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The Download: brain-computer interfaces, and teaching an AI model to give therapy

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. Brain-computer interfaces face a critical test Brain computer interfaces (BCIs) are electrodes put in paralyzed people’s brains so they can use imagined movements to send commands from their neurons through a wire, or via radio, to a computer. In this way, they can control a computer cursor or, in few cases, produce speech.   Recently, this field has taken some strides toward real practical applications. About 25 clinical trials of BCI implants are currently underway. And this year MIT Technology Review readers have selected these brain-computer interfaces as their addition to our annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Read the full story. —Antonio Regalado How do you teach an AI model to give therapy? —James O’DonnellOn March 27, the results of the first clinical trial for a generative AI therapy bot were published, and they showed that people in the trial who had depression or anxiety or were at risk for eating disorders benefited from chatting with a bot.I was surprised by those results. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that an AI model trained to provide therapy is the solution for millions of people experiencing a mental health crisis. But their findings suggest that the right selection of training data is vital. Read the full story. This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Tech companies are warning their immigrant workers not to leave the USEmployees on high-skilled visas could be denied entry back into the States. (WP $)+ Officials are considering collecting citizenship applicants’ social media data. (Associated Press)2 OpenAI has closed one of the largest private funding rounds in historyIt plans to put the $40 billion cash injection towards building AGI. (The Guardian)+ The deal values OpenAI at a whopping $300 billion. (CNBC)+ The company also teased its first open-weight model in years. (Insider $) 3 SpaceX has launched a mission that’s never been attempted beforeIt’s taking private customers on an orbit between Earth’s North and South poles. (CNN)+ Crypto billionaire Chun Wang is footing the bill for the mission. (Reuters)+ Europe is finally getting serious about commercial rockets. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Some DOGE workers are returning to their old jobsThey’re quietly heading back to their roles at X and SpaceX. (The Information $)+ Top staff were placed on leave after denying DOGE access to their systems. (Wired $)+ Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Amazon is going all-in on AI agentsIts new AI model Nova Act is designed to complete tasks such as online shopping. (The Verge)+ Why handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake. (MIT Technology Review) 6 DeepMind is making it harder for its researchers to publish studies It’s reluctant to share innovations that rivals could capitalize on. (FT $) 7 Meet the protestors staking out Tesla dealershipsProfessors and attorneys have taken to the streets to fight back. (New Yorker $)+ Far-right extremists are turning up to defend the company. (Wired $) 8 TikTok’s hottest topic? Tariffs Content creators are eager to explain what tariffs are to confused audiences. (WSJ $)+ Donald Trump is threatening to instigate a new range of tariffs this week. (NY Mag $)+ How Trump’s tariffs could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more. (MIT Technology Review) 9 Not everyone can look as cool as Nvidia’s Jensen HuangHis image has been co-opted to promote knockoff leather jackets. (404 Media) 10 Microsoft has killed off its Blue Screen of DeathGoodnight, sweet prince. (Vice) Quote of the day “I think that it is one of the most beautiful spaces on the internet for someone to figure out who they are.” —Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years, is not surprised by the influx of younger users flocking to her former workplace, Insider reports. The big story The quest to protect farmworkers from extreme heat October 2024On July 21, 2024, temperatures soared in many parts of the world, breaking the record for the hottest day ever recorded on the planet.The following day—July 22—the record was broken again.But even as the heat index rises each summer, the people working outdoors to pick fruits, vegetables, and flowers have to keep laboring.The consequences can be severe, leading to illnesses such as heat exhaustion, heatstroke and even acute kidney injury.Now, researchers are developing an innovative sensor that tracks multiple vital signs with a goal of anticipating when a worker is at risk of developing heat illness and issuing an alert. If widely adopted and consistently used, it could represent a way to make workers safer on farms even without significant heat protections. Read the full story. —Kalena Thomhave 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 or skeet ’em at me.) + Mescal! Dickinson! Quinn! Keoghan! I’m very excited for the forthcoming Beatles biopics, even if we have to wait three years.+ How to cook a delicious-looking basque cheesecake.+ TikTokers have taken to rubbing banana peel on their faces: but does it actually do anything?+ Spring has barely sprung, but fashion is already looking towards fall.

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.

Brain-computer interfaces face a critical test

Brain computer interfaces (BCIs) are electrodes put in paralyzed people’s brains so they can use imagined movements to send commands from their neurons through a wire, or via radio, to a computer. In this way, they can control a computer cursor or, in few cases, produce speech.  

