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How to Format Your TDS Draft: A New and Improved Guide

Whether you’re a first-time author or a TDS veteran, welcome to our formatting guide! As of August 2026, we launched our bespoke author platform to replace the WordPress site we’d previously used. You can expect a much easier, more intuitive, and more streamlined drafting experience here, but in case you’d like some guidance on how to upload your work to TDS, you’re in the right place.Table of contentsEssential ElementsAdding the contents of your articleTextHeadingsListsBlockquoteSeparatorTableCode and GitHub GistsMath notationsImagesVideo optionsSocial embedsLink embedsTable of ContentsHow can I ask for help with my draft?Essential ElementsWhenever you’d like to start a new article draft, look for the + New Article button on the top-right corner of the page. You’ll immediately see a pop-up modal inviting you to add key details about your work, like the title, subtitle, main category, and tags. If you’re not sure about some of these, that’s fine — the only required field at this stage is the article’s title. And you can always edit these details later if you’d like.Once you click on the Create Article button you’ll reach the editor screen. The other required element to think about now is the featured image. Look to the sidebar to find the options for choosing or creating one.If you’ve created a custom image for your article, fantastic — click on Upload image and choose it from your computer. If you’ve already uploaded your image to to your media library, or decided to repurpose an image from an older article, pick Choose from library and select the image you want.You also have the option to generate your image using AI directly from your draft using — you guessed it — the Generate with AI button. Click on it and a new modal will appear.Just type in your prompt — feel free to be as descriptive and specific as you want — and click Generate. After a few seconds you’ll see several options to choose from. If you ever need some additional guidance on choosing a featured image, or want to refresh your memory around our guidelines, here’s a FAQ that covers the topic.Adding the contents of your articleWith the essential elements out of the way, it’s time to actually upload your article. Our streamlined UI will get your draft ready for review with minimal hassle. To add regular text, simply start typing. To add any other kind of content or media, always start with the / key. A block menu will pop up, showing all the available content types you can add.Use the up and down arroes to scroll through the list, choose the block you want at that point in your article, and go from there. Let’s take a closer look at your options.TextSelf-explanatory! Just type in or paste your written content. Whenever you start a new paragraph, it’s set to text by default, so you don’t actually need to use the / key (unless you really want to).To add special styling to any part of your text, highlight the relevant portion and you’ll see a menu pop up:You can choose between bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, abd inline code. This is also where you’ll find the link button and alignmnet options. The text box symbol is where you should go if you want to leave a comment for our editors. Click on it, write your comment, tag someone specific from our team if you’d like (using the @ symbol), and click on Comment to submit it. Tip: to find all your comments in one neat space, look to your sidebar, and click on the Threads tab.HeadingsCreating a clear structural hierarchy within your article helps both readers and search engines navigate your content. Add a new heading whenever you start a new section, and choose the right one depending on its position within your article. When you type /heading you’ll see six levels available. Always start new sections with H2, and go down the hierarchy from there: for example, Section 1 in H2, Section 1.1 in H3, Section 1.11 in H4, etc. Please don’t use H1 headings in the body of the article.ListsYou have the option to create both bulleted and numbered lists, depending on your needs — just choose the right block from the list and you’re good to go. Tip: use the tab button to nest a secondary list within your primary list.BlockquoteChoose the blockquote block to highlight specific points or ideas, or when you’re quoting longer passages from external sources. Using blockquotes sparingly can be very effective, but don’t overdo it — just like bold or italicized text, they can quickly become distracting.SeparatorSometimes, a heading might feel insufficient for creating a visual break between or within sections.In those cases, use the Separator block — just make sure you select the Dotted style, which is the one we chose as our default on TDS. (If for some reason you absolutely need to use a different style of separator, that’s probably ok. Just leave us a comment explaining your choice.)TableTables are great for comparing benchmark results, product features, and more. The Table block makes creating sleek tables very easy.The + buttons below and to the right of the table will add rows and columns, respectively. The other settings in the pop-up menu allow you to toggle the header row and column, align the table vertically, delete rows and columns, and delete the table entirely.Code and GitHub GistsMany TDS articles include code — sometimes lots of code. The text block we covered above gives you access to inline code styling, however that’s not a practical solution for more than, say, a short snippet. You have two great options to choose from:Code blockChoose a code block when you’d like to input code directly into the draft and choose a language-specific syntax highlighting for it. Just paste your code into the block — then, either keep it in Auto mode and our site will choose the most appropriate highlights for it, or scroll down the list of available programming languages and choose the relevant one.If the block only contains outputs, natural-language prompts, etc., rather than working code, just pick Markdown, which will keep it in plaintext.GitHub GistsYou also have the option of embedding GitHub Gists directly into your draft, which can be useful if you’re bringing your work over from a repo. All you need to do is paste the URL of your gist (make sure it starts with gist.github.com) and click on Embed — it will magically appear in your draft and in the final article.Math notationsOne of the biggest upgrades of our bespoke editor is how easy it is to add equations, formulas, and any other math symbol-heavy content. Here, too, you have two options to choose from.Inline MathGo with the Inline Math block when you need to insert mathematical symbols or notations in the midst of your running text — just type it into the input box, check the preview below it to make sure everything looks good, click Save, and you’re done.Block MathFor longer and more complex mathy stuff, opt for Block Math — this is where you can truly work your LaTeX magic. Once again, use the preview below the input box to make sure all the sigmas and deltas are in the right spot.ImagesFor charts, plots, screenshots, animations, and so on, use the Image block. You have several options here: uploading, using an image already in your media library, adding via URL, or generating one using our built-in AI tool. Go wild! (Ok, not too wild, please.)Once you’re image is in, you can click on it and a settings popup will appear. This is where you can control its dimensions and alignment, add an alt and a title, and delete it if you decided not to use it.The most important setting here is the caption — the second symbol from the left. This is where we ask all authors to add sourcing and licensing information for all their images, including those they generated with AI and/or created themselves. Tip: if your article contains numerous images, and you created all or most of them, you can avoid adding an annoying number of captions by adding a note along the lines of “All images, unless otherwise noted, are by the author.” Then you only have to add captions to the ones you’ve sourced from third parties.Video optionsLooking to add a a live demo, a lecture you gave, or the song your audio ML project is referring to? Easy — just embed it using either the YouTube, Vimeo, or DailyMotion embed blocks. They all work the same way: choose the right block, paste the URL of the video you’d like to add, and click Embed. The result is a natively embedded, controllable video player:[embedded content] Social embedsThe best way to include content from social media in your articles is embedding them — the formatting is already optimized for our site, and you avoid running into thorny copyright issues, since you’re essentially re-sharing the original post. Beyond the video embeds we mentioned in the previous subsection, you can also embed tweets and Reddit posts following the exact same process: choose the block, paste the URL, click Embed, and presto!Link embedsUse the Link embed block to create styled embedded links to other URLs. Choose the block, paste the link to the page in question, and click Embed.Table of ContentsFor a final bit of magic, you can automatically generate a clickable table of contents of your article by adding the… Table of Contents block! It works by collecting all your headings and subheadings into a TOC format, so giving your thoughts to the internal structure of your article will pay off here.To create it, just add the Table of Contents block wherever you’d like it to appear — for example, after a quick intro (and, ideally, before your first heading).Tip: TOCs are optional; they usually work best in longer pieces and deep dives, and can feel a bit superfluous in a short, code-heavy article, for example.How can I ask for help with my draft?If this guide hasn’t addressed the question you had or an issue you ran into, no worries — you can reach out to use directly from your draft. Just highlight any word(s), click on the comment symbol, and tag one of our team members with the @ symbol. (If it’s a longer question and you prefer to email us, you can — find us at publication@towardsdatascience.com.)

