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Arista targets AI data centers with new liquid cooled pluggable optic module

To prove their point, the authors imagined a 400 MW AI datacenter with 1024 GPU racks of 128 GPUs each for a total of 128,000 GPUs. “Assume 12.8T scale-up and 1.6T scale-out bandwidth per GPU. With OSFP switch racks that have a density of 1.6 Pbps per rack, this would require more than 1,400 switch […]

To prove their point, the authors imagined a 400 MW AI datacenter with 1024 GPU racks of 128 GPUs each for a total of 128,000 GPUs. “Assume 12.8T scale-up and 1.6T scale-out bandwidth per GPU. With OSFP switch racks that have a density of 1.6 Pbps per rack, this would require more than 1,400 switch racks for scale-up and scale-out fabrics. With XPO, this would require 75% fewer racks, saving over 1,050 racks or 44 % of the floor space,” Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala stated in the blog. 

“Eliminating 75% of switch racks translates to massive reductions in construction and infrastructure costs, including power distribution, plumbing and installation costs, while accelerating deployment timelines,” Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala stated.

Arista said the water-cooling capability of XPO is also an important feature.

“All large AI data centers will be liquid cooled and the switches that go into these data centers also need to be liquid cooled,” Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala stated.  “While one can add liquid cooled cold plates on flat-top OSFP modules, this does not substantially improve thermal performance.”

XPO solves this problem by integrating a liquid cold plate inside the module, with two 32-channel paddle cards sharing the common cold plate which can cool both low power as well as high-power optics such as 8x1600G-ZR/ZR+ with up to 400W of power, Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala stated.

XPO modules are much simpler than OSPF modules which improves reliability as well. “Each 32-channel paddle card has only one microcontroller and one set of voltage converters, a 75% reduction in common components versus 4 OSFPs,” Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala wrote. 

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How AWS is reinventing the telco revenue model

Consider what that means for the mobile operator and its relationship with its customers. Instead of selling a generic 5G pipe with a static SLA, a telco can now sell a dynamic, guaranteed slice for a specific use case—say, a remote robotic surgery setup or a high-density, low-latency industrial IoT

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What’s the biggest barrier to AI success?

AI’s challenge starts with definition. We hear all the time about how AI raises productivity, and many have experienced that themselves. But what, exactly, does “productivity” mean? To the average person, it means they can do things with less effort, which they like, so it generates a lot of favorable

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IBM proposes unified architecture for hybrid quantum-classical computing

Quantum computers and classical HPC are traditionally “disparate systems [that] operate in isolation,” IBM researchers explain in a new paper. This can be “cumbersome,” because users have to manually orchestrate workflows, coordinate scheduling, and transfer data between systems, thus hindering productivity and “severely” limiting algorithmic exploration. But a hybrid approach

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Energy Department Announces $1.9B Investment in Critical Grid Infrastructure to Reduce Electricity Costs

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity (OE) today announced an approximately $1.9 billion funding opportunity to accelerate urgently needed upgrades to the nation’s power grid. These investments will meet rising electricity demand and resource adequacy needs, while lowering electricity costs for American households and businesses. Projects selected through the Speed to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and other Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades (SPARK) funding opportunity will deliver fast and durable upgrades to the grid with real results. In line with President Trump’s Executive Order, Unleashing American Energy, selected projects will demonstrate how reconductoring—replacing existing power lines with higher‑capacity conductors—paired with other Advanced Transmission Technologies (ATTs) can expand grid capacity, increase operational efficiency, lower prices for consumers, and improve overall system reliability and security of the nation’s electric grid. “For too long, important grid modernization and energy addition efforts were not prioritized by past leaders,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “Thanks to President Trump, we are doing the important work of modernizing our grid so electricity costs will be lowered for American families and businesses.” “The United States must increase grid capacity to meet demand, and ensure the grid provides reliable power—day-in and day-out,” said OE Assistant Secretary Katie Jereza. “Through this SPARK funding opportunity, we will stabilize and optimize grid operations to strengthen it for rapid growth.” The SPARK opportunity builds on the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program, which provided up to $10.5 billion in competitive funding over five years to states, tribes, electric utilities, and other eligible recipients to strengthen grid resilience and innovation. The previous two GRIP funding rounds covered FY 2022-2023 and FY 2023-2024 funding. Today’s announcement continues the mission of the GRIP Program under the SPARK funding opportunity, focusing on the rapid deployment of reconductoring and other ATTs that expand transfer capability, strengthen reliability

