Committee

Llama 3 is a capable generalist, but that’s exactly the problem when you need an agent that reliably outputs structured JSON for a specific API.

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. We’re putting too much faith in AI’s ability to say no Today’s AI models are trained to refuse a vast number of prompts. If you ask your chatbot how to poison a colleague or how to tie a noose, chances are it’ll turn you down. But refusal fails, sometimes horrifically. Some people are attempting to use AI to hone biological pathogens and build autonomous drone swarms. Sooner or later, failed refusals may result in global calamity. What’s more, relying on refusal means drawing a line between what a model should obey and what it must disobey. Governments will also get to draw their own lines, potentially restricting free speech. At the same time, the capabilities that make AI useful could also make it dangerous. If we want it to help cure cancer, AI needs genetics expertise that could also produce bioweapons. Read the full story on the formidable tradeoffs of AI refusal. —Arthur Holland Michel This story is from the next issue of our print magazine. Subscribe now to get your hands on a copy as soon as it lands on Wednesday 21 October!   We’re still figuring out the side effects of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs This week my colleague Antonio Regalado reported on new research suggesting GLP-1 drugs may slow biological aging. It’s the latest in a raft of potential benefits associated with these drugs. But there are also some weird side effects. The most common are gastrointestinal, but researchers are also investigating possible links to hair loss, nail disorders and damage to the nerves behind the eye.  Here’s what we know so far about the side effects of weight-loss drugs. —Jessica Hamzelou This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday. 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Envision Energy and its global ambitions for wind power Envision Energy is one of MIT Technology Review’s10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch 2026, available exclusively to subscribers. China is installing wind turbines faster than any other country. One of its leading manufacturers, Envision Energy, is integrating renewable energy into data centers, using wind turbines to generate power and batteries to store it on-site. Recently, it became the first company to directly power a data center entirely with renewable energy. An AI-powered system optimizes the power output so the facility can receive a steady supply, regardless of whether the wind is blowing. Now, it wants to bring that approach to data centers in deserts around the world. Find out how Envision plans to power the global AI boom with renewable energy. —Cici Zhang The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The US has frozen green cards for Microsoft and other IT firmsIt’s accused them of using visa fraud to replace American workers. (CNBC)+ And suspended them from a key green-card program. (AP)+ Adobe, Infosys, Tata, and other IT firms are also affected. (TechCrunch)+ Microsoft says 80% of its H-1B filings involved existing staff. (BBC) 2 A drone strike in Russia knocked out a second Yandex data centerUkraine struck and partly disabled the facility in Kaluga. (Reuters $)+ Another Yandex data center was hit by a drone a day earlier. (CNBC)+ Data centers have become big targets for military strikes. (Bloomberg $) + They may be safer in space. (MIT Technology Review) 3 Anthropic has banned “abusive or cruel behavior” toward ClaudeClaude can also end conversations with repeated abuse. (Verge)+ The policy builds on Anthropic’s research into AI welfare. (Guardian)+ Debates over AI consciousness are a trap. (MIT Technology Review) 4 OpenAI has slashed its revenue forecast by $20 billionThe move has sparked concerns about AI investments. (Guardian)+ What’s at stake in AI’s trillion-dollar gamble? (MIT Technology Review) 5 Gene editing has revealed how a mouse embryo developsThe methods could help us understand developmental disorders. (Nature)+ Female clones of male mice have arrived. (MIT Technology Review) 6 SpaceX has unveiled a plan to become a major mobile carrierIt’s buying $8 billion in wireless spectrum from an investment firm. (WSJ $)+ The deal could help it challenge AT&T and Verizon. (Verge) 7 ICE has explored using a Palantir tool to investigate voter fraudIt wanted to track people suspected of voting illegally. (Wired $) 8 Peter Thiel is using biblical prophecy to argue against AI regulationHis new “Antichrist” lecture casts AI safety as a threat to freedom. (Politico) 9 MIT’s Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land Apollo 11, has diedShe led the team that programmed Apollo’s onboard computers. (BBC)+ And became a software pioneer in a male-dominated field. (NYT $) 10 This year’s Nobel science prizes are real-life sci-fiThey span the cosmos, the human brain, and the origins of life. (Economist $) Quote of the day “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”  —President Donald Trump adds an ominous threat to his AI rebranding strategy in a post on Truth Social, Axios reports. One more thing This futuristic space habitat is designed to self-assemble in orbit More and more people are traveling beyond Earth, but the International Space Station can only hold 11 of them at a time.  Aurelia Institute, an architecture R&D lab based in Cambridge, MA, is building a solution: a habitat that launches in compact stacks of flat tiles—and self-assembles in orbit.  The concept may sound far-fetched, but it’s already won support from NASA. Read the full story. —Sarah Ward We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.) + What’s it like to fly an F-16 at 1,000 mph and pull 9G? This film finds out.+ Meet Jimothy, the raccoon with an extra-short neck who has captured hearts across the world.+ An indie

