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Pig kidneys that were “frozen” for a year have been brought back to life

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Pig kidneys that were cooled to -150 °C and stored in a freezer for months have been successfully rewarmed and shown to work again for the first time, say scientists. They hope to replicate the findings with human organs. The kidneys—which are similar in size to human ones—were left in a glass-like state, in one case for over a year. Once they had been rewarmed, tested in machines, and transplanted into pigs, the kidneys regained their color and made urine—key signs they were working. “Ten years ago … I wouldn’t say I had high hopes it was actually going to work,” says Erik Finger, a transplant surgeon at the University of Minnesota who co-led the work. “After we did the last transplant, I walked out of the room and said, ‘This is a big deal.’” The research was shared at the preprint server bioRxiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed. The kidneys aren’t perfect, and the researchers have yet to demonstrate that they can sustain life over the long term. But the results represent a milestone achievement, say others in the field. “Thank God that someone’s actually managed to do it in one organ and prove that it works,” says Peter Kilbride, a cryobiologist and cofounder of Kyros Kairos, a company focused on improving funding for cryopreservation research, who was not involved in the research. “For years, people have been trying and failing to get to this step. Finally, we’ve got this breakthrough.” “Their work is amazing and will enable us to truly, indefinitely bank organs,” says Korkut Uygun, a biomedical engineer and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, who was also not involved in the research. “It is a revolutionary time for transplantation.” Buying time Every year, tens of thousands of organ transplants take place in the US alone. These procedures are thought to have saved 2 million years of life in the last 25 years. But there’s plenty of room for improvement. One major challenge is the lack of available organs. Even when an organ becomes available, it can be difficult to get it to the right recipient within 24 to 36 hours, which is the current limit for preserving human organs. People who receive organ transplants must also take drugs that suppress their immune systems for the rest of their lives. These drugs are meant to stop their bodies from rejecting the new organs. But they come with side effects and increase the risk of infections and cancer. The ability to bank organs for long periods of time holds the promise to address all these challenges. Doctors would have more time to match organs to recipients. They’d be able to limit the risk of organ rejection, too—potentially by preparing recipients, and their immune systems, beforehand. “With real organ banking … instead of the patients waiting for the organ, it’s the organs that are waiting for the patients,” says Finger. Scientists have been able to cool cells to ultra-low temperatures through a process called vitrification, which essentially turns them to something like glass. This procedure is already used to store eggs, sperm, and embryos. Vitrifying whole organs is much harder. Some problems can be avoided with cryoprotectants—chemicals that work like antifreeze and prevent damaging ice crystals from forming. But these chemicals tend to be incredibly toxic. It’s also difficult to rapidly and uniformly cool large tissues, and just as hard to evenly rewarm an organ all the way through. Working with John Bischof, a bioengineer at the University of Minnesota, Finger and colleagues have come up with a solution. Once an organ has been loaded with a cryoprotectant, they infuse it with iron oxide nanoparticles. These nanoparticles don’t do anything to the cells. But when it’s time to rewarm the organ, they can be activated with an electromagnetic field.  When the radiofrequency of that field switches between two states, the particles also flip, realigning themselves with the field. That causes them to release heat throughout the organ. Adjusting the power of the field allows the team to control the rate of heating so that it gets faster once the organ reaches -120°C.  The researchers successfully vitrified rat kidneys using this approach in work published in 2023. Back then, they were able to rewarm kidneys that had been kept in a freezer for up to 100 days before transplanting them into rats. Since then, the team has been trying to achieve the same success with bigger organs. Pig kidneys are thought to be a good model for human ones—they’re about the same size and look similar. Rat kidneys weigh around one gram; pig kidneys are around 100. It hasn’t been easy. The cryoprotectant used for vitrifying rat kidneys didn’t work as well in the pig organs. “We had to rediscover and modify the cocktail,” says Bischof. “That’s why it’s taken us three years.” Deep-freezing kidneys The first step in the procedure is to remove a kidney from a donor pig. Once it’s out, the kidney is flushed with a commonly used organ preservation solution to remove the blood, bagged, and temporarily laid on a bed of ice in a cooler so it can be