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United States to Release 172 Million Barrels of Oil From the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

WASHINGTON—U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright released the following statement regarding the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR): “Earlier today, 32 member nations of the International Energy Agency unanimously agreed to President Trump’s request to lower energy prices with a coordinated release of 400 million barrels of oil and refined products from their respective reserves.  “As part of this effort, President Trump authorized the Department of Energy to release 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, beginning next week. This will take approximately 120 days to deliver based on planned discharge rates.  “President Trump promised to protect America’s energy security by managing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve responsibly and this action demonstrates his commitment to that promise. Unlike the previous administration, which left America’s oil reserves drained and damaged, the United States has arranged to more than replace these strategic reserves with approximately 200 million barrels within the next year—20% more barrels than will be drawn down—and at no cost to the taxpayer.  “For 47 years, Iran and its terrorist proxies have been intent on killing Americans. They have manipulated and threatened the energy security of America and its allies. Under President Trump, those days are coming to an end.  “Rest assured, America’s energy security is as strong as ever.”                                                                                         ###

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Occidental Petroleum, 1PointFive STRATOS DAC plant nears startup in Texas Permian basin

Occidental Petroleum Corp. and its subsidiary 1PointFive expect Phase 1 of the STRATOS direct air capture (DAC) plant in Texas’ Permian basin to come online in this year’s second quarter. In a post to LinkedIn, 1PointFive said Phase 1 “is in the final stage of startup” and that Phase 2, which incorporates learnings from research and development and Phase 1 construction activities, “will also begin commissioning in Q2, with operational ramp-up continuing through the rest of the year.” Once fully operational, STRATOS is designed to capture up to 500,000 tonnes/year (tpy) of CO2. As part of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Class VI permitting process and approval, it was reported that STRATOS is expected to include three wells to store about 722,000 tpy of CO2 in saline formations at a depth of about 4,400 ft. The company said a few activities before start-up remain, including ramping up remaining pellet reactors, completing calciner final commissioning in parallel, and beginning CO2 injection. Start-up milestones achieved include: Completed wet commissioning with water circulation. Received Class VI permits to sequester CO2. Ran CO2 compression system at design pressure. Added potassium hydroxide (KOH) to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. Building pellet inventory. Burners tested on calciner.  

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Brava Energia weighs Phase 3 at Atlanta to extend production plateau

Just 2 months after bringing its flagship Atlanta field onstream with the new FPSO Atlanta, Brazil’s independent operator Brava Energia SA is evaluating a potential third development phase that could add roughly 25 million bbl of reserves and help sustain peak production longer than originally planned. The Phase 3 project, still at an early technical and economic evaluation stage, focuses on the Atlanta Nordeste area; a separate, shallower reservoir discovered in 2006 by Shell’s 9-SHEL-19D-RJS well. According to André Fagundes, vice-president of research (Brazil) at Welligence Energy Analytics, Phase 2 has four wells still to be developed: two expected in 2027 and two in 2029. Phase 3 would involve drilling two additional wells in 2031, bringing total development to 12 producing wells. Until recently, full-field development was understood to comprise 10 wells, but Brava has since updated guidance to reflect a 12-well development concept. Atlanta field upside The primary objective is clear. “We believe its main objective is to extend the production plateau,” Fagundes said. Welligence estimates incremental recovery could reach 25 MMbbl, increasing the field’s overall recovery factor by roughly 1.5%. Lying outside Atlanta’s main Cretaceous reservoir, Atlanta Nordeste represents a genuine upside opportunity, Fagundes explained. The field benefits from strong natural aquifer support, and no water or gas injection is anticipated. Water-handling constraints that affected early production using the Petrojarl I—limited to 11,500 b/d of water treatment—are no longer a bottleneck. FPSO Atlanta can process up to 140,000 b/d of water. Reservoir performance to date has been solid, albeit with difficulties. Recurrent electric submersible pump (ESP) failures and processing limits on the previous FPSO complicated full validation of original reservoir models. With the new 50,000-b/d FPSO in operation since late 2024, reservoir deliverability has become the main constraint. Phase 3 wells would also use ESPs and require additional subsea