Whether you’re a first-time author or a TDS veteran, welcome to our formatting guide!

As of August 2026, we launched our bespoke author platform to replace the WordPress site we’d previously used. You can expect a much easier, more intuitive, and more streamlined drafting experience here, but in case you’d like some guidance on how to upload your work to TDS, you’re in the right place.

Essential Elements

Whenever you’d like to start a new article draft, look for the + New Article button on the top-right corner of the page. You’ll immediately see a pop-up modal inviting you to add key details about your work, like the title, subtitle, main category, and tags. If you’re not sure about some of these, that’s fine — the only required field at this stage is the article’s title. And you can always edit these details later if you’d like.

Once you click on the Create Article button you’ll reach the editor screen. The other required element to think about now is the featured image. Look to the sidebar to find the options for choosing or creating one.

If you’ve created a custom image for your article, fantastic — click on Upload image and choose it from your computer. If you’ve already uploaded your image to to your media library, or decided to repurpose an image from an older article, pick Choose from library and select the image you want.

You also have the option to generate your image using AI directly from your draft using — you guessed it — the Generate with AI button. Click on it and a new modal will appear.

Just type in your prompt — feel free to be as descriptive and specific as you want — and click Generate. After a few seconds you’ll see several options to choose from.

If you ever need some additional guidance on choosing a featured image, or want to refresh your memory around our guidelines, here’s a FAQ that covers the topic.

Adding the contents of your article

With the essential elements out of the way, it’s time to actually upload your article. Our streamlined UI will get your draft ready for review with minimal hassle.

To add regular text, simply start typing. To add any other kind of content or media, always start with the / key. A block menu will pop up, showing all the available content types you can add.

Use the up and down arroes to scroll through the list, choose the block you want at that point in your article, and go from there. Let’s take a closer look at your options.

Text

Self-explanatory! Just type in or paste your written content. Whenever you start a new paragraph, it’s set to text by default, so you don’t actually need to use the / key (unless you really want to).

To add special styling to any part of your text, highlight the relevant portion and you’ll see a menu pop up:

You can choose between bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, abd inline code. This is also where you’ll find the link button and alignmnet options.

The text box symbol is where you should go if you want to leave a comment for our editors. Click on it, write your comment, tag someone specific from our team if you’d like (using the @ symbol), and click on Comment to submit it.

Tip: to find all your comments in one neat space, look to your sidebar, and click on the Threads tab.

Headings

Creating a clear structural hierarchy within your article helps both readers and search engines navigate your content. Add a new heading whenever you start a new section, and choose the right one depending on its position within your article.

When you type /heading you’ll see six levels available. Always start new sections with H2, and go down the hierarchy from there: for example, Section 1 in H2, Section 1.1 in H3, Section 1.11 in H4, etc. Please don’t use H1 headings in the body of the article.

Lists

You have the option to create both bulleted and numbered lists, depending on your needs — just choose the right block from the list and you’re good to go.

Tip: use the tab button to nest a secondary list within your primary list.

Blockquote

Choose the blockquote block to highlight specific points or ideas, or when you’re quoting longer passages from external sources.

Using blockquotes sparingly can be very effective, but don’t overdo it — just like bold or italicized text, they can quickly become distracting.

Separator

Sometimes, a heading might feel insufficient for creating a visual break between or within sections.

In those cases, use the Separator block — just make sure you select the Dotted style, which is the one we chose as our default on TDS. (If for some reason you absolutely need to use a different style of separator, that’s probably ok. Just leave us a comment explaining your choice.)

Table

Tables are great for comparing benchmark results, product features, and more. The Table block makes creating sleek tables very easy.

The + buttons below and to the right of the table will add rows and columns, respectively. The other settings in the pop-up menu allow you to toggle the header row and column, align the table vertically, delete rows and columns, and delete the table entirely.

Code and GitHub Gists

Many TDS articles include code — sometimes lots of code. The text block we covered above gives you access to inline code styling, however that’s not a practical solution for more than, say, a short snippet. You have two great options to choose from:

Code block

Choose a code block when you’d like to input code directly into the draft and choose a language-specific syntax highlighting for it. Just paste your code into the block — then, either keep it in Auto mode and our site will choose the most appropriate highlights for it, or scroll down the list of available programming languages and choose the relevant one.

If the block only contains outputs, natural-language prompts, etc., rather than working code, just pick Markdown, which will keep it in plaintext.

GitHub Gists

You also have the option of embedding GitHub Gists directly into your draft, which can be useful if you’re bringing your work over from a repo.

All you need to do is paste the URL of your gist (make sure it starts with gist.github.com) and click on Embed — it will magically appear in your draft and in the final article.

Math notations

One of the biggest upgrades of our bespoke editor is how easy it is to add equations, formulas, and any other math symbol-heavy content. Here, too, you have two options to choose from.

Inline Math

Go with the Inline Math block when you need to insert mathematical symbols or notations in the midst of your running text — just type it into the input box, check the preview below it to make sure everything looks good, click Save, and you’re done.

Block Math

For longer and more complex mathy stuff, opt for Block Math — this is where you can truly work your LaTeX magic. Once again, use the preview below the input box to make sure all the sigmas and deltas are in the right spot.

Images

For charts, plots, screenshots, animations, and so on, use the Image block. You have several options here: uploading, using an image already in your media library, adding via URL, or generating one using our built-in AI tool. Go wild! (Ok, not too wild, please.)