Recently, this field has taken some strides toward real practical applications. About 25 clinical trials of BCI implants are currently underway. And this year MIT Technology Review readers have selected these brain-computer interfaces as their addition to our annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado

How do you teach an AI model to give therapy?

—James O’Donnell

On March 27, the results of the first clinical trial for a generative AI therapy bot were published, and they showed that people in the trial who had depression or anxiety or were at risk for eating disorders benefited from chatting with a bot.

I was surprised by those results. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that an AI model trained to provide therapy is the solution for millions of people experiencing a mental health crisis. But their findings suggest that the right selection of training data is vital. Read the full story.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Tech companies are warning their immigrant workers not to leave the US
Employees on high-skilled visas could be denied entry back into the States. (WP $)
+ Officials are considering collecting citizenship applicants’ social media data. (Associated Press)

2 OpenAI has closed one of the largest private funding rounds in history
It plans to put the $40 billion cash injection towards building AGI. (The Guardian)
+ The deal values OpenAI at a whopping $300 billion. (CNBC)
+ The company also teased its first open-weight model in years. (Insider $)

3 SpaceX has launched a mission that’s never been attempted before
It’s taking private customers on an orbit between Earth’s North and South poles. (CNN)
+ Crypto billionaire Chun Wang is footing the bill for the mission. (Reuters)
+ Europe is finally getting serious about commercial rockets. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Some DOGE workers are returning to their old jobs
They’re quietly heading back to their roles at X and SpaceX. (The Information $)+ Top staff were placed on leave after denying DOGE access to their systems. (Wired $)
+ Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Amazon is going all-in on AI agents
Its new AI model Nova Act is designed to complete tasks such as online shopping. (The Verge)
+ Why handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake. (MIT Technology Review)

6 DeepMind is making it harder for its researchers to publish studies 
It’s reluctant to share innovations that rivals could capitalize on. (FT $)

7 Meet the protestors staking out Tesla dealerships
Professors and attorneys have taken to the streets to fight back. (New Yorker $)
+ Far-right extremists are turning up to defend the company. (Wired $)

8 TikTok’s hottest topic? Tariffs 
Content creators are eager to explain what tariffs are to confused audiences. (WSJ $)
+ Donald Trump is threatening to instigate a new range of tariffs this week. (NY Mag $)
+ How Trump’s tariffs could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Not everyone can look as cool as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang
His image has been co-opted to promote knockoff leather jackets. (404 Media)

10 Microsoft has killed off its Blue Screen of Death
Goodnight, sweet prince. (Vice)

Quote of the day

“I think that it is one of the most beautiful spaces on the internet for someone to figure out who they are.”

—Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years, is not surprised by the influx of younger users flocking to her former workplace, Insider reports.

The big story

The quest to protect farmworkers from extreme heat


October 2024

On July 21, 2024, temperatures soared in many parts of the world, breaking the record for the hottest day ever recorded on the planet.

The following day—July 22—the record was broken again.

But even as the heat index rises each summer, the people working outdoors to pick fruits, vegetables, and flowers have to keep laboring.

The consequences can be severe, leading to illnesses such as heat exhaustion, heatstroke and even acute kidney injury.

Now, researchers are developing an innovative sensor that tracks multiple vital signs with a goal of anticipating when a worker is at risk of developing heat illness and issuing an alert. If widely adopted and consistently used, it could represent a way to make workers safer on farms even without significant heat protections. Read the full story.

—Kalena Thomhave

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 or skeet ’em at me.)

+ Mescal! Dickinson! Quinn! Keoghan! I’m very excited for the forthcoming Beatles biopics, even if we have to wait three years.
+ How to cook a delicious-looking basque cheesecake.
+ TikTokers have taken to rubbing banana peel on their faces: but does it actually do anything?
+ Spring has barely sprung, but fashion is already looking towards fall.