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California Resources eyes ‘measured’ capex ramp on way to 12% production growth thanks to Berry buy

@import url(‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:[email protected]&display=swap’); a { color: var(–color-primary-main); } .ebm-page__main h1, .ebm-page__main h2, .ebm-page__main h3, .ebm-page__main h4, .ebm-page__main h5, .ebm-page__main h6 { font-family: Inter; } body { line-height: 150%; letter-spacing: 0.025em; font-family: Inter; } button, .ebm-button-wrapper { font-family: Inter; } .label-style { text-transform: uppercase; color: var(–color-grey); font-weight: 600; font-size: 0.75rem; } .caption-style { font-size: 0.75rem; opacity: .6; } #onetrust-pc-sdk [id*=btn-handler], #onetrust-pc-sdk [class*=btn-handler] { background-color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-policy a, #onetrust-pc-sdk a, #ot-pc-content a { color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-pc-sdk .ot-active-menu { border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-accept-btn-handler, #onetrust-banner-sdk #onetrust-reject-all-handler, #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-pc-btn-handler.cookie-setting-link { background-color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk .onetrust-pc-btn-handler { color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } The leaders of California Resources Corp., Long Beach, plan to have the company’s total production average 152,000-157,000 boe/d in 2026, with each quarter expected to be in that range. That output would equate to an increase of more than 12% from the operator’s 137,000 boe/d during fourth-quarter 2025, due mostly to the mid-December acquisition of Berry Corp. Fourth-quarter results folded in 14 days of Berry production and included 109,000 b/d of oil, with the company’s assets in the San Joaquin and Los Angeles basins accounting for 99,000 b/d of that total. The company dilled 31 new wells during the quarter and 76 in all of 2025—all in the San Joaquin—but that number will grow significantly to about 260 this year as state officials have resumed issuing permits following the passage last fall of a bill focused on Kern County production. Speaking to analysts after CRC reported fourth-quarter net income of $12 million on $924 million in revenues, president and chief executive officer Francisco Leon and chief financial officer Clio Crespy said the goal is to manage 2026 output decline to roughly 0.5% per quarter while operating four rigs and

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Petro-Victory Energy spuds São João well in Brazil

@import url(‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:[email protected]&display=swap’); a { color: var(–color-primary-main); } .ebm-page__main h1, .ebm-page__main h2, .ebm-page__main h3, .ebm-page__main h4, .ebm-page__main h5, .ebm-page__main h6 { font-family: Inter; } body { line-height: 150%; letter-spacing: 0.025em; font-family: Inter; } button, .ebm-button-wrapper { font-family: Inter; } .label-style { text-transform: uppercase; color: var(–color-grey); font-weight: 600; font-size: 0.75rem; } .caption-style { font-size: 0.75rem; opacity: .6; } #onetrust-pc-sdk [id*=btn-handler], #onetrust-pc-sdk [class*=btn-handler] { background-color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-policy a, #onetrust-pc-sdk a, #ot-pc-content a { color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-pc-sdk .ot-active-menu { border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-accept-btn-handler, #onetrust-banner-sdk #onetrust-reject-all-handler, #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-pc-btn-handler.cookie-setting-link { background-color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk .onetrust-pc-btn-handler { color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } Petro-Victory Energy Corp. has spudded the SJ‑12 well at São João field in Barreirinhas basin, on the Brazilian equatorial margin, Maranhão.  Drilling and testing SJ‑12 is aimed at proving enough gas can be produced to sell locally. The well forms part of the single non‑associated gas well commitment under a memorandum of understanding signed in 2024 with Enava. São João contains 50.1 bcf (1.4 billion cu m) non‑associated gas resources. Petro‑Victory 100% owns and operates São João field.

