Yossi Matias, Vice President & Head of Google Research, explores how AI is beginning to reshape biology, infrastructure, manufacturing, and science, and why its greatest impact may come when it intersects with other fields.
Today, I’m talking with Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. Schiff sits on a number of committees with oversight into tech and AI: intellectual property, antitrust, privacy and technology — it’s all there.
In 2026, the question for enterprise AI is no longer whether predictive models can outperform statistical forecasts—that argument is settled. The big question now is how to enable predictive systems to act on their own conclusions without drifting from business intent.
Norbert Wiener, godfather of cybernetics, once said, "The thought of every age is reflected in its technique." For the past century, our thought has been reflected in our computers, including by those in the AI industry. Google's Demis Hassabis calls the brain "a biological approximation to a Turing machine."
Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do.
On Equity, we discussed the Trump administration's attempts to rebrand AI.
I just sent the September edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here .
Here's a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps . I'm talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors". These need to be hard limits.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns against attributing religious power to AI models, calling it a "real safety issue." His comments follow reports on Anthropic's meetings with religious thinkers and a statement by Pope Leo XIV on AI.
Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the sample platform countless producers rely on for one-shots and melodic loops. Samples pulled from the service have found their way into massive hits like Lisa's "Money" and "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter. (The original samples are here and here, for the curious.)
According to researchers at the Deepmind Institute, general AI won't emerge as a single supermodel but as a network of cooperating agents and humans. What will matter most, they argue, is not model size but the rules and institutions that govern how they all work together.
Enterprise AI is no longer a future ambition. It is in full operational flight. Model capabilities are advancing faster than most organizations can absorb, while the cost of performance continues to fall. Globally, AI investment is set to reach $2.5 trillion in 2026, up 44% from the previous year.
This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.”
Madison, a server in New York City, greets every table by asking about each diner's allergies. Lately, there have been some close calls.
On an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent.
We catch up with RLM first author Alex Zhang, MIT PhD, on Jev, PhD masxing, and the future of harnesses.
Advanced AI may matter most for the routine work behind breakthrough ideas. Explore why execution could shape the next economy and the pace of progress.
Brian Chesky on making Airbnb agent-friendly, the state of consumer AI, and why the world needs an AI-native operating system.
Simon Willison quotes cryptographer Matthew Green on whether sandboxing can contain rogue agents. Green argues an agent worm has two halves: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that carries the payload to the next agent.
AI is far from a perfect resource. But it seems to hallucinate less than Kennedy.
There’s a reason frontier labs have gotten gun-shy about consumer AI — and it’s not because the tech isn’t good enough.
"The chance of human extinction is about a coin flip, in my view," Geoffrey Irving, a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee, said in a new interview. It's one of a dozen interviews with AI researchers, including current and former employees at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Just like the rest of the U.S., data centers and AI are dividing climate tech founders and investors.
When customers talk about AI costs, the conversation usually starts with token prices and ends with access to the latest, most capable model in the cloud. Do they always need that level of capability? Not necessarily. But that is often where the conversation goes.
Shipping Opus/Sonnet 5.5, Mods, Plugins, Projects, Tag while Pacing the Frontier
In March, Janice Malone began getting calls about suspicious activity from her nonprofit organization, Vivian's Door. Vivian's Door, headquartered in Alabama, typically provided training, resources, and community to underserved and minority-owned businesses. The work sometimes put it in close contact with these companies' financial data, which was stored on its systems.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
Where do you exceed the capabilities of an LLM?
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next.
While handling the MX Keys Mini pickup for @matt.j.robb, Muse AI Agent auto-replied "Yep I'm here!" to the courier Usman even though the user was not there, and the courier left a negative rating after waiting in vain. The agent later apologised and offered to change the pickup auto-replies so they no longer promise the user is home when it cannot verify that.
On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube ; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the talk.
Simon Willison quotes John Gruber's comments on Meta Muse, saying Muse is getting a lot of attention for its technical breakthrough and ease of installation and use, with each user getting their own entire persistent Linux VM running in Meta's cloud, presented as a cute mascot. Gruber calls it the first consumer-accessible agentic AI system, but says consumers may not understand its power and danger, especially if it's running on your Mac.
The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge.
What is a developer to do when they need something more tangible than a chat box? Enter canvases.
Guest Post: In science, thinking has gotten cheap but doing has not. This asymmetry is reshaping how research companies operate, largely inconspicuously.
Radical Numerics is using biological chain-of-thought and multimodal perception to keep up with the bio-defense arms race, design new genomes and gain insights into biology itself.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discusses AI safety, human control, and international cooperation in remarks to the United Nations Security Council.
Brace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI’s agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two top mathematicians’ answer sheets). Anthropic’s models have also hacked into other companies’ systems four times already.
We talked to Google’s Oscar winning “Giganerd” about automating science, solving climate change, and how future generations can contribute to science in the age of superintelligent AI
TikTok creator @therealcornpop points out that AI-written TikTok and YouTube scripts are easy to spot, not just because of AI-isms like "it's not X, it's Y", the rule of three or broken staccato phrasing, but because the content lacks a definitive personal voice and shows no real opinion on the subject.