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IBM Cloud speeds AI workloads with Intel Gaudi 3 accelerators

For businesses that need more control over their AI development, IBM says they can deploy IBM watsonx.ai software with the Intel Gaudi 3-based virtual server on IBM Cloud VPC in Q2 2025. IBM watsonx.ai includes an end-to-end AI development studio, AI developer toolkit and full AI lifecycle management for developing AI services

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Phillips 66 Seals Acquisition of EPIC Midstream Assets

Phillips 66 has completed the acquisition of EPIC Y-Grade GP LLC and EPIC Y-Grade LP for about $2.2 billion, boosting its midstream footprint in the Permian Basin. The units, bought from EPIC Midstream Holdings LP, own natural gas liquids (NGL) pipelines, fractionation facilities and distribution systems. “This transaction strengthens our position as a leading integrated downstream energy provider”, Don Baldridge, Phillips 66 executive vice president for midstream and chemicals, said in a company statement. “We are evolving our portfolio and enhancing our ability to provide seamless and efficient delivery of energy products. “Phillips 66 will offer producers unparalleled flow assurance, while advancing a strategy that is expected to deliver attractive returns and create long-term value for our shareholders”. The acquired operations comprise two fractionators with a capacity of170,000 barrels per day (bpd) near Corpus Christi, Texas; purity distribution pipelines stretching about 350 miles; and an NGL pipeline around 885 miles long and with a capacity of 175,000 bpd. The NGL pipeline links the Delaware, Midland and Eagle Ford basins to the fractionation complexes and Phillips 66’s Sweeny Hub, which has facilities for crude distilling, naphtha reforming, fluid catalytic cracking, alkylation and hydrodesulfurization, as well as aromatics units, a vacuum distillation unit and a delayed coking unit. The pipeline capacity is being raised to 225,000 bpd, in a project expected to be completed in the second quarter. A further expansion has also been sanctioned to grow the capacity to 350,000 bpd; completion is expected 2026. EPIC has also put in place plans to raise the fractionation capacity to 280,000 bpd. “The acquired assets connect Permian production to Gulf Coast refiners, petrochemical companies and export markets, and are highly integrated with the Phillips 66 asset base”, Phillips 66 said. Announcing the agreement January 6, the company said, “Phillips 66 does not expect

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Octopus Energy takes 10% East Anglia One stake

Octopus Energy has taken a 10% stake in the 714MW East Anglia One offshore wind farm, based off the coast of Suffolk. Octopus acquired the stake from Macquarie Asset Management for an undisclosed sum on behalf of Vector, Octopus’ offshore wind fund aimed at investing in fixed and floating offshore wind projects. The deal marks Macquarie’s third sale of its stake in the project, having started holding 40% of the £2.5 billion project, with ScottishPower Renewables holding the rest. It sold 20% of the project to the Renewables Infrastructure Group (TRIG) in 2020 when the wind farm went into operations, followed by another 10% in 2024 to NTR on behalf of L&G NTR Clean Power and the Development Bank of Japan. The deal is also Octopus Energy’s fourth investment in a UK offshore wind farm and its seventh in Europe. In addition to East Anglia One, Octopus has stakes in the UK’s Hornsea One, Lincs and Walney Extension, along with Butendiek in Germany, and Borssele V and Borssele III & IV in the Netherlands. The East Anglia deal builds upon the company’s $2bn of total offshore wind investments made last year. The company has previously said it aims to invest £2bn in UK clean energy projects by 2030, with the East Anglia One deal contributing to this goal. Octopus added that it is looking at the French market as it plans to enter the country’s offshore wind tender and develop a brand-new offshore wind farm in partnership with Skyborn Renewables. Octopus Energy Generation CEO Zoisa North-Bond said: “Britain is blessed with strong winds and long coastlines – perfect conditions for offshore wind. “The sector has become a vital pillar of our energy system over the past years, and this investment will help to turbocharge this clean technology further, bringing cheaper,

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OPEC+ Agrees to Make Larger Than Expected Supply Hike in May

OPEC+ agreed to make a larger than expected oil supply hike in May, adding the equivalent of three monthly tranches from its previous plan to revive output. The group led by Saudi Arabia and Russia will add 411,000 barrels a day to the market next month, according to a statement posted on the OPEC website. The decision followed a conference call between ministers on Thursday that was focused on member countries that had been consistently exceeding their quotas, delegates said, asking not to be identified as the talks were private. The surprise decision deepened a slump in crude prices that had been triggered by US President Donald Trump’s announcement of historic tariffs on Wednesday. Oil futures fell 5.5% to $70.80 a barrel as of 12:35 p.m. in London.  After several delays, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners finally began this month restoring output that had been halted over the past few years. It will boost production by 138,000 barrels a day this month. The acceleration of the group’s production increase in May is intended to put pressure on members that have been exceeding their quotas, while also providing them with the opportunity to make larger compensation cuts to atone for past cheating, delegates said.  While global oil markets are still fragile amid growing trade tensions, and many OPEC+ members need higher crude prices to balance their state budgets, the group has also faced external pressure from Trump to “cut the price of oil.”  WHAT DO YOU THINK? Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone. All comments are subject to editorial review. Off-topic, inappropriate or insulting comments will be removed. MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR Bloomberg

