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Chevron Lummus, Neste Make Progress on New Waste-to-Fuel Tech

Neste Oyj and Chevron Lummus Global (CLG) have announced promising pilot results for a new process to convert lignocellulosic biomass into renewable fuels. “Through close collaboration at CLG’s state-of-the-art R&D facility in the U.S., Neste and CLG have successfully demonstrated proof of concept for converting lignocellulosic waste into renewable fuels, with highly promising initial results”, […]

Neste Oyj and Chevron Lummus Global (CLG) have announced promising pilot results for a new process to convert lignocellulosic biomass into renewable fuels.

“Through close collaboration at CLG’s state-of-the-art R&D facility in the U.S., Neste and CLG have successfully demonstrated proof of concept for converting lignocellulosic waste into renewable fuels, with highly promising initial results”, a joint statement said.

The results indicated the new technology could outperform existing technologies for processing lignocellulosic raw materials, according to the companies. “Neste and CLG are currently validating the technology and targeting readiness to scale up the technology to commercial scale”, they said.

“Vast amounts of lignocellulosic waste and residues from existing forest industry and agricultural production remain underutilized and could be leveraged as valuable renewable raw materials”.

“The partnership combines CLG’s extensive experience and proven track record in developing and licensing market-leading refining technologies with Neste’s pioneering expertise and global leadership in renewable fuels”, the partners said.

CLG chief executive Rajesh Samarth said, “We are confident this partnership will pave a new pathway for producing renewable fuels, leveraging our versatile and scalable hydroprocessing technology platform”.

Lars Peter Lindfors, senior vice president for technology and innovation at Neste, said, “Unlocking the potential of these promising raw materials would allow us to meet the growing demand of renewable fuels in the long-term and contribute to ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets”.

Espoo, Finland-based Neste produces sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel. It has increased its SAF production capacity to 1.5 million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) with last year’s start-up of a Rotterdam project with a capacity of 500,000 metric tons a year. Neste aims to grow its production capacity for renewable fuels to 6.8 million metric tons a year by 2027.

CLG, a joint venture between Chevron Corp. and Lummus Technology, provides technology for the production of both renewable and conventional transportation fuels, premium base oils and more sustainable petrochemicals.

In 2021 CLG launched its ISOTERRA technology for the conversion of biomass into SAF and renewable diesel. The two-step process involves hydrodeoxygenation of feeds such as vegetable, algae and palm and used cooking oils, followed by dewaxing to meet cold flow property specifications.

ISOTERRA was installed in Chevron’s El Segundo Refinery in California in late 2023. Last year ISOTERRA was selected for a SAF project in China.

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Trump Overturns California Phaseout of Fossil Fuel Cars

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed into law congressional resolutions that overturn three California regulations for cleaner transport, including one that would phase out the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles by 2035. Last February the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it was letting Congress review waivers it had issued

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Why people love Linux

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Petronas Enters into New Partnerships with Eni, TotalEnergies

Malaysia’s national oil and gas company has signed a deal with Eni SpA to combine their upstream assets in Malaysia and Indonesia. Separately Petroliam Nasional Bhd. (Petronas) penned multiple agreements with TotalEnergies SE to jointly explore several offshore blocks in Malaysia and signed another agreement for a farm-down in Indonesia to the French company. The joint venture agreement with Italy’s state-backed Eni, expected to be finalized in the fourth quarter, would deliver 500,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boe) a day in the medium term. The combined portfolio would consist of about three billion boe of reserves and 10 billion boe of exploration potential, according to the companies. “This collaboration will unlock new opportunities for us to contribute to the energy security in the region and deliver long-term value across Malaysia and Indonesia”, Petronas president and chief executive Muhammad Taufik said in an online statement. The partnership would create “synergy in terms of assets, expertise and financial capabilities, in a transformational model that further strengthens the huge potential of the two countries”, Eni chief executive Claudio Descalzi said separately. “The new company will have a strong regional impact on gas production, bringing additional energy, infrastructures and employment for the benefit of both Indonesia and Malaysia”. Meanwhile Petronas’ agreements with TotalEnergies in Malaysia and Indonesia involve offshore blocks in different maturation stages and covering over 100,000 square kilometers (38,610.19 square miles), TotalEnergies said in a press release. “TotalEnergies will notably hold, alongside PETRONAS through its wholly-owned subsidiary Petronas Carigali Sdn. Bhd., a 50 percent operated working interest in Blocks SK301b and SK313, where significant gas discoveries (more than 4 Tcf) were made and are expected to be developed to support gas supply to Malaysia LNG from 2030”, TotalEnergies said. “TotalEnergies will also hold, alongside PETRONAS, interests in several exploration blocks offshore Malaysia.