The story is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way we live. A robot shaped like a human—white with a black head and torso—has been popping up on video feeds. Perhaps you’ve seen it dance or pass popcorn, put trash in a bin, vacuum, or press the button of a microwave. Or maybe you’ve watched it fall backward while handing out water bottles or struggle to iron a shirt.  This would be Tesla’s Optimus, an AI-powered humanoid robot that Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, believes will be “not just Tesla’s biggest product ever, but probably the biggest product ever,” headed to work on factory floors and, later, in our homes. Eventually it “will have human and then superhuman dexterity,” he told shareholders in July. Optimus robots could automate almost all human labor—from hauling sheet metal to folding laundry—for as little as $20,000 each, Musk argues. Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January, he predicted they could be on sale to the public by the end of 2027. Musk is not alone in his evangelism. Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has said that robotics could become the “biggest industry in the history of the planet.” In January, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said that humanoid robots would match human-level ability this year. According to Morgan Stanley, the number of robots that “resemble and act like humans” is likely to reach nearly 1 billion by 2050, creating a market worth over $5 trillion.  Elon Musk predicts that Tesla’s Optimus humanoid could be one the world’s best-selling products. For now, it’s most often seen handing out food and drinks at Tesla events.SIPA VIA AP IMAGES Such proclamations are in large part fueled by the idea that the same AI advances behind tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude will enable a new generation of robots to imitate human movement the way chatbots imitate human language. But many robotics researchers are skeptical, arguing that such assumptions minimize the challenges of using an intelligence built on language and images to master the infinite variability of the physical world. “None of those companies [building humanoid robots]—absolutely none of them—has any idea how to make those robots smart enough to be useful,” Yann LeCun, often referred to as one of the godfathers of AI, said at another event during the January Davos conference.   Researchers also point out that the tendency to conflate humanoid robots made to resemble people with so-called generalist machines able to learn and perform multiple tasks is misleading. ”It’s very easy to make a robot that looks like a person,” explains Jonathan Hurst, cofounder and chief robot officer of Agility Robotics and professor of robotics at Oregon State University. “It is dramatically more difficult to make a machine that moves or behaves dynamically or physically like a person.”   These tensions—over whether all-purpose humanoid robots are just around the corner or nowhere in sight, and whether current forms of AI are all that’s needed to perfect them—are playing out in robotics labs across the country, where the hype over timelines is obscuring painstaking but meaningful progress. A decade or so ago, a series of breakthroughs led to a generative AI revolution that turned the long-imagined possibility of artificial intelligence into reality. Roboticists—though they disagree on exactly when this will happen—believe that an equally transformative revolution is possible in robotics, one that will endow machines with physical intuition and fluidity that has long been out of reach. As progress in robotics inches forward, the question is whether the same methods and tools that fueled advances in AI are enough to get there, or if an entirely new path is required. Robots meet advanced AI To see one of the smartest robot brains working today, it’s worth looking at what Google DeepMind can do with a piece of equipment called ALOHA 2, short for “A Low-cost Open-source Hardware System for Bimanual Teleoperation.”  Roboticists have long clashed over whether a humanlike form is necessary for generalist robots, with proponents arguing that it will help them slot into the world as it exists and detractors saying it’s not worth the trouble. ALOHA 2 reflects this second way of thinking. Not much to look at, it’s just a pair of arms, some grippers, and a couple of cameras. But despite its seeming simplicity, it is a workhorse for researchers at Google DeepMind, who use it to test their most advanced AI for robotics system, Gemini Robotics, in their various labs. When controlled by Gemini Robotics, ALOHA 2 becomes more of a generalist robot, in the sense that it can perform any number of tasks based on examples it’s been trained on. Ask it to pack a lunchbox and, as evidenced by a video of this exercise, it can use two pincer grippers to delicately place a piece of white bread into a Ziploc bag, close it, place a bunch of grapes in a Tupperware container, secure the lid, and then carefully move the items into a lunchbox before zipping it up.  It’s not a great lunch. But the fact that the robot can put it together represents an objective step forward from what was possible even, say, three years ago.  This is in large part due to AI and its impact on what are known as robot policies, which controls how a general-purpose robot will need to assess and understand its surroundings, plan how to move within them, and then perform its task correctly. The ALOHA 2 robot isn’t much more than two mechanical arms on a bench top, but it serves as a testbed for cutting-edge AI robotics models. These animations are based on human teleoperation of the robot arms, data that is used to train Google DeepMind’s models. (Video: Google DeepMind / Stanford University / Hoku Labs) Historically, these policies were based

In this article, you will learn how to benchmark a deterministic 3-Tiered Graph-RAG system against a standard vector RAG pipeline on fact-dense queries, and what…