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VARO to Take Over Preem

VARO Energy has agreed to buy the full share capital of Corral Petroleum Holdings AB and thereby acquire Preem Holding AB/Preem AB, a key Scandinavian oil refiner that is transitioning to renewable fuels. “On completion, we will become Europe’s second largest renewable fuel producer with an extensive distribution and storage network across major European markets with conventional fuel production capacity of 530,000 barrels per day”, VARO chief executive Dev Sanyal said in a company statement. “Combined we will serve over 50,000 business customers across 33 countries, with our future growth underpinned by a robust portfolio of mature renewable fuel projects”. Baar, Switzerland-based VARO is a joint venture of Carlyle (66.66 percent) and Vitol (33.33 percent) that produces and markets both conventional and renewable fuels. It operates in 26 countries. Stockholm-based Preem provides over 40 percent of Sweden’s and a fourth of Scandinavia’s transport fuel needs, as well as serves 17 countries in Europe, VARO noted. After investing nearly $1 billion since 2010 in renewable fuel production, as well as decarbonization initiatives, Preem now produces 300,000 metric tons a year of renewable fuels. This capacity is expected to rise to 1.3 million metric tons per annum after the completion of an upgrade at the Synsat diesel plant to enable up to 40 percent co-processing of renewable feedstocks. In Sweden Preem owns 2 refineries with 352,000 barrels a day in combined production capacity, representing 80 percent of the country’s refining capacity, VARO said. “Primarily located in Scandinavia, Preem’s assets are highly complementary to VARO’s existing operations across northwest Europe with limited overlap”, VARO said. Marcel van Poecke, chair of VARO and chair of energy at Carlyle, said, “This acquisition provides material value creation opportunities through disciplined investment in future growth projects, while enhancing VARO’s ability to deliver the reliable and secure energy

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District Judge’s Gulf Ruling Has Major Implications on Future Lease Sales

A U.S. district judge’s recent ruling against the sale of Gulf oil and gas drilling rights has major implications on future sales, according to Ellen R. Wald, the President of Transversal Consulting. “It means that environmental groups can bring lawsuits against the Interior Department just because they don’t agree with a certain aspect of their environmental impact statement,” Wald told Rigzone. The Transversal Consulting President outlined to Rigzone that interpretations of the National Environmental Policy Act, a law from 1970, have come to include “things like energy market forecasts for 30 years in the future” and said the Trump administration has an opportunity to change this. Wald pointed out to Rigzone that the administration can do this “either by overhauling the judiciary, by changing the National Environmental Policy Act to be more specific about what must be included in an environmental impact statement so that it is not open to interpretation by the judiciary, or by taking the case to higher level courts (potentially even to the Supreme Court) where they could rule that the lower court was wrong in its interpretation of the National Environmental Policy Act”. “Lower courts are supposed to follow the rulings made by higher courts and they should dismiss future cases made on these grounds,” Wald said. “Ultimately if the Supreme Court rules on it, then the issue should be put to rest. Otherwise this issue will continue to plague oil and gas development in the United States,” Wald added. Wald told Rigzone that current activity in the Gulf will not be impacted by the ruling, “only activity on the leases in question”. “It isn’t clear whether companies started drilling operations or not or whether any injunctions were issued,” Wald said. The Transversal Consulting President went on to tell Rigzone that she doesn’t see how the Trump administration can get around the ruling other

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UK government to profit from nuclear fusion fund

The UK government has invested £20 million into a UK nuclear fusion investment fund, which is expected to leverage up to £100m of private investment. Energy secretary Ed Miliband said: “This government is taking back control of Britain’s energy by driving for clean homegrown power through our Plan for Change. “Fusion has the potential to provide us with energy security, whilst attracting the best technologies to our shores and training up the next generation of British scientists and engineers. We are backing both nuclear and fusion power, and today we take a step forward in growing this exciting industry.” The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said on Thursday that it is investing capital to unlock private sector investment and help the nascent sector scale up. It said government will receive a share of any returns made by the partnership. The department argued that successful deployment of nuclear fusion energy would be “globally transformative” and would allow the UK to export the technology to a global market that is expected to be worth trillions of pounds. It said the funding was allocated from the government’s existing research and development budget for the year 2024 to 2025. The government’s cornerstone investment in nuclear fusion will effectively “kickstart” the Starmaker One investment fund, a private vehicle set up to enable start-ups and businesses to commercialise and grow. It is the first early-stage fusion energy venture capital fund to be formed outside the US and the first of its kind to partner with the government as an investor. The energy department said it has invested £410m, unveiled in January, into UK nuclear fusion research to spur collaboration with other countries to drive economic growth through developing clean and “unlimited” power. The fusion fund is structured as a limited partnership, in which the UK government is

