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This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Reading OpenAI’s account last week of how some of its models broke their containment and hacked into the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company, was the first time I got…
Outside the small town of Paducah, Kentucky, a wealth of uranium is locked away in thousands of storage cylinders filled with waste material from a now-closed nuclear enrichment facility. Lasers could help get it out. A company called Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is looking to reprocess this old material with a new technology called laser…
Imagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy. Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives. Today they can exchange data, but they are not yet able to actually coordinate…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How lasers could help provide fuel for nuclear reactors Nuclear power provides about 9% of global electricity today, and that fraction could tick up as countries look to build new reactors.…
For the enterprise, the promise of agentic AI is much more than just a better chatbot. It is software agents that execute business tasks end-to-end across people, business workflows, data, and systems. The platform best-suited to run agents is built with proper CPU capacity, resilient data access, policy-aware tool use, observability, memory management, and the…
Drug discovery is a high-cost, high-risk endeavor that is under growing pressure from a market increasingly defined by first-mover advantage. Since the 1950s, the cost of developing new pharmaceuticals has roughly doubled every nine years—a phenomenon known as Eroom’s Law. Today, bringing a new drug to market takes an average of 10-15 years and costs…
This week, I covered a fascinating effort to preserve organs outside the body. There’s a huge shortage of donor organs, and one of the main reasons is time—they survive only a matter of hours outside the body, even when they’re kept on ice. Doctors dream of organ banks—stores of human organs that can be preserved…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Supercooled kidneys have been transplanted into pigs in a “landmark achievement” When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been removed from a donor’s…
When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been carefully removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have a matter of hours to get it into a recipient. Leave it too long and the organ will become unusable. In most cases, organs will be kept…
Designing and developing a new medicine is an expensive, failure-prone scientific challenge. A new drug can take many years to develop, at the cost of a significant investment. And even then, most possible candidates never reach the patient. For biologic medicines, therapies made from engineered proteins rather than synthetic chemistry (which are often used to…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about…
On July 3, as a heat wave swept the region, New York State’s grid imported 52 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to meet about 9% of its total electricity demand that day. Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens called the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE).…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA’s new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will…
When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy’s most precise disappearing acts to date. The telescope will carry the first space-bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography. It will allow astronomers…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself Last weekend, several current and former advisers to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading…
The conversation about AI often centers on algorithms, computing power, or huge investments in new semiconductor fabrication plants and hyperscale data centers. But beneath each of these advances is another layer of innovation that makes them possible: advanced materials. Every new generation of AI technology demands more processing power, more memory, greater energy efficiency, and…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Over the weekend, several current and former advisors to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading AI companies. David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto “czar” until…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring The next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your résumé before any human sees it. But there’s…
The next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your résumé before any human sees it. But there’s good reason to question whether AI will judge you fairly. Researchers already know that LLMs pick up human biases from their training data. New research suggests that LLMs can also develop their own biases from…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. There’s a lot of hype around perimenopause. Don’t buy it. Perimenopause used to be considered taboo, but not anymore. Thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers,…
Every morning, airline dispatchers, grid operators, and farmers around the world make decisions based on the same thing: a weather forecast. While these forecasts are something that most people glance at for two seconds, weather predictions influence major strategic decisions in many industries, with real money, livelihoods, and even actual lives at stake. Farmers use…
Perimenopause has entered the chat. Perimenopause—and its better-known relative, menopause—used to be considered taboo. Not anymore, thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers. Perhaps it’s my age, but these days, both my algorithm and my conversations with friends increasingly swing toward perimenopause. Menopause is defined as the life stage that…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Meet GPT-Red: an LLM super-hacker OpenAI built to make its models safer OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other…
It feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer—seriously, these heat waves in New York have been brutal—but we need to talk about heat pumps. The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. (For what it’s worth, many heat…
OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other models boost their defenses against cyberattacks. Last week the company released the latest version of its flagship LLM, GPT-5.6. OpenAI says that training it against GPT-Red made the model its most robust release yet. GPT-Red automates…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. PsiQuantum has a plan to make a massive quantum computer out of light The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What Anthropic’s latest AI discovery does—and doesn’t—show —James O’Donnell When Anthropic announced last week that it had found a new window into its models’ “internal thoughts” as they reason through answers,…
The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data center crossed with an ice cream factory. Inside will be some 100 stainless-steel cabinets, each about six feet tall and connected to a supply of liquid helium that keeps them only a few degrees above absolute zero.…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Anthropic—currently the world’s most valuable AI company, with a nearly $1 trillion valuation—has a reputation for publishing strange and heady research. It’s looking into whether AI models can feel pain, for example,…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Sperm donors need limits, says a European fertility group Ties van der Meer doesn’t know how many siblings he has. The 47-year-old was conceived at a private fertility clinic using sperm…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Anthropic found a hidden space where Claude puzzles over concepts The AI firm Anthropic has got the clearest glimpse yet at what’s really going on inside large language models as they…
Ties van der Meer doesn’t know how many siblings he has. The 47-year-old was conceived at a private fertility clinic in the Netherlands using sperm provided by an anonymous donor. After the Netherlands banned anonymous donation in 2004, the doctor who ran the clinic destroyed records that might have identified those donors, he says. He…
The AI firm Anthropic has developed a technique that has given it the clearest glimpse yet at what’s really going on inside large language models as they answer questions or carry out tasks. What they found ranges from the mundane to the unnerving. Researchers at the company built a tool called the Jacobian lens (or…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Four nuclear reactors hit a big milestone in the US —Casey Crownhart I was really looking forward to July 4, and not just because I love a poolside barbecue. This year…
I was really looking forward to July 4, and not just because I love a poolside barbecue. This year the American holiday also marked a big symbolic deadline for US nuclear power. Last year the Trump administration set a goal to see three new microreactors achieve criticality, a technical milestone establishing that a reactor can…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why worms (and microbes) are catching on as a manure pollution solution Anthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips to…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI Sam Altman’s proposal that Americans should share in the wealth created by AI is back in the spotlight, with reports that he is discussing giving…
Anthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips on his family’s land in Hickman, a tiny town in the state’s agricultural heartland. He reaches down with both hands and pulls up a clump of muck, turning it over to reveal a half-dozen squirming red earthworms.…
With the rapid progress of AI capabilities and the move to agentic systems, organizations are expanding their use cases as the technology continues to grow. That constant evolution also introduces risk, leaving IT leaders to wonder which investments will prove valuable even six months into the future. Returning to the foundational elements of AI architecture—the…