Businesses and developers often face a steep learning curve when installing clean energy technologies, such as solar installations and EV chargers. To get a fair deal, they need to navigate a complex bidding process that involves requesting proposals, evaluating bids, and ultimately contracting with a provider. Now the startup Station A, founded by a pair…
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Jan Liphardt teaches bioengineering at Stanford, but to many strangers in Los Altos, California, he is a peculiar man they see walking a four-legged robotic dog down…
After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry out simple online tasks in a browser, such as booking concert tickets or filling an online grocery order. The app is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent—CUA (“coo-ah”), for short—built on top of…
As the capabilities of generative AI models have grown, you’ve probably seen how they can transform simple text prompts into hyperrealistic images and even extended video clips. More recently, generative AI has shown potential in helping chemists and biologists explore static molecules, like proteins and DNA. Models like AlphaFold can predict molecular structures to accelerate…
Amid the benefits that algorithmic decision-making and artificial intelligence offer — including revolutionizing speed, efficiency, and predictive ability in a vast range of fields — Manish Raghavan is working to mitigate associated risks, while also seeking opportunities to apply the technologies to help with preexisting social concerns. “I ultimately want my research to push towards…
Many organizations have experimented with AI, but they haven’t always gotten the full value from their investments. A host of issues standing in the way center on the accuracy, fairness, and security of AI systems. In response, organizations are actively exploring the principles of responsible AI: the idea that AI systems must be fair, transparent, and…
OpenAI spent $1.76 million on lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone, according to a new disclosure filed on Tuesday—a significant jump from 2023 when the company disclosed just $260,000 spent on Capitol Hill. The company also disclosed a new in-house lobbyist, Meghan Dorn, who worked for five…
Artificial intelligence has become vital in business and financial dealings, medical care, technology development, research, and much more. Without realizing it, consumers rely on AI when they stream a video, do online banking, or perform an online search. Behind these capabilities are more than 10,000 data centers globally, each one a huge warehouse containing thousands…
TL;DR: Enterprise AI teams are discovering that purely agentic approaches (dynamically chaining LLM calls) don’t deliver the reliability needed for production systems.The prompt-and-pray model—where business logic lives entirely in prompts—creates systems that are unreliable, inefficient, and impossible to maintain at scale.A shift toward structured automation, which separates conversational ability from business logic execution, is needed…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Peering into the body to find and diagnose cancer is all about spotting patterns. Radiologists use x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging to illuminate tumors, and pathologists examine tissue from kidneys, livers,…