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Trump Plays Down Iran-Israel Ceasefire as He Leaves G7 Early

US President Donald Trump left the Group of Seven leaders meeting in Canada early to deal with the Israel-Iran conflict, but played down the chances of a ceasefire. On Tuesday morning, he returned to Washington and criticized French President Emmanuel Macron for saying the move was possibly a sign he was working on a truce. “Wrong!,” Trump said in reference to Macron on Truth Social. “He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that. Stay Tuned!” Trump hasn’t clearly spelled out his next steps as he returns to the US capital. Israel and Iran continue to strike on one another. While global markets have calmed since hostilities started on Friday with Israel bombing Iran, there are still widespread fears the war will spread to other countries in the oil- and gas-producing region. Despite Trump’s latest comments, top US officials said the president remains hopeful a peace deal can be achieved between Israel and Iran. The diplomatic flurry followed another 24 hours of intense bombardments, with Iran firing ballistic missiles and Israel striking targets across the Islamic Republic, including the capital of Tehran. The USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group is now sailing to the Middle East ahead of schedule, marking the first significant move of American military assets to the region since Friday.  “Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign,” Trump wrote in an earlier social media post, referring to nuclear talks between Tehran and Washington that are now on hold. “What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” It wasn’t clear if Trump knew of a

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EU Needs $279B Investment in Traditional Nuclear through 2050: Commission

European Union member states need around EUR 241 billion ($278.62 billion) through 2050 to grow the share of conventional nuclear in their energy mix toward meeting their decarbonization, industrial competitiveness and energy security goals, according to official analysis. The 27-member bloc had 101 operational nuclear power reactors, with a combined capacity of 98 gigawatts electric (GWe), as of last year, the European Commission said. These are spread across 12 member states: Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Finland, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. In 2023 the units supplied 22.8 percent of the EU’s electricity generation. Three more reactors are under construction: one in Slovakia (Mochovce 4) and two in Hungary (Paks II), according to the Commission. While the EU’s top economy, Germany, shut down its three remaining nuclear power plants in April 2023, the new German government signaled it would drop its opposition to nuclear power, according to a Reuters report May 20, 2025, citing a French official. The estimated investment need, EUR 241 billion in present-value terms, is based on generation gaps identified in National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs). The estimate, a “base case scenario”, accounts for the existing fleet, ongoing constructions and planned newbuilds. Additional investment is needed for small modular reactors (SMRs), advanced modular reactors (AMRs) and microreactors, the Commission said, though it did not quantify the investment need. Newbuild projects account for EUR 205 billion. Lifetime extensions would need EUR 36 billion, according to the Commission. In the base case scenario, the Commission projects an increase in nuclear generation capacity to 109 GWe in 2050, assuming at least some of the existing reactors extend their operating life beyond 60 years and planned newbuild reactors are delivered on time. “The Commission estimates that over 90 percent of electricity in the EU in 2040 will

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Chevron Lummus, Neste Make Progress on New Waste-to-Fuel Tech