taken over to the engineering lab. There, team members unpack the kidney and hook it up to a device they’ve designed to control the organ’s temperature and pressure. Then they start to load it up with the cocktail of cryoprotectants, slowly enough to ensure an even spread through the organ but quickly enough to minimize any toxic effects. It takes around two hours. The next step is to infuse the organ with the iron oxide nanoparticles, which are pumped through the organ for around seven to eight minutes, says Finger. Then it’s time to cool the organ by pumping cold nitrogen vapor into a chamber housing it. It’s a delicate process, and the team must ensure that the organ is cooling all the way through. At the same time, they must lower the kidney’s temperature as quickly as possible to prevent ice from forming. “Oftentimes there are multiple people doing different things to make sure that things don’t go awry,” says Bischof. Once the organ reaches the vitrified state at around -120 °C, it “behaves like a glass,” says Finger. “At that point, you can stay stable for long periods of time—we think indefinitely.” The team then pauses the cooling process to ensure that the organ is glassy throughout. Otherwise, it could crack. After the pause, if everything goes well, the kidney is ultimately cooled to -150 °C. Once it’s in the freezer, it can stay there for days, weeks, or even months. The team has kept a small number of kidneys banked for over a year. Pink right up The real test of these kidneys comes when they’re taken out of the freezer, rewarmed, and flushed of their chemicals and nanoparticles. Can they support life? So far, the team has tested some of them in a couple of different ways. In one set of experiments, the researchers put rewarmed kidneys on perfusion devices—systems that are already used in transplant surgeries both to provide organs with nutrients and to help doctors assess them while they’re out of the body. In another set of experiments, Finger and his colleagues transplanted rewarmed kidneys into pigs and monitored them for two hours. In both experiments, the rewarmed kidneys seemed to recover, says Finger. “They pink right up,” he says.  The team see blood flow into the rewarmed, transplanted kidney, allowing it to “pink up.”COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS There are lots of ways to measure the function of a kidney, but one key test is whether or not the organ can make urine. By this measure, the rewarmed kidneys did well, although they produced around two-thirds of the amount that would normally be expected. “They produce urine … within a minute or so,” says Finger. “We know that they work.”  Most of the rewarmed kidneys had been banked for days or weeks. But one had been in the freezer for just over a year. When Finger and his colleagues rewarmed it and put it on a perfusion machine, they found that it produced urine “immediately.” “It actually looked better than many of the [other] kidneys,” says Finger. “We’re comfortable now saying we can store them for a year and rewarm them with excellent function.” “It’s a very big deal to go a year,” says Kevin Myer, president and CEO of LifeGift, an organ procurement organization based in Texas. Being able to store organs for that length of time would transform organ transplantation. He envisions banks of organs that could be used on demand in emergency cases where people can’t wait, such as for some drug overdoses or gunshot wounds. Final hurdles But the procedure isn’t ready for prime time just yet. As well as producing less urine than expected, the rewarmed kidneys also showed signs of injury. The damage seems to be caused by the cryoprotectant chemicals, say the researchers. “This is one big breakthrough that solves half the problem,” as Kilbride puts it. The team has shown that the rewarmed kidneys can regain blood flow, which is “very important,” says Greg Fahy, a cryobiologist who is considered a pioneer in the field. But he’s worried about the extent of the damage to the organs. “We can’t tell from these experiments whether these kidneys might have supported life or not.” But Fahy, who is chief scientific officer at the biotech companies Intervene Immune and 21st Century Medicine (where he is also executive director), acknowledges that it’s not clear how these kidneys might fare once they’re inside a living animal for the long term.  Finger also hopes to find ways to repair the damage seen in the kidneys. Other research has shown that the health of transplant organs can improve while they’re on perfusion machines. And damaged kidneys might undergo some level of self-repair once they’re in a body. At any rate, human kidneys may cope better with the process than pig kidneys, says Finger. The next step will be to test the kidneys in pigs over longer periods of time. The team, along with many other researchers in the field, will continue the search for less toxic cryoprotectants, too. Finger, Bischof, and their colleagues are also planning experiments with human kidneys. Finger is optimistic. “We’re going to see that there’s injury, and it’s not perfect … but now we’ve got to the point where it works,” he says. “These are big, historic milestones in our field, and we’re excited about it.”

