Administrators RSM confirm 162 jobs lost at failed Beam

Stay Ahead, Stay ONMINE

Administrators RSM confirm 162 jobs lost at failed Beam

Shuttered offshore and subsea technology company Beam has appointed RSM UK Restructuring Advisory as its administrators. The group’s partner and co-head of restructuring Damian Webb and restructuring partner David Shambrook will lead work to handle the failed Bristol-headquartered company. Employees of the Beam, formerly Rovco, recently rook to social media to confirm their shock at […]

Shuttered offshore and subsea technology company Beam has appointed RSM UK Restructuring Advisory as its administrators.

The group’s partner and co-head of restructuring Damian Webb and restructuring partner David Shambrook will lead work to handle the failed Bristol-headquartered company.

Employees of the Beam, formerly Rovco, recently rook to social media to confirm their shock at having suddenly been made redundant, with 162 of its 195 employees having lost their jobs.

The administrators are currently exploring ways to maximise returns for the Beam’s creditors and to preserve jobs for staff where possible.

Maritime technology and naval architecture consultancy Tymor Marine is one of the company’s creditors.

Beam brought them onboard to mobilise some of its vessels, with Tymor designing the fastenings to secure a remote operated vehicle (ROV) to the back of the ship’s deck.

Speaking to Energy Voice, Tymor Marine managing director Kevin Moran said that the cost of the work as of the end of March was around £23,000.

“But they also owe us money for approvals for some of their equipment, where we had to go through a third-party authority,” he said, accounting for around £4,000 of the figure.

Founded in 2015, Beam was formed when Rovco and Vaarst merged in September last year. It provided automated offshore wind operations, including development and maintenance, through the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies

Since launching, the two firms have raised close to £50 million from investors across three funding rounds in 2019, 2022 and 2024.

However, reports claim the company’s most recent equity raise was unsuccessful, and an accelerated sale of the business and assets was unfruitful, leading to it entering administration.

The company reported an £8.1m loss before tax in 2023, following an £8.7m loss in 2022.

In addition to its Bristol office, the company has additional bases in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Beam had recently embarked on a recruitment drive in Scotland as part of expansion efforts.

In May last year, Rovco pledged to create over 100 new jobs in Scotland alongside expanding to the US and Asia.

Backers of the Bristol-headquartered firm included Foresight Group, Equinor, through Equinor Ventures, and American defence sector investor IQT.

Stay Ahead

Explore More Insights

Stay ahead with more perspectives on cutting-edge power, infrastructure, energy, bitcoin and AI solutions. Explore these articles to uncover strategies and insights shaping the future of industries.

Nutanix expands beyond HCI

The Pure Storage integration will also be supported within Cisco’s FlashStack offering, creating a “FlashStack with Nutanix” solution with storage provided by Pure, networking capabilities as well as UCS servers from Cisco, and then the common Nutanix Cloud Platform. Cloud Native AOS: Breaking free from hypervisors Another sharp departure from

Cadence debuts Nvidia-powered supercomputer to accelerate enterprise engineering, biotech

“First, the industry is moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional representations of the world,” said Neil Shah, VP of research and partner at Counterpoint Research. “Designing advanced 3D chipsets, molecules, or LiDAR, camera, and sensor-based autonomous mobility systems for cars and aerospace requires more complex synthetic data generation to train models

IBM introduces new generation of LinuxOne AI mainframe

In addition to generative AI applications, new multiple model AI approaches are engineered to enhance prediction and accuracy in many industry use cases like advanced fraud detection, image processing and retail automation, according to IBM. LinuxONE Emperor 5 also comes with advanced security features specifically designed for the AI threat

Juniper extends Mist AI observability, performance management capabilities

“Unlike traditional solutions for digital twinning and synthetic testing, Marvis Minis don’t require manual configuration or any additional hardware or software. They are digital experience twins, now client-to-cloud available on all Juniper full-stack devices,” according to a data sheet from Juniper. “Marvis Minis are always on and constantly ingesting user