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New MLCommons benchmarks to test AI infrastructure performance

The latest release also broadens its scope beyond chatbot benchmarks. A new graph neural network (GNN) test targets datacenter-class hardware and is designed for workloads like fraud detection, recommendation engines, and knowledge graphs. It uses the RGAT model based on a graph dataset containing over 547 million nodes and 5.8 billion edges. Judging performance Analysts suggest that these benchmarks will make it easier to judge the performance of various hardware chips and clusters based on documented models. “As every chipmaker seeks to prove that its hardware is good enough to support AI, we now have a standard benchmark that shows the quality of question support, math, and coding skills associated with hardware,” said Hyoun Park, CEO and Chief Analyst at Amalgam Insights.  Chipmakers can now compete not just on traditional speeds and feeds, but in mathematical skill and informational accuracy. This benchmark provides a rare opportunity to add new performance standards on cross-vendor hardware, Park added. “The latency in terms of how quickly tokens are delivered and the time for the user to see the response is the deciding factor,” said Neil Shah, partner and co-founder at Counterpoint Research. “This is where players such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel have to get the software right to help developers optimize the models and bring out the best compute performance.” Benchmarking and buying decisions Independent benchmarks like those from MLCommons play a key role in helping buyers evaluate system performance, but relying on them alone may not provide the full picture.

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Potential Nvidia chip shortage looms as Chinese customers rush to beat US sales ban

Will it lead to shortages? The US first placed export controls on chips sent to China in October 2022 as a means to slow the country’s technological advances. It blocked the sale of Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips, leading the company to develop the less powerful A800 and H800 chips for the market; they were also subsequently banned. There was a surge in demand for the H20 following the arrival of Chinese startup DeepSeek’s ultra low-cost, open-source AI model in January. And while the H20 is reported to be 15 times slower than Nvidia’s newest Blackwell chips sold elsewhere in the world, it was designed specifically by Nvidia to comply with the further US export controls introduced in October 2023. It is being used by Chinese companies for training, although it’s billed as an inference chip, explained Matt Kimball, VP and principal analyst for datacenter compute and storage at Moor Insights & Strategy. Should Nvidia choose to focus its efforts on manufacturing more of the chips, Kimball said he doesn’t think it will impact supply in the US and Europe, as Blackwell is the main product sold in those markets and H20 is an N-1 Hopper architecture chip. “If you take this a step further and ask whether this large order slows down the production of chips destined for the US and Europe, I’d say the answer is no, as the Hopper family is built on a different process node than the Blackwell family,” he said. Still, Kimball noted, “supply chain management is difficult, especially for smaller organizations that are put to the back of the line as hyperscalers with multibillion dollar orders are first in line for the newest [chips].”

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European cloud group invests to create what it dubs “Trump-proof cloud services”

But analysts have questioned whether the Microsoft move truly addresses those European business concerns. Phil Brunkard, executive counselor at Info-Tech Research Group UK, said, commenting on last month’s announcement of the EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud,  “Microsoft says that customer data will remain stored and processed in the EU and EFTA, but doesn’t guarantee true data sovereignty.” And European companies are now rethinking what data sovereignty means to them. They are moving beyond having it refer to where the data sits to focusing on which vendors control it, and who controls them. Responding to the new Euro cloud plan, another analyst, IDC VP Dave McCarthy, saw the effort as “signaling a growing European push for data control and independence.” “US providers could face tougher competition from EU companies that leverage this tech to offer sovereignty-friendly alternatives. Although €1 million isn’t a game-changer on its own, it’s a clear sign Europe wants to build its own cloud ecosystem—potentially at the expense of US market share,” McCarthy said. “For US providers, this could mean investing in more EU-based data centers or reconfiguring systems to ensure European customers’ data stays within the region. This isn’t just a compliance checkbox. It’s a shift that could hike operational costs and complexity, especially for companies used to running centralized setups.” Adding to the potential bad news for US hyperscalers, McCarthy said that there was little reason to believe that this trend would be limited to Europe. “If Europe pulls this off, other regions might take note and push for similar sovereignty rules. US providers could find themselves adapting to a patchwork of regulations worldwide, forcing a rethink of their global strategies,” McCarthy said. “This isn’t just a European headache, it’s a preview of what could become a broader challenge.”