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Arista targets AI data centers with new liquid cooled pluggable optic module

To prove their point, the authors imagined a 400 MW AI datacenter with 1024 GPU racks of 128 GPUs each for a total of 128,000 GPUs. “Assume 12.8T scale-up and 1.6T scale-out bandwidth per GPU. With OSFP switch racks that have a density of 1.6 Pbps per rack, this would require more than 1,400 switch racks for scale-up and scale-out fabrics. With XPO, this would require 75% fewer racks, saving over 1,050 racks or 44 % of the floor space,” Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala stated in the blog.  “Eliminating 75% of switch racks translates to massive reductions in construction and infrastructure costs, including power distribution, plumbing and installation costs, while accelerating deployment timelines,” Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala stated. Arista said the water-cooling capability of XPO is also an important feature. “All large AI data centers will be liquid cooled and the switches that go into these data centers also need to be liquid cooled,” Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala stated.  “While one can add liquid cooled cold plates on flat-top OSFP modules, this does not substantially improve thermal performance.” XPO solves this problem by integrating a liquid cold plate inside the module, with two 32-channel paddle cards sharing the common cold plate which can cool both low power as well as high-power optics such as 8x1600G-ZR/ZR+ with up to 400W of power, Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala stated. XPO modules are much simpler than OSPF modules which improves reliability as well. “Each 32-channel paddle card has only one microcontroller and one set of voltage converters, a 75% reduction in common components versus 4 OSFPs,” Bechtolsheim and Vusirikala wrote. 

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Cisco grows high-end optical support for AI clusters

Cisco has also upgraded its Network Conversion System (NCS) with a 1RU, 800GE line card offering 12.8T capacity, with 32 OSFP-based ports for 100GE, 400GE, and 800GE clients and 800ZR/ZR+ WDM trunks. The NCS 1014  doubles the density of previous-generation NCS versions and now includes MACsec encryption (IEEE 802.1AE) to secure point-to-point links with hardware-based encryption, data integrity, and authentication for Ethernet traffic, Ghioni stated. It supports enhanced capacity and performance with C&L-band support and NCS 1014 systems with the 2.4T WDM line card based on the Coherent Interconnect Module 8 and now supports 800 GE clients, which can be mapped directly to a wavelength or inverse multiplexed across two wavelengths to maximize reach, Ghioni wrote.  In the pluggable optic arena, Cisco is now offering a Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable Double Density (QSFP-DD) Pluggable Protection Switch Module that can monitor the optical link and switch traffic if it detects a fault in less than 50 milliseconds. The module occupies a quarter of the rack space compared to traditional protection devices—offering 90% rack space saving over available options, Ghioni wrote.  It is aimed at Metro and DCI network customers where sub-50 ms failure recovery is essential and data centers needing fiber protection without bulky hardware, Ghioni stated.  Cisco also added its Acacia developed Bright QSFP28 100ZR 0 dBm coherent optical pluggable in a standard QSFP28 form factor.  It is aimed at edge, access, enterprise, and campus network deployment. Cisco has been actively growing its optical portfolio  recently adding the Cisco Silicon One G300, which powers 102.4T N9000 and Cisco 8000 systems, as well as advanced 1.6T OSFP optics and 800G Linear Pluggable Optics. 

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Datalec targets rapid infrastructure deployment with new modular data centers

“We are engineering the data center with a new lens bringing pre-engineered system designs that are flexible and adaptable that enables a tailored solution for clients,” said John Lever, director of modular solutions at Datalec. The systems are flexible enough that these solutions cater for all types of data center, from standard server technology to AI and high-density compute. Datalec also provides “bolt-on” solutions, including a ‘digital wrapper’ including digital twinning and lifecycle and global support, Lever says. Another way Datalec says it differentiates from competing modular designs is a larger share of work is done offsite in a controlled manufacturing environment, which cuts onsite construction time, improves safety and limits disruption to live facilities, Lever says. The company competes with other modular data center vendors including Schneider Electric, Vertiv, Flex many others. DPI’s says its services are aimed at colocation providers, hyperscale and AI infrastructure teams, and large enterprises that need to add capacity quickly, safely and cost effectively across multiple regions.