Devon Sells Stake in Permian Gas Pipeline

Devon Energy Corp. and Ridgemont Equity Partners are divesting their interests in a natural gas pipeline serving the Permian Basin with a capacity of about 2.5 billion cubic feet a day. Put onstream November 2024, the Matterhorn Express Pipeline is fully contracted. The system consists of a 510-mile mainline and associated compression that carries gas from the Waha area to Wharton, Texas. It also has delivery capabilities for Katy, Texas, as well as laterals in the Midland Basin, according to operator WhiteWater Development LLC. The stake sales by Devon and Ridgemont will result in WhiteWater, MPLX LP and Enbridge Inc. owning 65 percent, 10 percent and 10 percent of the pipeline respectively, according to a joint statement. “WhiteWater’s equity interest in the Matterhorn Express Pipeline will be jointly backed by [infrastructure investors] FIC and I Squared, and WhiteWater will continue to operate the Matterhorn Express Pipeline”, said the statement posted on WhiteWater’s website. The parties expect to complete the transactions in the second quarter. MPLX separately said its side of the transaction consists of a 5 percent acquisition that would raise its stake to 10 percent for a purchase price of $151 million. Devon separately said it will receive about $375 million in proceeds. “Proceeds from the divestiture will be used to further strengthen the company’s investment-grade financial position”, it said in its quarterly report. “The monetization of Devon’s equity ownership will not change the terms or conditions of the company’s secured capacity on the pipeline”. In a separate transaction, Devon said in the report its partnership with BPX for the Blackhawk field in the Eagle Ford shale had been dissolved. That dissolution has resulted in Devon owning around 46,000 net acres with a stake of 95 percent and operatorship. For the first quarter (Q1), Devon reported $494 million in net profit.

UK and Norway sign green energy industrial partnership amid difficult week for Labour

The UK and Norway have formalised a green industrial partnership focused on the energy transition amid a week of setbacks for Labour’s clean power goals. UK energy secretary Ed Miliband travelled to Oslo to sign the deal alongside Norway’s trade and industry minister Cecilie Myrseth and energy minister Terje Aasland. The two governments first announced the partnership in December last year, stating their ambition to cooperate on carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. Alongside CCS, the partnership will also focus on hydrogen, offshore wind, sustainable energy systems, green supply chains and joint efforts on skills development. The UK government said it will also feature collaboration on the protection of UK and Norwegian offshore infrastructure and reducing barriers to cross-border CO2 storage. An independent report found that closer cooperation between the UK and Norway could create up to 51,000 jobs and add up to £36 billion to the UK economy. © Leon Neal/PA WirePrime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store tour the Northern Lights CCUS Plant CO2 transport and storage facility in Bergen, during a trip to Norway. Image: Leon Neal/PA Wire The Norwegian government said the UK is the country’s second-largest trading partner after the EU, with total trade in 2024 coming to approximately £38bn. More than 200 Norwegian firms operate in the UK, including Equinor, Statkraft Vårgrønn, which altogether employ over 15,000 people. In a statement, Miliband said that together, Norway and the UK can “take advantage of the opportunities ahead in the North Sea”. “Energy security is national security – and only by working with key partners like Norway can we accelerate clean power that we control, getting us off the rollercoaster of fossil fuels in these unstable times,” Miliband said. Meanwhile, Aasland said the two countries “have a unique relationship in the

EIA Cuts 2025 and 2026 Brent Oil Price Forecast

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) cut its average Brent oil spot price forecast for 2025 and 2026 in its latest short term energy outlook (STEO), which was released on May 6. According to that STEO, the EIA sees the Brent spot price averaging $65.85 per barrel this year and $59.24 per barrel next year. In its previous STEO, which was released in April, the EIA projected that the Brent spot price would average $67.87 per barrel in 2025 and $61.48 per barrel in 2026. The EIA’s latest STEO sees the commodity averaging $65.04 per barrel in the second quarter of this year, $62 per barrel in the third quarter, $61 per barrel in the fourth quarter, $60 per barrel across the first and second quarters of next year, $59 per barrel in the third quarter of 2026, and $58 per barrel in the fourth quarter. In its April STEO, the EIA forecast that the Brent spot price would come in at $66.33 per barrel in the second quarter of 2025, $65.67 per barrel in the third quarter, $64 per barrel in the fourth quarter, $63 per barrel in the first quarter of next year, $62 per barrel in the second quarter, $61 per barrel in the third quarter, and $60 per barrel in the fourth quarter of 2026. “The Brent crude oil spot price averaged $68 per barrel in April, $5 per barrel lower than in March,” the EIA highlighted in its latest STEO. “Crude oil prices fell for the third consecutive month, driven primarily by expectations of lower global oil demand growth following the implementation of new tariffs from the United States and its largest trading partners,” it added. “In April, OPEC+ members also reaffirmed and accelerated their planned production increases, adding to expectations that global oil inventories