Neste Oyj and Chevron Lummus Global (CLG) have announced promising pilot results for a new process to convert lignocellulosic biomass into renewable fuels. “Through close collaboration at CLG’s state-of-the-art R&D facility in the U.S., Neste and CLG have successfully demonstrated proof of concept for converting lignocellulosic waste into renewable fuels, with highly promising initial results”, a joint statement said. The results indicated the new technology could outperform existing technologies for processing lignocellulosic raw materials, according to the companies. “Neste and CLG are currently validating the technology and targeting readiness to scale up the technology to commercial scale”, they said. “Vast amounts of lignocellulosic waste and residues from existing forest industry and agricultural production remain underutilized and could be leveraged as valuable renewable raw materials”. “The partnership combines CLG’s extensive experience and proven track record in developing and licensing market-leading refining technologies with Neste’s pioneering expertise and global leadership in renewable fuels”, the partners said. CLG chief executive Rajesh Samarth said, “We are confident this partnership will pave a new pathway for producing renewable fuels, leveraging our versatile and scalable hydroprocessing technology platform”. Lars Peter Lindfors, senior vice president for technology and innovation at Neste, said, “Unlocking the potential of these promising raw materials would allow us to meet the growing demand of renewable fuels in the long-term and contribute to ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets”. Espoo, Finland-based Neste produces sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel. It has increased its SAF production capacity to 1.5 million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) with last year’s start-up of a Rotterdam project with a capacity of 500,000 metric tons a year. Neste aims to grow its production capacity for renewable fuels to 6.8 million metric tons a year by 2027. CLG, a joint venture between Chevron Corp. and Lummus Technology, provides technology

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Oil Drops as Iran Seeks Deescalation with Israel

Oil fell on signs that the conflict in the Middle East may avoid disrupting crude production, with Iran seeking to deescalate hostilities with Israel. West Texas Intermediate slid 1.7% to settle below $72 a barrel after spiking to start the session and swinging in an $8 throughout the day. US President Donald Trump said Iran wants to talk about deescalating the conflict, helping quell fears that a protracted war would engulf a region that produces around a third of the world’s crude. “The question is — will Israel really be on board with that?” said Rebecca Babin, a senior energy trader at CIBC Private Wealth Group. “What this does suggest, though, is that the chatter about the Strait of Hormuz may have been overstating the threat.” Still, oil markets remain on edge after Israel launched an attack on the South Pars gas field, forcing the halt of a production platform, following strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites and military leadership last week. However, critical crude oil-exporting infrastructure has so far been spared and there’s been no blockage of the vital Strait of Hormuz. While an attack on Iran’s gas production is a concern, the biggest fear for the oil market centers on Hormuz. Middle East producers ship about a fifth of the world’s daily output through the narrow waterway, and prices could soar further if Tehran attempts to disrupt shipments through the route. Oil prices remain significantly higher than where they were before the attacks began. Crude gained more than 7% in the session after air strikes began on Friday, leading to record volumes of producer hedging as well as futures and options changing hands. Wall Street analysts have been quick to highlight the risks the conflict could pose. RBC Capital Markets said the fact both sides have targeted energy infrastructure

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OPEC Says Output Hike Tempered by Compensation from Quota Cheats

Key OPEC+ nations added less oil to the market last month than the headline figure of its output plan, as the cartel’s leadership pushed members to atone for earlier over-production. The eight members involved in the group’s current accord raised production by 154,000 barrels a day, compared with a headline increase of 411,000 barrels a day, according to a monthly report from OPEC’s secretariat. Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Russia were among those compensating for past excess output. However, the eight countries’ total output was almost 400,000 barrels a day above their target for the month as Kazakhstan continued to pump well above its quota. Group leader Saudi Arabia has spurred OPEC and its allies to accelerate their planned output revival in a bid to punish members that flouted their limits with lower prices, and to reclaim the market share Riyadh has ceded during years of supply curbs. That push initially weakened oil prices, but markets have been roiled in recent days as Israel launched a wave of attacks on OPEC member Iran, including some strikes on its domestic energy infrastructure. US crude futures are trading near $73 a barrel after surging on Friday by the most in three years. With Iran’s crude exports so far unaffected, OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais has said the organization doesn’t need to take any immediate action. Quota Cheats The report published by OPEC’s Vienna-based research department on Monday showed that members have taken a mixed approach in implementing their agreed production increases. Saudi Arabia largely went ahead with its mandated hike in May, raising production by 177,000 barrels a day to an average of 9.183 million per day. Kazakhstan and Iraq, who had pledged extra cutbacks as compensation for cheating, both reduced output in May. Astana cut by 21,000 barrels to 1.8

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Cisco capitalizes on Isovalent buy, unveils new load balancer