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Study finds significant savings from direct current power for AI workloads

The result is a 50% to 80% reduction in copper usage, due to fewer conductors and less parallel cabling, and an 8% to 12% reduction in annual energy-related OpEx through lower conversion and distribution losses. By reducing conductor count, cabling, and redundant power components, 800VDC enables meaningful savings at both build-out and operational stages. AI-first facilities can see a $4 million to $8 million in CapEx savings per 10 MW build by reducing upstream AC. For a one-gigawatt data center, you’re saving a couple million pounds of copper wire, he said. Burke says an all-DC data center is best done with a whole new facility rather than retrofitting old facilities. “[DC] is going to be in a lot of greenfield data centers that are going to be built, and data centers that are going to go to higher compute power are also going to DC,” he said. He did recommend all-DC retrofits for existing data centers that are going to employ high power computing with GPUs. Enteligent’s unnamed and as yet unreleased product is a converter that takes 800 volts and partitions it to 50 volts for the computing servers. The company will provide a new power supply, power shelf that converts 800 volts DC to 50 volts DC much more efficiently than any current power supplies. Burke said the company is doing NDA level testing and pilot programs now with its product, but it will be making a formal announcement within the next few weeks. There are a number of players in the DC arena focusing on different parts of the power supply market including Vertiv, Rutherford, Siemens, Eaton and many more.

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Cisco blends Splunk analytics, security with core data center management

With the integration, data center teams can gather and act on events, alarms, health scores, and inventory through open APIs, Cisco stated. It also offers pre-built and customizable dashboards for inventory, health, fabric state, anomalies, and advisories as well as correlates telemetry across fabrics and technology tiers for actionable insights, according to Cisco. “This isn’t just another connector or API call. This is an embedded, architectural integration designed to transform how you monitor, troubleshoot, and secure your data center fabric. By bringing the power of Splunk directly into the Data Center Networking environment, we are enabling teams to solve complex problems faster, maintain strict data sovereignty, and dramatically reduce operational costs,” wrote Usha Andra is a senior product marketing leader and Anant Shah, senior product manager, both with Cisco Data Center Networking in a blog about the integration.  “Traditionally, network monitoring involves a trade-off. You either send massive amounts of raw logs to a centralized data lake, incurring high ingress and storage costs. Or you rely on sampled data that misses critical microbursts and anomalies,” Andra and Shah wrote.  “Native Splunk integration changes the paradigm by running Splunk capabilities directly within the Cisco Nexus Dashboard. This allows for the streaming of high-fidelity telemetry, including anomalies, advisories, and audit logs, directly to Splunk analytics.”

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Execution, Power, and Public Trust: Rich Miller on 2026’s Data Center Reality and Why He Built Data Center Richness

DCF founder Rich Miller has spent much of his career explaining how the data center industry works. Now, with his latest venture, Data Center Richness, he’s also examining how the industry learns. That thread provided the opening for the latest episode of The DCF Show Podcast, where Miller joined present Data Center Frontier Editor in Chief Matt Vincent and Senior Editor David Chernicoff for a wide-ranging discussion that ultimately landed on a simple conclusion: after two years of unprecedented AI-driven announcements, 2026 will be the year reality asserts itself. Projects will either get built, or they won’t. Power will either materialize, or it won’t. Communities will either accept data center expansion – or they’ll stop it. In other words, the industry is entering its execution phase. Why Data Center Richness Matters Now Miller launched Data Center Richness as both a podcast and a Substack publication, an effort to experiment with formats and better understand how professionals now consume industry information. Podcasts have become a primary way many practitioners follow the business, while YouTube’s discovery advantages increasingly make video versions essential. At the same time, Miller remains committed to written analysis, using Substack as a venue for deeper dives and format experimentation. One example is his weekly newsletter distilling key industry developments into just a handful of essential links rather than overwhelming readers with volume. The approach reflects a broader recognition: the pace of change has accelerated so much that clarity matters more than quantity. The topic of how people learn about data centers isn’t separate from the industry’s trajectory; it’s becoming part of it. Public perception, regulatory scrutiny, and investor expectations are now shaped by how stories are told as much as by how facilities are built. That context sets the stage for the conversation’s core theme. Execution Defines 2026 After

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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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