Pig kidneys that were cooled to -150 °C and stored in a freezer for months have been successfully rewarmed and shown to work again for the first time, say scientists. They hope to replicate the findings with human organs.

The kidneys—which are similar in size to human ones—were left in a glass-like state, in one case for over a year. Once they had been rewarmed, tested in machines, and transplanted into pigs, the kidneys regained their color and made urine—key signs they were working.

“Ten years ago … I wouldn’t say I had high hopes it was actually going to work,” says Erik Finger, a transplant surgeon at the University of Minnesota who co-led the work. “After we did the last transplant, I walked out of the room and said, ‘This is a big deal.’” The research was shared at the preprint server bioRxiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The kidneys aren’t perfect, and the researchers have yet to demonstrate that they can sustain life over the long term. But the results represent a milestone achievement, say others in the field.

“Thank God that someone’s actually managed to do it in one organ and prove that it works,” says Peter Kilbride, a cryobiologist and cofounder of Kyros Kairos, a company focused on improving funding for cryopreservation research, who was not involved in the research. “For years, people have been trying and failing to get to this step. Finally, we’ve got this breakthrough.”

“Their work is amazing and will enable us to truly, indefinitely bank organs,” says Korkut Uygun, a biomedical engineer and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, who was also not involved in the research. “It is a revolutionary time for transplantation.”

Buying time

Every year, tens of thousands of organ transplants take place in the US alone. These procedures are thought to have saved 2 million years of life in the last 25 years. But there’s plenty of room for improvement.

One major challenge is the lack of available organs. Even when an organ becomes available, it can be difficult to get it to the right recipient within 24 to 36 hours, which is the current limit for preserving human organs.

People who receive organ transplants must also take drugs that suppress their immune systems for the rest of their lives. These drugs are meant to stop their bodies from rejecting the new organs. But they come with side effects and increase the risk of infections and cancer.

The ability to bank organs for long periods of time holds the promise to address all these challenges. Doctors would have more time to match organs to recipients. They’d be able to limit the risk of organ rejection, too—potentially by preparing recipients, and their immune systems, beforehand.

“With real organ banking … instead of the patients waiting for the organ, it’s the organs that are waiting for the patients,” says Finger.

Scientists have been able to cool cells to ultra-low temperatures through a process called vitrification, which essentially turns them to something like glass. This procedure is already used to store eggs, sperm, and embryos. Vitrifying whole organs is much harder.

Some problems can be avoided with cryoprotectants—chemicals that work like antifreeze and prevent damaging ice crystals from forming. But these chemicals tend to be incredibly toxic. It’s also difficult to rapidly and uniformly cool large tissues, and just as hard to evenly rewarm an organ all the way through.

Working with John Bischof, a bioengineer at the University of Minnesota, Finger and colleagues have come up with a solution. Once an organ has been loaded with a cryoprotectant, they infuse it with iron oxide nanoparticles. These nanoparticles don’t do anything to the cells. But when it’s time to rewarm the organ, they can be activated with an electromagnetic field. 

When the radiofrequency of that field switches between two states, the particles also flip, realigning themselves with the field. That causes them to release heat throughout the organ. Adjusting the power of the field allows the team to control the rate of heating so that it gets faster once the organ reaches -120°C. 

The researchers successfully vitrified rat kidneys using this approach in work published in 2023. Back then, they were able to rewarm kidneys that had been kept in a freezer for up to 100 days before transplanting them into rats.

