the response was immediate: 50,000 views and nearly a thousand likes within the first day.
We also rolled out the Human CAPTCHA Master Soulbound Token (SBT). This special edition, non-transferable token is distributed directly to the wallets of users who passed the Human CAPTCHA challenge. If you earned one, it's a permanent on-chain credential proving you're a verified human. The community started flexing their SBTs across Crypto Twitter within hours.
Top AI Stories
Yann LeCun's AMI Labs Raises $1.03B — Europe's Largest Seed Round Ever
Yann LeCun is betting a billion dollars that the future of AI isn't chatbots — it's world models. His startup AMI Labs closed a $1.03 billion seed round (€890 million), the largest in European history, at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with backing from Nvidia, Samsung, Temasek, and individuals including Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Cuban, and Eric Schmidt.
The idea behind world models is that AI systems should build internal representations of how the physical world works — rather than predicting the next word in a sequence. CEO Alexandre LeBrun told TechCrunch: "My prediction is that 'world models' will be the next buzzword. In six months, every company will call itself a world model to raise funding." LeCun's vision is ambitious: domestic robots with common sense, smart glasses that understand context, and AI that reasons about physics. AMI Labs has also committed to open-sourcing much of its code, signaling a bet that openness accelerates progress.
Source: TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/09/yann-lecuns-ami-labs-raises-1-03-billion-to-build-world-models/
An 88-Year-Old Legend Published a Paper, and Gave Claude the Credit
Donald Knuth , the Turing Award-winning father of algorithm analysis and author of The Art of Computer Programming, just published a paper titled "Claude's Cycles." The reason: Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 solved an open problem in graph theory that had gone unsolved by human mathematicians. The problem involved decomposing arcs of a directed graph on a 3D toroidal grid into three Hamiltonian cycles for all odd values of m greater than 2.
Claude solved in 31 iterative steps, and Knuth then rigorously proved the construction was correct — discovering 760 similar decompositions in the process. At 88, Knuth wrote that the result forced him to re-evaluate the role of generative AI in mathematical research. The paper is hosted on his Stanford faculty page and was revised on March 6. This isn't just an AI benchmark win — it's one of the most credentialed mathematicians alive acknowledging that AI is now a genuine collaborator in frontier research.
Source: Stanford CS | https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf
Google Gemini Is the Fastest-Growing AI Website, Up 643% Year-Over-Year
Google Gemini isn't just growing — it's growing faster than every other AI platform by a massive margin. According to Similarweb data reported by 9to5Google, Gemini saw 643% year-over-year growth in web visits comparing February 2026 to February 2025. For comparison: ChatGPT grew 37%, Perplexity grew 39%, Claude grew 297%, and Grok grew 480%. DeepSeek actually lost traffic year-over-year.
The data covers gemini.google.com only and excludes mobile app usage, meaning the real numbers are likely even larger. Google's aggressive rollout of Gemini across Search, Workspace, and Android is clearly paying off. While competitors fight for niche audiences, Google is leveraging its distribution advantage to put Gemini in front of billions. The question is whether traffic translates to retention — but at 643% growth, Google's scale moat is widening fast.
Stay in the Loop
That's a wrap on Edition #18. A billion-dollar bet on world models, an 88-year-old Turing Award winner crediting AI for solving open math, and Google Gemini growing faster than anything else in the space. The pace is accelerating.
Join the Perle Labs community on X (https://x.com/perlelabs), Discord (https://discord.gg/joinperle), and Telegram (https://t.me/perlelabs) to stay connected and catch the next drop of insights from across the ecosystem.