Alternative technologies key to FERC transmission orders’ success: ACORE

Dive Brief: Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Orders 1920 and 1920-A create space for a more holistic transmission planning framework marked by collaboration between transmission providers and state utility regulators, according to an American Council on Renewable Energy report published in April. Alternative transmission technologies, or ATTs, mentioned in the orders — dynamic line ratings, advanced power flow control, transmission switching and high-performance conductors — can speed development of a more reliable, resilient, efficient and ultimately cost-effective transmission network, principals with The Brattle Group and Grid Strategies said in “Incorporating GETs and HPCs Into Transmission Planning Under FERC Order 1920.” Transmission planners and state entities must overcome four key barriers to ATT implementation at scale: insufficient recognition of their value, misaligned incentives, overly static and deterministic planning practices, and an apparent lack of capacity to perform advanced system analyses, the report said. Dive Insight: Former FERC Commissioner Allison Clements hailed Order 1920 as “a strong step that can considerably enhance grid reliability while making electricity more affordable for consumers” shortly after its issuance last May. But Order 1920 was just an incremental step, one “forged through compromise,” Clements said. In November, after a diverse collection of clean energy groups and mostly Republican-controlled states challenged the order in federal courts, FERC issued a modified order that it said “further enhances the role of Relevant State Entities in Long-Term Regional Transmission Planning, especially their role in shaping scenario development and cost allocation.” Among other enhancements, Order 1920-A requires transmission providers to incorporate state entities’ input on planners’ future scenario development in recognition that those scenarios will reflect states’ own plans to meet legislative or regulatory obligations, FERC said. While Order 1920 leaves the details of scenario development to transmission providers, it requires them to develop at least three “plausible and diverse” scenarios identifying

Southeastern utilities have fallen behind in transmission planning: reports

Dive Brief: The Southeast Regional Transmission Planning organization hasn’t approved a new regional transmission project in more than a decade — and is now the only region in the U.S. where that is true, according to a report written by The Brattle Group for the Carolinas Clean Energy Business Association and other renewable energy groups. Unlike neighboring utilities including Duke Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority, Southern Co. avoided outages during 2022’s Winter Storm Elliot because it was able to import power from other nearby generators, a separate report by Telos Energy for the Southern Renewable Energy Association said. Southeastern utilities could save more than $8 billion in the long-run if they invested $5 billion in expanding the region’s grid, according to The Brattle Group. Dive Insight: Despite attracting sizeable investment under the Inflation Reduction Act, the southeastern grid is falling behind other regions of the U.S. in terms of transmission planning and expansion, according to recent reports. The SERTP process, created in 2007 in response to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission orders, has proven insufficient for the region’s needs, according to The Brattle Group. “The current SERTP regional planning process will not yield the most valuable and cost-effective transmission infrastructure needed to meet the future needs of the system,” the report said. The organization is supposed to coordinate regional transmission planning and cost allocation between 10 utilities across 12 states, but it has no independent staff and hasn’t produced or approved a new regional transmission project in over a decade, according to Brattle. Meanwhile, Telos Energy found that Southern Co. avoided outages during Winter Storm Elliot because it imported power from neighboring states at a cost of more than $52 million. Southern Co. could have defrayed some of those costs, according to the report, if it had access to lower-cost markets via

XL Batteries CEO sees opportunity to topple China’s lithium battery dominance

This is the latest installment in Utility Dive’s “Taking Charge” series, where we engage with power sector leaders on the energy transition. Stable, scalable organic flow battery technology could replace the ubiquitous lithium-ion battery, says XL Batteries co-founder and CEO Tom Sisto – and make the U.S. less dependent on China, which dominates the lithium battery supply chain. Sisto aims for XL Batteries’ product, a water-based organic flow battery which uses petrochemical feedstocks, to help replace lithium batteries. The petrochemical feedstocks are used to supply the organic molecules the company was founded around, which Sisto says are uniquely stable and therefore well-suited to battery use. “Our hope is to put demos into customers’ hands fairly soon,” he said. “And we will be commercially deploying very large scale projects significantly before 2030.” The “commodity chemicals” that XL Batteries uses as feedstocks are “global, ubiquitous, and made at the largest scales in the world,” Sisto said. In contrast, China “dominates the active materials production portion of the lithium battery supply chain,” according to a June article from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Behind China, Japan and South Korea, the United States “finds itself a distant fourth” in lithium battery materials production, “a position where it is likely to remain for 10 years despite significant investment,” CSIS said. Costs across the battery supply chain are already soaring in the U.S. due to President Trump’s new tariffs on Chinese goods, causing project delays and cancellations. “We’re seeing the disruption of these lithium-ion utility scale projects,” Sisto said. “I think what it’s done is it’s opened people’s eyes to [China’s] 90% control over the entirety of the supply chain, from the raw materials up.” Even if developers in the U.S. “wanted to build a factory, we don’t have the equipment to go inside of