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 breakthroughs in robotics won’t change your life any time soon The hype around humanoid robots is reaching fever pitch. Much of it comes from the idea that the same AI advances behind ChatGPT and Claude could enable robots to imitate human movement the way chatbots imitate human language. But many researchers are skeptical. They argue that such assumptions minimize the challenges of using an intelligence built on language and images to master the infinite variability of the physical world. They also point out that conflating humanoids with so-called generalist machines is misleading. Across robotics labs, tensions have emerged over whether current forms of AI are all that’s needed to perfect all-purpose humanoids or whether an entirely new path is required. Read the full story on what it will take to build truly general-purpose robots. —Jamie Condliffe This story is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way we live. 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: WaveSave and its portable rubber dam WaveSave is one of MIT Technology Review’s10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch 2026, available exclusively to subscribers. As sea levels rise and flood risks worsen, WaveSave has emerged with an ingeniously simple tool: a portable rubber dam that’s quick to install when flooding starts. Anyone can unfurl the SlamDam on the ground along a riverbank or shoreline and pump it full of water until it swells into place. And there it stands, up to 1.3 meters high, shielding nearby property or structures from damage as waters rise.  WaveSave now plans to take its unusual approach to flood protection much further. —Amy Nordrum Subscribers can now access the full 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, spanning everything from smart turbines and sustainable cement to carbon dioxide batteries. Why we’re watching these climate tech companies —Casey Crownhart Our Climate Tech Companies to Watch list is always a little ray of hope for me—there are some fascinating ideas out there about how we power our world or move away from fossil fuels.  Our chosen companies also reflect several aspects of the current moment. One is that China is the center of the climate and energy tech world. Another is that everybody wants a piece of the data center pie. And then there’s the fact that the grid needs support, with energy storage a key piece moving forward. Here’s what this year’s list reveals about the state of climate tech. This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Scientists in Austria and China have built the first nuclear clocksThey could become the world’s most precise timekeepers. (NYT $)+ They could also help scientists search for dark matter. (Reuters $)+ China’s nuclear clock is six times more stable than Austria’s. (SCMP)+ A space clock could help measure Earth. (MIT Technology Review) 2 Three fired OpenAI researchers want to protect AI reasoning monitoringThey warn that AI companies could lose a key safety tool. (WSJ $)+ OpenAI fired them for allegedly sharing sensitive information. (Gizmodo)+ Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason. (MIT Technology Review) 3 Samsung has forecast the highest quarterly profit ever for a tech firmThe AI chip boom has sent its projected profits to $80 billion. (CNBC)+ Can AI labs ever turn a profit? (Reuters $)+ What even is the AI bubble? (MIT Technology Review) 4 OpenAI’s math breakthroughs point beyond mathematicsAI is progressing into increasingly specialised fields. (Axios)+ OpenAI is catching up with Anthropic on coding. (WSJ $)+ A new AI tool could speed up math research.(MIT Technology Review) 5 A 194-year-old tortoise has had its genome sequencedHis longevity could reveal ways to extend human lifespan. (Guardian)+ Jonathan is the world’s oldest known land animal. (404 Media)+ His youthful mitochondria may help repair DNA. (New Scientist $) 6 A fraudster who used AI to outstream Taylor Swift has been jailedHe used AI-generated songs and bots to earn $8 million. (NYT $)+ But prosecutors said he stole royalty payments. (Ars Technica) 7 TikTok allegedly gave kids fake safety features to study engagementThe tests measured time spent and ad revenue. (Reuters $) 8 Burglars could be identified from DNA floating in the airThanks to a new device that collects airborne genetic material. (Economist $) 9 Pioneers of mirror-image molecules have won the chemistry NobelTheir work has become a key tool in developing medicines. (Guardian) 10 California has declared a human-vs-robot fight illegalThe state’s combat-sports laws were never written for machines. (NYT $) Quote of the day “We grew a mind.”  —David Robinson, who last week quit his job as OpenAI safety transparency lead, tells The New York Times that his former company has built models that develop capabilities their creators did not explicitly design. One more thing We need a moonshot for computing The US government is organizing itself for the next era of computing. Ultimately, it has one big choice to make: adopt a conservative strategy that aims to preserve its lead for the next five years—or orient itself toward genuine computing moonshots. There is no shortage of candidates, including quantum computing, neuromorphic computing and reversible computing. And there are plenty of novel materials and devices. These possibilities could even be combined to form hybrid computing systems. The National Semiconductor Technology Center can drive these ideas forward. To be successful, it would do well to follow DARPA’s lead by focusing on moonshot programs. Read the full story. —Brady Helwig & PJ Maykish We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.) + An experimental pair of contact lenses can repair themselves with UV light.+ Meet Rich,