TL;DR: Eli Lilly has signed a deal worth up to $2.75 billion with Insilico Medicine, a startup that uses AI to develop drugs. Only $115 million of that is upfront—the rest is contingent on milestones that could take many years to hit. It's the latest move in pharma's all-in bet on AI, which has proven it can speed up early-stage drug development. But no completely AI-discovered drug has cleared FDA approval yet, and the hard part is still ahead.

What happened: Lilly gets exclusive worldwide rights to a specific portfolio of Insilico's preclinical AI-designed drugs. This is the two companies' third deal in three years: a software license in 2023, a $100 million research collaboration in late 2025, now this. This latest agreement fits a deliberate broader AI strategy for Lilly—including a co-innovation AI lab with Nvidia announced in January, with up to $1 billion invested over five years. It's also part of a wider push across Big Pharma, which is reportedly staring down an estimated $300 billion in prescription drug revenue exposed to patent expiration by 2030 and needs to reload pipelines fast.

What AI has proven: The early-stage speed gains are real. Insilico's rentosertib—the first drug where both target and molecule were identified entirely by generative AI—went from concept to clinical candidate in 18 months (versus the standard three to six years through traditional methods, according to Insilico). The core case for AI drug discovery may not be about drugs reaching patients faster—it's about more shots on goal at a fraction of the per-shot cost. If you can generate candidates faster and cheaper, even an unchanged clinical failure rate should eventually produce more approvals.

What’s unproven: AI hasn't yet demonstrated it can improve on the roughly 90% clinical trial failure rate for drug candidates—and trials are where the real money burns. A drug can take around 10–15 years to reach market from discovery and costs anywhere between $1.1 billion and $2.6 billion. Right now, AI doesn't widely touch the back half of the process (but some GLP-1 makers have started to integrate AI into trials). Lilly's own CFO, Lucas Montarce, said in March that the company is "investing heavily" in AI for R&D, but that it will "take more time" to get AI drugs from research to clinical testing, according to the Financial Times.

Bottom line: Whether the shots-on-goal math holds is a question 2026 will start to answer, as the first wave of AI-designed candidates enters Phase 3 clinical trials—including for asthma and pulmonary fibrosis. The Eli Lilly-Insilico deal's own structure captures where things stand: $115 million in hand, $2.6 billion in hope. —SM

The AirPods Max 2 ANC upgrade is real

I'm on the subway, crammed between strangers, the train screeching so hard it sounds like it's auditioning for a horror movie. With the AirPods Max 2 on, I could barely hear it—it was quiet enough that my brain filtered it out as background noise.

I've owned the first-generation AirPods Max since December 2024 and wear them almost daily, so when Apple sent over the new version last week—ahead of their release on April 1—I had a solid baseline. I tested them for five days, and I'll keep using them for the next six months to report back with more long-term observations (if you have any specific questions, let me know).

The H2 chip promises up to 1.5 times more effective active noise cancellation (ANC) than the original, and in my testing around New York City, that held up. The subway screeching was the most dramatic proof point, but I also sat on my couch with the robot vacuum running directly beneath me and could barely register it. Office chatter wasn't a bother at all. The original AirPods Max are already good. The 2s are noticeably better.

The Good: The ANC improvement is immediately noticeable in real-world conditions—subway noise, traffic, and ambient chatter all but disappear. The sound is really good. The H2 chip also unlocks new features: Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness (which automatically lowers your volume when you start talking to someone), and Live Translation—all of which can be useful situationally but don’t feel groundbreaking to me. The battery lasted four full days before I needed to charge (Apple claims up to 20 hours with ANC on, which is the same as the originals).

The Bad: At $549—the same price as the originals at launch in 2020—these are still pricey even by premium over-ear headphones standards, running around $100 more than two of their biggest competitors, the Sony WH-1000XM6 and the Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2nd Gen (both of which also regularly go on sale). The design is essentially identical to the original (the orange colorway is really nice, but reads more peach in person), and they are still fairly heavy, so the headband can get uncomfortable after a few hours of continuous wear (though that's true of the first gen, too).

Verdict: Signal (If you’re in the market for premium over-ear headphones and price doesn’t matter, the ANC alone earns it. If you already own the original AirPods Max and the new software features don't excite you, there's no rush.) —SM

Disclosure: Companies may send us products to test, but they never pay for our opinions. Our recommendations are unbiased and unfiltered, and Tech Brew may earn a commission if you buy through our links.

If you have a gadget you love, let us know and we may feature it in a future edition.

A good relationship ultimately comes down to compatibility: aligned goals, complementary communication styles, shared financial values—and, apparently, how many hours a day you spend coding with Claude.

Welcome to what Business Insider calls the “Claude-gap,” a new relationship fault line in which one half of a couple is deep in a Claude Code obsession, while the other is left competing for attention and emotional bandwidth. In several interviews with real couples, BI captures the specific pain points of love in the vibe coding age—like the struggle to hold your partner’s focus because they’re busy instructing Claude to build an app to track their pet’s meals. Or trying to show enthusiasm when they gush about something their precocious AI coding agent just did (for the 100th time). One couple had to set a firm boundary: no using Claude when the kids are around.

There are a few lessons here: first, how hard it can be to maintain a relationship where both parties feel valued. Second, how quickly vibe coding has sunk its hooks into people since the term started to gain popularity in 2025. As one 53-year-old pediatric surgeon explained: You open your laptop in the evening for a quick few prompts, and the next thing you know, it’s morning again. Multiple vibe coders compared the compulsion to being addicted to a video game.

At $200 a month for the top-tier Claude Max plan, it’s also a pricey hobby to watch your partner emotionally neglect you for. But the couples featured here are likely far from alone. Claude’s paid subscriptions have reportedly more than doubled in 2026, and in March it reached No. 1 on the US App Store for the first time. That’s a whole lot of new throuples. —WK

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