Tech CEOs warn Senate: Outdated US power grid threatens AI ambitions

The implications are clear: without dramatic improvements to the US energy infrastructure, the nation’s AI ambitions could be significantly constrained by simple physical limitations – the inability to power the massive computing clusters necessary for advanced AI development and deployment. Streamlining permitting processes The tech executives have offered specific recommendations to address these challenges, with several focusing on the need to dramatically accelerate permitting processes for both energy generation and the transmission infrastructure needed to deliver that power to AI facilities, the report added. Intrator specifically called for efforts “to streamline the permitting process to enable the addition of new sources of generation and the transmission infrastructure to deliver it,” noting that current regulatory frameworks were not designed with the urgent timelines of the AI race in mind. This acceleration would help technology companies build and power the massive data centers needed for AI training and inference, which require enormous amounts of electricity delivered reliably and consistently. Beyond the cloud: bringing AI to everyday devices While much of the testimony focused on large-scale infrastructure needs, AMD CEO Lisa Su emphasized that true AI leadership requires “rapidly building data centers at scale and powering them with reliable, affordable, and clean energy sources.” Su also highlighted the importance of democratizing access to AI technologies: “Moving faster also means moving AI beyond the cloud. To ensure every American benefits, AI must be built into the devices we use every day and made as accessible and dependable as electricity.”

Networking errors pose threat to data center reliability

Still, IT and networking issues increased in 2024, according to Uptime Institute. The analysis attributed the rise in outages due to increased IT and network complexity, specifically, change management and misconfigurations. “Particularly with distributed services, cloud services, we find that cascading failures often occur when networking equipment is replicated across an entire network,” Lawrence explained. “Sometimes the failure of one forces traffic to move in one direction, overloading capacity at another data center.” The most common causes of major network-related outages were cited as: Configuration/change management failure: 50% Third-party network provider failure: 34% Hardware failure: 31% Firmware/software error: 26% Line breakages: 17% Malicious cyberattack: 17% Network overload/congestion failure: 13% Corrupted firewall/routing tables issues: 8% Weather-related incident: 7% Configuration/change management issues also attributed for 62% of the most common causes of major IT system-/software-related outages. Change-related disruptions consistently are responsible for software-related outages. Human error continues to be one of the “most persistent challenges in data center operations,” according to Uptime’s analysis. The report found that the biggest cause of these failures is data center staff failing to follow established procedures, which has increased by about 10 percentage points compared to 2023. “These are things that were 100% under our control. I mean, we can’t control when the UPS module fails because it was either poorly manufactured, it had a flaw, or something else. This is 100% under our control,” Brown said. The most common causes of major human error-related outages were reported as:

Liquid cooling technologies: reducing data center environmental impact

“Highly optimized cold-plate or one-phase immersion cooling technologies can perform on par with two-phase immersion, making all three liquid-cooling technologies desirable options,” the researchers wrote. Factors to consider There are numerous factors to consider when adopting liquid cooling technologies, according to Microsoft’s researchers. First, they advise performing a full environmental, health, and safety analysis, and end-to-end life cycle impact analysis. “Analyzing the full data center ecosystem to include systems interactions across software, chip, server, rack, tank, and cooling fluids allows decision makers to understand where savings in environmental impacts can be made,” they wrote. It is also important to engage with fluid vendors and regulators early, to understand chemical composition, disposal methods, and compliance risks. And associated socioeconomic, community, and business impacts are equally critical to assess. More specific environmental considerations include ozone depletion and global warming potential; the researchers emphasized that operators should only use fluids with low to zero ozone depletion potential (ODP) values, and not hydrofluorocarbons or carbon dioxide. It is also critical to analyze a fluid’s viscosity (thickness or stickiness), flammability, and overall volatility. And operators should only use fluids with minimal bioaccumulation (the buildup of chemicals in lifeforms, typically in fish) and terrestrial and aquatic toxicity. Finally, once up and running, data center operators should monitor server lifespan and failure rates, tracking performance uptime and adjusting IT refresh rates accordingly.