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Talent gap complicates cost-conscious cloud planning

The top strategy so far is what one enterprise calls the “Cloud Team.” You assemble all your people with cloud skills, and your own best software architect, and have the team examine current and proposed cloud applications, looking for a high-level approach that meets business goals. In this process, the team tries to avoid implementation specifics, focusing instead on the notion that a hybrid application has an agile cloud side and a governance-and-sovereignty data center side, and what has to be done is push functionality into the right place. The Cloud Team supporters say that an experienced application architect can deal with the cloud in abstract, without detailed knowledge of cloud tools and costs. For example, the architect can assess the value of using an event-driven versus transactional model without fixating on how either could be done. The idea is to first come up with approaches. Then, developers could work with cloud providers to map each approach to an implementation, and assess the costs, benefits, and risks. Ok, I lied about this being the top strategy—sort of, at least. It’s the only strategy that’s making much sense. The enterprises all start their cloud-reassessment journey on a different tack, but they agree it doesn’t work. The knee-jerk approach to cloud costs is to attack the implementation, not the design. What cloud features did you pick? Could you find ones that cost less? Could you perhaps shed all the special features and just host containers or VMs with no web services at all? Enterprises who try this, meaning almost all of them, report that they save less than 15% on cloud costs, a rate of savings that means roughly a five-year payback on the costs of making the application changes…if they can make them at all. Enterprises used to build all of

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Lightmatter launches photonic chips to eliminate GPU idle time in AI data centers

“Silicon photonics can transform HPC, data centers, and networking by providing greater scalability, better energy efficiency, and seamless integration with existing semiconductor manufacturing and packaging technologies,” Jagadeesan added. “Lightmatter’s recent announcement of the Passage L200 co-packaged optics and M1000 reference platform demonstrates an important step toward addressing the interconnect bandwidth and latency between accelerators in AI data centers.” The market timing appears strategic, as enterprises worldwide face increasing computational demands from AI workloads while simultaneously confronting the physical limitations of traditional semiconductor scaling. Silicon photonics offers a potential path forward as conventional approaches reach their limits. Practical applications For enterprise IT leaders, Lightmatter’s technology could impact several key areas of infrastructure planning. AI development teams could see significantly reduced training times for complex models, enabling faster iteration and deployment of AI solutions. Real-time AI applications could benefit from lower latency between processing units, improving responsiveness for time-sensitive operations. Data centers could potentially achieve higher computational density with fewer networking bottlenecks, allowing more efficient use of physical space and resources. Infrastructure costs might be optimized by more efficient utilization of expensive GPU resources, as processors spend less time waiting for data and more time computing. These benefits would be particularly valuable for financial services, healthcare, research institutions, and technology companies working with large-scale AI deployments. Organizations that rely on real-time analysis of large datasets or require rapid training and deployment of complex AI models stand to gain the most from the technology. “Silicon photonics will be a key technology for interconnects across accelerators, racks, and data center fabrics,” Jagadeesan pointed out. “Chiplets and advanced packaging will coexist and dominate intra-package communication. The key aspect is integration, that is companies who have the potential to combine photonics, chiplets, and packaging in a more efficient way will gain competitive advantage.”

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Silicon Motion rolls SSD kit to bolster AI workload performance

The kit utilizes the PCIe Dual Ported enterprise-grade SM8366 controller with support for PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe 2.0 and OCP 2.5 data center specifications. The 128TB SSD RDK also supports NVMe 2.0 Flexible Data Placement (FDP), a feature that allows advanced data management and improved SSD write efficiency and endurance. “Silicon Motion’s MonTitan SSD RDK offers a comprehensive solution for our customers, enabling them to rapidly develop and deploy enterprise-class SSDs tailored for AI data center and edge server applications.” said Alex Chou, senior vice president of the enterprise storage & display interface solution business at Silicon Motion. Silicon Motion doesn’t make drives, rather it makes reference design kits in different form factors that its customers use to build their own product. Its kits come in E1.S, E3.S, and U.2 form factors. The E1.S and U.2 forms mirror the M.2, which looks like a stick of gum and installs on the motherboard. There are PCI Express enclosures that hold four to six of those drives and plug into one card slot and appear to the system as a single drive.

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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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