Since then, the team has been trying to achieve the same success with bigger organs. Pig kidneys are thought to be a good model for human ones—they’re about the same size and look similar. Rat kidneys weigh around one gram; pig kidneys are around 100.

It hasn’t been easy. The cryoprotectant used for vitrifying rat kidneys didn’t work as well in the pig organs. “We had to rediscover and modify the cocktail,” says Bischof. “That’s why it’s taken us three years.”

Deep-freezing kidneys

The first step in the procedure is to remove a kidney from a donor pig. Once it’s out, the kidney is flushed with a commonly used organ preservation solution to remove the blood, bagged, and temporarily laid on a bed of ice in a cooler so it can be taken over to the engineering lab.

There, team members unpack the kidney and hook it up to a device they’ve designed to control the organ’s temperature and pressure. Then they start to load it up with the cocktail of cryoprotectants, slowly enough to ensure an even spread through the organ but quickly enough to minimize any toxic effects. It takes around two hours.

The next step is to infuse the organ with the iron oxide nanoparticles, which are pumped through the organ for around seven to eight minutes, says Finger. Then it’s time to cool the organ by pumping cold nitrogen vapor into a chamber housing it.

It’s a delicate process, and the team must ensure that the organ is cooling all the way through. At the same time, they must lower the kidney’s temperature as quickly as possible to prevent ice from forming. “Oftentimes there are multiple people doing different things to make sure that things don’t go awry,” says Bischof.

Once the organ reaches the vitrified state at around -120 °C, it “behaves like a glass,” says Finger. “At that point, you can stay stable for long periods of time—we think indefinitely.” The team then pauses the cooling process to ensure that the organ is glassy throughout. Otherwise, it could crack.

After the pause, if everything goes well, the kidney is ultimately cooled to -150 °C. Once it’s in the freezer, it can stay there for days, weeks, or even months. The team has kept a small number of kidneys banked for over a year.

Pink right up

The real test of these kidneys comes when they’re taken out of the freezer, rewarmed, and flushed of their chemicals and nanoparticles. Can they support life? So far, the team has tested some of them in a couple of different ways.

In one set of experiments, the researchers put rewarmed kidneys on perfusion devices—systems that are already used in transplant surgeries both to provide organs with nutrients and to help doctors assess them while they’re out of the body.

In another set of experiments, Finger and his colleagues transplanted rewarmed kidneys into pigs and monitored them for two hours. In both experiments, the rewarmed kidneys seemed to recover, says Finger. “They pink right up,” he says. 

The team see blood flow into the rewarmed, transplanted kidney, allowing it to “pink up.”
COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS

There are lots of ways to measure the function of a kidney, but one key test is whether or not the organ can make urine. By this measure, the rewarmed kidneys did well, although they produced around two-thirds of the amount that would normally be expected. “They produce urine … within a minute or so,” says Finger. “We know that they work.” 

Most of the rewarmed kidneys had been banked for days or weeks. But one had been in the freezer for just over a year. When Finger and his colleagues rewarmed it and put it on a perfusion machine, they found that it produced urine “immediately.” “It actually looked better than many of the [other] kidneys,” says Finger. “We’re comfortable now saying we can store them for a year and rewarm them with excellent function.”

“It’s a very big deal to go a year,” says Kevin Myer, president and CEO of LifeGift, an organ procurement organization based in Texas. Being able to store organs for that length of time would transform organ transplantation. He envisions banks of organs that could be used on demand in emergency cases where people can’t wait, such as for some drug overdoses or gunshot wounds.

Final hurdles

But the procedure isn’t ready for prime time just yet. As well as producing less urine than expected, the rewarmed kidneys also showed signs of injury. The damage seems to be caused by the cryoprotectant chemicals, say the researchers.

“This is one big breakthrough that solves half the problem,” as Kilbride puts it.