The customer deploys the Isovalent Load Balancer control plane via automation and configures the desired number of virtual load-balancer appliances, Graf said. “The control plane automatically deploys virtual load-balancing appliances via the virtualization or Kubernetes platform. The load-balancing layer is self-healing and supports auto-scaling, which means that I can replace unhealthy instances and scale out as needed. The load balancer supports powerful L3-L7 load balancing with enterprise capabilities,” he said. Depending on the infrastructure the load balancer is deployed into, the operator will deploy the load balancer using familiar deployment methods. In a data center, this will be done using a standard virtualization automation installation such as Terraform or Ansible. In the public cloud, the load balancer is deployed as a public cloud service. In Kubernetes and OpenShift, the load balancer is deployed as a Kubernetes Deployment/Operator, Graf said.  “In the future, the Isovalent Load Balancer will also be able to run on top of Cisco Nexus smart switches,” Graf said. “This means that the Isovalent Load Balancer can run in any environment, from data center, public cloud, to Kubernetes while providing a consistent load-balancing layer with a frictionless cloud-native developer experience.” Cisco has announced a variety of smart switches over the past couple of months on the vendor’s 4.8T capacity Silicon One chip. But the N9300, where Isovalent would run, includes a built-in programmable data processing unit (DPU) from AMD to offload complex data processing work and free up the switches for AI and large workload processing. For customers, the Isovalent Load Balancer provides consistent load balancing across infrastructure while being aligned with Kubernetes as the future for infrastructure. “A single load-balancing solution that can run in the data center, in public cloud, and modern Kubernetes environments. This removes operational complexity, lowers cost, while modernizing the load-balancing infrastructure in preparation

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Oracle’s struggle with capacity meant they made the difficult but responsible decisions

IDC President Crawford Del Prete agreed, and said that Oracle senior management made the right move, despite how difficult the situation is today. “Oracle is being incredibly responsible here. They don’t want to have a lot of idle capacity. That capacity does have a shelf life,” Del Prete said. CEO Katz “is trying to be extremely precise about how much capacity she puts on.” Del Prete said that, for the moment, Oracle’s capacity situation is unique to the company, and has not been a factor with key rivals AWS, Microsoft, and Google. During the investor call, Katz said that her team “made engineering decisions that were much different from the other hyperscalers and that were better suited to the needs of enterprise customers, resulting in lower costs to them and giving them deployment flexibility.” Oracle management certainly anticipated a flurry of orders, but Katz said that she chose to not pay for expanded capacity until she saw finalized “contracted noncancelable bookings.” She pointed to a huge capex line of $9.1 billion and said, “the vast majority of our capex investments are for revenue generating equipment that is going into data centers and not for land or buildings.”

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Winners and losers in the Top500 supercomputer ranking

GPU winner: AMD AMD is finally making a showing for itself, albeit modestly, in GPU accelerators. For the June 2025 edition of the list, AMD Instinct accelerators are in 23 systems, a nice little jump from the 10 systems on the June 2024 list. Of course, it helps with the sales pitch when AMD processors and coprocessors can be found powering the No. 1 and No. 2 supercomputers in the world. GPU loser: Intel Intel’s GPU efforts have been a disaster. It failed to make a dent in the consumer space with its Arc GPUs, and it isn’t making much headway in the data center, either. There were only four systems running GPU Max processors on the list, and that’s up from three a year ago. Still, it’s pitiful showing given the effort Intel made. Server winners: HPE, Dell, EVIDAN, Nvidia The four server vendors — servers, not component makers — all saw share increases. Nvidia is also a server vendor, selling its SuperPOD AI servers directly to customers. They all gained at the expense of Lenovo and Arm. Server loser: Lenovo It saw the sharpest drop in server share, going from 163 systems in June of 2024 to 136 in this most recent listing. Loser: Arm Other than the 13 Nvidia Grace chips, the ARM architecture was completely absent from this spring’s list.