Cisco unveils prototype quantum networking chip

Clock synchronization allows for coordinated time-dependent communications between end points that might be cloud databases or in large global databases that could be sitting across the country or across the world, he said. “We saw recently when we were visiting Lawrence Berkeley Labs where they have all of these data sources such as radio telescopes, optical telescopes, satellites, the James Webb platform. All of these end points are taking snapshots of a piece of space, and they need to synchronize those snapshots to the picosecond level, because you want to detect things like meteorites, something that is moving faster than the rotational speed of planet Earth. So the only way you can detect that quickly is if you synchronize these snapshots at the picosecond level,” Pandey said. For security use cases, the chip can ensure that if an eavesdropper tries to intercept the quantum signals carrying the key, they will likely disturb the state of the qubits, and this disturbance can be detected by the legitimate communicating parties and the link will be dropped, protecting the sender’s data. This feature is typically implemented in a Quantum Key Distribution system. Location information can serve as a critical credential for systems to authenticate control access, Pandey said. The prototype quantum entanglement chip is just part of the research Cisco is doing to accelerate practical quantum computing and the development of future quantum data centers. The quantum data center that Cisco envisions would have the capability to execute numerous quantum circuits, feature dynamic network interconnection, and utilize various entanglement generation protocols. The idea is to build a network connecting a large number of smaller processors in a controlled environment, the data center warehouse, and provide them as a service to a larger user base, according to Cisco. The challenges for quantum data center network fabric

Zyxel launches 100GbE switch for enterprise networks

Port specifications include: 48 SFP28 ports supporting dual-rate 10GbE/25GbE connectivity 8 QSFP28 ports supporting 100GbE connections Console port for direct management access Layer 3 routing capabilities include static routing with support for access control lists (ACLs) and VLAN segmentation. The switch implements IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging, port isolation, and port mirroring for traffic analysis. For link aggregation, the switch supports IEEE 802.3ad for increased throughput and redundancy between switches or servers. Target applications and use cases The CX4800-56F targets multiple deployment scenarios where high-capacity backbone connectivity and flexible port configurations are required. “This will be for service providers initially or large deployments where they need a high capacity backbone to deliver a primarily 10G access layer to the end point,” explains Nguyen. “Now with Wi-Fi 7, more 10G/25G capable POE switches are being powered up and need interconnectivity without the bottleneck. We see this for data centers, campus, MDU (Multi-Dwelling Unit) buildings or community deployments.” Management is handled through Zyxel’s NebulaFlex Pro technology, which supports both standalone configuration and cloud management via the Nebula Control Center (NCC). The switch includes a one-year professional pack license providing IGMP technology and network analytics features. The SFP28 ports maintain backward compatibility between 10G and 25G standards, enabling phased migration paths for organizations transitioning between these speeds.

Engineers rush to master new skills for AI-driven data centers

According to the Uptime Institute survey, 57% of data centers are increasing salary spending. Data center job roles that saw the highest increases were in operations management – 49% of data center operators said they saw highest increases in this category – followed by junior and mid-level operations staff at 45%, and senior management and strategy at 35%. Other job categories that saw salary growth were electrical, at 32% and mechanical, at 23%. Organizations are also paying premiums on top of salaries for particular skills and certifications. Foote Partners tracks pay premiums for more than 1,300 certified and non-certified skills for IT jobs in general. The company doesn’t segment the data based on whether the jobs themselves are data center jobs, but it does track 60 skills and certifications related to data center management, including skills such as storage area networking, LAN, and AIOps, and 24 data center-related certificates from Cisco, Juniper, VMware and other organizations. “Five of the eight data center-related skills recording market value gains in cash pay premiums in the last twelve months are all AI-related skills,” says David Foote, chief analyst at Foote Partners. “In fact, they are all among the highest-paying skills for all 723 non-certified skills we report.” These skills bring in 16% to 22% of base salary, he says. AIOps, for example, saw an 11% increase in market value over the past year, now bringing in a premium of 20% over base salary, according to Foote data. MLOps now brings in a 22% premium. “Again, these AI skills have many uses of which the data center is only one,” Foote adds. The percentage increase in the specific subset of these skills in data centers jobs may vary. The Uptime Institute survey suggests that the higher pay is motivating workers to stay in the

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.

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

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

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

Stay Ahead, Stay ONMINE