The team has shown that the rewarmed kidneys can regain blood flow, which is “very important,” says Greg Fahy, a cryobiologist who is considered a pioneer in the field. But he’s worried about the extent of the damage to the organs. “We can’t tell from these experiments whether these kidneys might have supported life or not.”

But Fahy, who is chief scientific officer at the biotech companies Intervene Immune and 21st Century Medicine (where he is also executive director), acknowledges that it’s not clear how these kidneys might fare once they’re inside a living animal for the long term. 

Finger also hopes to find ways to repair the damage seen in the kidneys. Other research has shown that the health of transplant organs can improve while they’re on perfusion machines. And damaged kidneys might undergo some level of self-repair once they’re in a body. At any rate, human kidneys may cope better with the process than pig kidneys, says Finger.

The next step will be to test the kidneys in pigs over longer periods of time. The team, along with many other researchers in the field, will continue the search for less toxic cryoprotectants, too. Finger, Bischof, and their colleagues are also planning experiments with human kidneys.

Finger is optimistic. “We’re going to see that there’s injury, and it’s not perfect … but now we’ve got to the point where it works,” he says. “These are big, historic milestones in our field, and we’re excited about it.”

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OCP 2026: Agentic AI Drives the Data Center’s Chip-to-Grid Transformation

NVIDIA Opens More of the AI Factory Architecture NVIDIA’s Ian Buck closed the opening keynote program with an extensive presentation covering Vera Rubin systems, open rack designs, networking, power delivery and AI factory software. The company announced additional contributions to OCP based on its third-generation MGX 1.2 reference architecture. The specification includes high-density liquid-cooled computing systems, improved cooling connections, standardized power interfaces and modular mechanical designs. Buck emphasized that these developments are as much about manufacturing and serviceability as they are about computational performance. He described how NVIDIA reduced the assembly time for a compute tray from approximately 90 minutes in the Grace Blackwell generation to roughly one minute for Vera Rubin through simplified mechanical construction and more automated assembly. At the scale of thousands of racks, those manufacturing improvements can materially influence deployment schedules. NVIDIA also previewed its next-generation Vera Rubin Ultra architecture, designed to interconnect 576 GPUs using an advanced NVLink fabric with co-packaged optics. Open Data Center and Grid Resilience Specifications For data center developers and operators, however, NVIDIA’s most consequential OCP contributions may lie outside the computing rack. NVIDIA, AMD, Google and Meta have published an Open Data Center Specification, currently at version 0.7, intended to establish common design principles for AI factory facilities. The specification addresses power architecture, cooling infrastructure and physical layout, helping equipment suppliers and developers coordinate around shared infrastructure requirements. That shared facilities work unfolds alongside vendor-specific programs such as NVIDIA’s DSX Ready, which establishes qualification requirements for battery energy storage and liquid cooling equipment supporting its AI factory designs. NVIDIA also joined Google, Meta and Microsoft in publishing an OCP Grid Resilience Specification addressing the behavior of large AI installations during grid disturbances. The specification establishes expectations for facilities to remain connected, respond automatically to disturbances and recover toward normal operating

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NetBox Labs adds network design templates and AI agents to streamline infrastructure operations

“This is infrastructure, and so if an agent does the wrong thing, it breaks the company,” Beevers said. NetBox Designs turns repeatable infrastructure into templates AI data centers are full of racks that are almost all identical in design. Teams do not want to lay out each one by hand. The same applies to a retail chain with small, medium, and large store formats, where the IT footprint needs to line up. NetBox Designs, now in public preview, targets that repetition. Designs work like “templatized Lego bricks for infrastructure,” Beevers said. A team defines a site, rack or IP plan once and sets its parameters. NetBox then renders the plan as many times as needed, down to the low-level components and their configuration. That includes assigning IP addresses, prefixes, and virtual LANs across a fabric. The goal is to speed design down to the component level, reduce manual error and compress time to market.