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Micron joins HBM4 race with 36GB 12-high stack, eyes AI and data center dominance

Race to power the next generation of AI By shipping samples of the HMB4 to the key customers, Micron has joined SK hynix in the HBM4 race. In March this year, SK hynix shipped the 12-Layer HBM4 samples to customers. SK hynix’s HBM4 has implemented bandwidth capable of processing more than 2TB of data per second, processing data equivalent to more than 400 full-HD movies (5GB each) in a second, said the company. “HBM competitive landscape, SK hynix has already sampled and secured approval of HBM4 12-high stack memory early Q1’2025 to NVIDIA for its next generation Rubin product line and plans to mass produce HBM4 in 2H 2025,” said Danish Faruqui, CEO, Fab Economics. “Closely following, Micron is pending Nvidia’s tests for its latest HBM4 samples, and Micron plans to mass produce HBM4 in 1H 2026. On the other hand, the last contender, Samsung is struggling with Yield Ramp on HBM4 Technology Development stage, and so has to delay the customer samples milestones to Nvidia and other players while it earlier shared an end of 2025 milestone for mass producing HBM4.” Faruqui noted another key differentiator among SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung: the base die that anchors the 12-high DRAM stack. For the first time, both SK hynix and Samsung have introduced a logic-enabled base die on 3nm and 4nm process technology to enable HBM4 product for efficient and faster product performance via base logic-driven memory management. Both Samsung and SK hynix rely on TSMC for the production of their logic-enabled base die. However, it remains unclear whether Micron is using a logic base die, as the company lacks in-house capability to fabricate at 3nm.

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Cisco reinvigorates data center, campus, branch networking with AI demands in mind

“We have a number of … enterprise data center customers that have been using bi-directional optics for many generations, and this is the next generation of that feature,” said Bill Gartner, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s optical systems and optics business. “The 400G lets customer use their existing fiber infrastructure and reduces fiber count for them so they can use one fiber instead of two, for example,” Gartner said. “What’s really changed in the last year or so is that with AI buildouts, there’s much, much more optics that are part of 400G and 800G, too. For AI infrastructure, the 400G and 800G optics are really the dominant optics going forward,” Gartner said. New AI Pods Taking aim at next-generation interconnected compute infrastructures, Cisco expanded its AI Pod offering with the Nvidia RTX 6000 Pro and Cisco UCS C845A M8 server package. Cisco AI Pods are preconfigured, validated, and optimized infrastructure packages that customers can plug into their data center or edge environments as needed. The Pods include Nvidia AI Enterprise, which features pretrained models and development tools for production-ready AI, and are managed through Cisco Intersight. The Pods are based on Cisco Validated Design principals, which offer customers pre-tested and validated network designs that provide a blueprint for building reliable, scalable, and secure network infrastructures, according to Cisco. Building out the kind of full-scale AI infrastructure compute systems that hyperscalers and enterprises will utilize is a huge opportunity for Cisco, said Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group. “These are full-scale, full-stack systems that could land in a variety of enterprise and enterprise service application scenarios, which will be a big story for Cisco,” Newman said. Campus networking For the campus, Cisco has added two new programable SiliconOne-based Smart Switches: the C9350 Fixed Access Smart Switches and C9610

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Qualcomm’s $2.4B Alphawave deal signals bold data center ambitions

Qualcomm says its Oryon CPU and Hexagon NPU processors are “well positioned” to meet growing demand for high-performance, low-power compute as AI inferencing accelerates and more enterprises move to custom CPUs housed in data centers. “Qualcomm’s advanced custom processors are a natural fit for data center workloads,” Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon said in the press release. Alphawave’s connectivity and compute technologies can work well with the company’s CPU and NPU cores, he noted. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2026. Complementing the ‘great CPU architecture’ Qualcomm has been amassing Client CPUs have been a “big play” for Qualcomm, Moor’s Kimball noted; the company acquired chip design company Nuvia in 2021 for $1.4 billion and has also announced that it will be designing data center CPUs with Saudi AI company Humain. “But there was a lot of data center IP that was equally valuable,” he said. This acquisition of Alphawave will help Qualcomm complement the “great CPU architecture” it acquired from Nuvia with the latest in connectivity tools that link a compute complex with other devices, as well as with chip-to-chip communications, and all of the “very low level architectural goodness” that allows compute cores to deliver “absolute best performance.” “When trying to move data from, say, high bandwidth memory to the CPU, Alphawave provides the IP that helps chip companies like Qualcomm,” Kimball explained. “So you can see why this is such a good complement.”

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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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