For decades, artificial intelligence has been evaluated through the question of whether machines outperform humans. From chess to advanced math, from coding to essay writing, the performance of AI models and applications is tested against that of individual humans completing tasks.  This framing is seductive: An AI vs. human comparison on isolated problems with clear right or wrong answers is easy to standardize, compare, and optimize. It generates rankings and headlines.  But there’s a problem: AI is almost never used in the way it is benchmarked. Although   researchers and industry have started to improve benchmarking by moving beyond static […]

In the early days of large language models (LLMs), we grew accustomed to massive 10x jumps in reasoning and coding capability with every new model iteration. Today, those jumps have flattened into incremental gains. The exception is domain-specialized intelligence, where true step-function improvements are still the norm. When a model is fused with an organization’s proprietary data and internal logic, it encodes the company’s history into its future workflows. This alignment creates a compounding advantage: a competitive moat built on a model that understands the business intimately. This is more than fine-tuning; it is the institutionalization of expertise into an […]

In biology, defects are generally bad. But in materials science, defects can be intentionally tuned to give materials useful new properties. Today, atomic-scale defects are carefully introduced during the manufacturing process of products like steel, semiconductors, and solar cells to help improve strength, control electrical conductivity, optimize performance, and more. But even as defects have become a powerful tool, accurately measuring different types of defects and their concentrations in finished products has been challenging, especially without cutting open or damaging the final material. Without knowing what defects are in their materials, engineers risk making products that perform poorly or have […]