Discovered Materials, a months-old, San Francisco startup using AI models to find new substances for building advanced chips, announced a million-dollar challenge for AI models to solve five critical problems in materials science. While frontier AI models have solved a remarkable series of outstanding mathematics problems and made progress in the life sciences, they have […] More
A few early analyses have tried to quantify just what BAAJA would mean for emissions in the US. One, from the think tank Rhodium Group, found that in the best-case scenario, the bill would cut economy-wide emissions by 4%, reduce annual energy bills by $78 per household, and add 200 gigawatts of new clean energy […] More
Political groups both supporting and opposing the AI industry spent millions of dollars trying to influence Tuesday’s midterm elections and shape the future of AI regulation. That spending produced mixed results, with some of the most heavily backed candidates losing their races. On the industry side, two AI-focused political action committees (PACs) that raised and […] More
A sales representative asks an AI agent for customer pricing, and the agent pulls data from multiple sources: restricted pricing systems, internal communications, and archived quotes. The output looks accurate to the agent, so a second agent uses the data to draft the proposal for the sales rep. No human checks either handoff. When it’s […] More
The November 3 midterm results gave Democrats full control of Congress, setting the stage for what could be one of the most divided U.S. governments this decade, with Republicans in the White House. Tuesday’s results suggest that anger over data centers, the large facilities that house the computers powering AI, is becoming a political force. […] More
Let’s step back for just a moment to put these results in context. Readers might remember huge laws affecting climate and energy that were passed in just the last four years. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included massive support for clean energy, including tax credits and government grants and loans.Then the 2025 One Big Beautiful […] More
Apple is cutting the daily amount its engineering teams can spend on AI, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. It’s a big change for a company that has worked to integrate the technology into its engineering processes. In October, Apple lowered the daily AI spending cap for its engineering teams, decreasing it from $300 to $200, the outlet […] More
Tuesday, November 17, 2026 In an effort to reach an elusive continuity of the self, some far-thinking technologists are working on ways to keep your brain going—even beyond death. Join science editor Mary Beth Griggs and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado for a conversation exploring possible paths to keep your mind going, including gradual […] More
OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane thinks the 2028 presidential election could be a defining moment for AI. And he wants politicians to start developing policies that address Americans’ concerns about the technology, rather than simply paying lip service to anti-AI sentiment and the backlash against data centers. In a new essay, Lehane compares […] More
Even before the polls closed, insiders in the data center industry noticed that the times were changing. At the industry’s DCD conference in Ashburn, Virginia, on Tuesday, panelists lamented that Texas had been the easiest place to build for years—until September. That’s when Abbott, perhaps seeing the increasingly bipartisan distaste for these facilities, began changing […] More
Sequoia Capital posted a memo to X on Wednesday morning titled “The Sequoia of Tomorrow” that’s full of surprises. The firm has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds, it says. It is also closing its London office, shutting down its Arc accelerator and its Scouts program, merging its early-stage and growth teams into one, […] More
—Linda Marsa MIT Technology Review Narrated: The agentic web is here In 2001, a decade after inventing the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision: an internet navigated by autonomous software agents that address our every need, without requiring us to muck about with browsers and search engines ourselves. At the time, the […] More