Every year, global health experts are faced with a high-stakes decision: Which influenza strains should go into the next seasonal vaccine? The choice must be made months in advance, long before flu season even begins, and it can often feel like a race against the clock. If the selected strains match those that circulate, the…
The following article comes from two blog posts by Drew Breunig: “How Long Contexts Fail” and “How to Fix Your Contexts.” Managing Your Context is the Key to Successful Agents As frontier model context windows continue to grow,1 with many supporting up to 1 million tokens, I see many excited discussions about how long context…
Over the past 20 years building advanced AI systems—from academic labs to enterprise deployments—I’ve witnessed AI’s waves of success rise and fall. My journey began during the “AI Winter,” when billions were invested in expert systems that ultimately underdelivered. Flash forward to today: large language models (LLMs) represent a quantum leap forward, but their prompt-based…
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Using AI to improve our health and well-being is one of the areas scientists and researchers are most excited about. The last month…
When I picked up my daughter from summer camp, we settled in for an eight-hour drive through the Appalachian mountains, heading from North Carolina to her grandparents’ home in Kentucky. With little to no cell service for much of the drive, we enjoyed the rare opportunity to have a long, thoughtful conversation, uninterrupted by devices….
MCP—the Model Context Protocol introduced by Anthropic in November 2024—is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to data sources and development environments. It’s built for a future where every AI assistant is wired directly into your environment, where the model knows what files you have open, what text is selected, what you just typed,…
On a mission to reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing components, Siemens turned its attention to the design of a robot gripper. Making up just 2% of the robot, the impact of this hand-like device may seem inconsequential. But, reducing its weight by 90% and the number of constituent parts by 84% can save up to 3…
Environmental scientists are increasingly using enormous artificial intelligence models to make predictions about changes in weather and climate, but a new study by MIT researchers shows that bigger models are not always better. The team demonstrates that, in certain climate scenarios, much simpler, physics-based models can generate more accurate predictions than state-of-the-art deep-learning models. Their…
Choosing the right LLM has become a full-time job. New models appear almost daily, each offering different capabilities, prices, and quirks, from reasoning strengths to cost efficiency to code generation. This competition creates strong incentives for AI labs to carve out a niche and gives new startups room to emerge, resulting in a fragmented landscape…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The AI learns it is about to be switched off and goes rogue, disobeying commands and threatening its human operators. It’s a well-worn trope in science fiction. We see it in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s the premise of the Terminator series, in…