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AMD unveils Helion as agentic AI fuels demand for data center CPUs

AMD has introduced Helion, an open blueprint for data center racks that aims to give CPUs a larger role in running AI agents while allowing customers to configure GPU resources around their inference requirements. Based on Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications, the architecture supports different combinations of computing hardware. AMD cited examples including CPU-only racks for hyperscalers, powered by sixth-generation EPYC processors with up to 32,768 cores, and all-in-one enterprise racks accommodating up to 16 Instinct MI350P GPUs. AMD has listed networking bandwidth of up to 102 Tbps for Helion, although the company has not specified how that figure is calculated. The specification represents a planned rack capability rather than demonstrated performance in customer environments.

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Land & Expand: North America’s Data Center Pipeline Expands Under Pressure

Land & Expand is Data Center Frontier’s periodic look at the latest data center development news, including new sites, land acquisitions and campus expansions across North America. This latest installment finds the development pipeline continuing to expand, even as the requirements for bringing large-scale projects online grow more complicated. Developers are securing land, planning new power infrastructure and advancing campuses measured in hundreds of megawatts or more. At the same time, local governments and residents are demanding greater clarity on electricity costs, water consumption, noise, tax incentives and the long-term effects of industrial-scale computing facilities. A succession of development disclosures and project milestones through September and early October 2026 illustrates both the geographical reach of North America’s expanding data center pipeline and the growing difficulty of measuring how much proposed capacity will ultimately be delivered. The projects range from preliminary discussions and newly secured development sites to campuses already under construction. Some are advancing through formal permitting and power studies; others remain contingent on customers, financing or local approvals. Together, they reveal an industry still expanding aggressively, but operating under increasingly complex development conditions. Fluidstack: Cameron County, Texas — Up to 1.5 GW One of the largest newly disclosed projects is Fluidstack’s AI data center development in Cameron County in the Rio Grande Valley. The project surfaced publicly September 10 when Cameron County announced that it had issued Fluidstack a worksite permit for property near Harlingen. The permit authorizes preliminary site work, including grading, utilities and related infrastructure, rather than construction of the data center buildings themselves. Fluidstack subsequently disclosed considerably more detail on September 21, saying construction had begun on a $4 billion first phase capable of supporting as much as 1.5 GW. Fluidstack expects the project to generate more than 2,500 construction jobs and several hundred permanent positions. 

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DCF Global: Five Markets Redrawing the AI Infrastructure Map

The Global Constraint Is Execution These five markets demonstrate that the worldwide AI infrastructure buildout is no longer organized around a single development model. Spain is using permitting reform to attract investment. China is concentrating construction around energy resources. India is translating enormous capital commitments into an expanding development pipeline. Latin America is combining hyperscale growth with national industrial objectives. And Southeast Asia is creating interconnected infrastructure markets whose boundaries increasingly extend beyond individual cities and countries. Not every market is competing for the same business. Sovereign cloud services, enterprise applications, AI training clusters, and large-scale inference platforms carry different requirements involving power, connectivity, latency, data residency, and operating economics. But the infrastructure questions remain remarkably consistent. Can a project obtain enough electricity? Can transmission and supporting networks be delivered on schedule? Will the supply chain provide the required equipment? Can the facility be constructed and commissioned efficiently? And will the development retain the regulatory certainty and community acceptance required to operate for decades? The gap between announced development and actual capacity is becoming a defining measurement of the industry. Cushman & Wakefield estimates that Asia-Pacific alone had approximately 26.5 GW of data center capacity in its development pipeline during H1 2026. Of that total, roughly 4.8 GW was under construction, with another 21.7 GW in planning. Those figures reveal both the extraordinary scale of the opportunity and the considerable infrastructure work still required to realize it. What the Global Buildout Means for North America For U.S. data center operators, developers, engineering firms, equipment suppliers, and investors, international expansion is not a separate story. It is increasingly part of the same global competition for capital, equipment, power infrastructure, and specialized expertise. The transformers, switchgear, generators, advanced cooling systems, fiber networks, and electrical distribution equipment required by a major AI campus

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).  In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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