Once you’re image is in, you can click on it and a settings popup will appear. This is where you can control its dimensions and alignment, add an alt and a title, and delete it if you decided not to use it.

The most important setting here is the caption — the second symbol from the left. This is where we ask all authors to add sourcing and licensing information for all their images, including those they generated with AI and/or created themselves.

Tip: if your article contains numerous images, and you created all or most of them, you can avoid adding an annoying number of captions by adding a note along the lines of “All images, unless otherwise noted, are by the author.” Then you only have to add captions to the ones you’ve sourced from third parties.

Video options

Looking to add a a live demo, a lecture you gave, or the song your audio ML project is referring to? Easy — just embed it using either the YouTube, Vimeo, or DailyMotion embed blocks. They all work the same way: choose the right block, paste the URL of the video you’d like to add, and click Embed. The result is a natively embedded, controllable video player:

Social embeds

The best way to include content from social media in your articles is embedding them — the formatting is already optimized for our site, and you avoid running into thorny copyright issues, since you’re essentially re-sharing the original post. Beyond the video embeds we mentioned in the previous subsection, you can also embed tweets and Reddit posts following the exact same process: choose the block, paste the URL, click Embed, and presto!

Link embeds

Use the Link embed block to create styled embedded links to other URLs. Choose the block, paste the link to the page in question, and click Embed.

Table of Contents

For a final bit of magic, you can automatically generate a clickable table of contents of your article by adding the… Table of Contents block! It works by collecting all your headings and subheadings into a TOC format, so giving your thoughts to the internal structure of your article will pay off here.

To create it, just add the Table of Contents block wherever you’d like it to appear — for example, after a quick intro (and, ideally, before your first heading).

Tip: TOCs are optional; they usually work best in longer pieces and deep dives, and can feel a bit superfluous in a short, code-heavy article, for example.

How can I ask for help with my draft?

If this guide hasn’t addressed the question you had or an issue you ran into, no worries — you can reach out to use directly from your draft. Just highlight any word(s), click on the comment symbol, and tag one of our team members with the @ symbol. (If it’s a longer question and you prefer to email us, you can — find us at publication@towardsdatascience.com.)

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Energy Department Announces $500 Million Award to Revitalize American Steelmaking

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Zayo, NVIDIA Build the Long-Haul Backbone for Distributed AI

The data center industry’s increasingly power-first approach to site selection has created a follow-on question: Once the megawatts are found, is there enough network infrastructure to make the site useful at AI scale? Zayo and NVIDIA are putting real infrastructure behind that question. Zayo said it is working with NVIDIA to expand network capacity supporting AI factories across North America, including an 8,000-route-mile program targeting some of the fastest-growing AI corridors in the United States. The project encompasses six new long-haul routes along with overbuilds of existing network across 10 high-demand corridors. The announcement arrives as AI data center development moves beyond the largest established hubs toward markets where power and land may be more readily available, but fiber capacity cannot necessarily be taken for granted. That geography is increasingly important. NVIDIA has separately developed “scale-across” networking technology designed to allow AI infrastructure distributed among different buildings — or even data centers separated by hundreds of kilometers — to operate as a more unified computing environment. Put together, the developments suggest that networking is becoming inseparable from the AI factory buildout itself. Power may determine where the next generation of AI infrastructure can be built. Fiber will increasingly determine how effectively those sites can participate in the larger AI ecosystem. Fiber Follows the Power Zayo CEO Steve Smith said AI demand is changing both where network infrastructure is needed and how aggressively capacity must be deployed ahead of development. “AI is fundamentally reshaping where and how network infrastructure needs to be built across the U.S.,” Smith said. The company’s 8,000-mile program is more nuanced than that top-line number might suggest. Zayo disclosed in April that the expansion includes approximately 3,000 route miles across six new long-haul routes, plus more than 5,000 route miles of overbuilds across 10 existing corridors. Zayo

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Southern’s 17 GW Pipeline Puts AI Power Demand Into Utility Math

The headline number from Southern Company’s latest earnings report is hard to miss: electricity use by data centers across the utility’s system increased 55% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier. But the more consequential numbers may be the ones sitting behind it. Southern now has more than 1.2 GW of operating data center load, up by more than 500 MW from a year ago. At the same time, its electric utilities have signed contracts and large-load agreements totaling more than 17 GW by the mid-2030s, with another 8 GW in late-stage development and a prospective pipeline of large industrial and data center projects exceeding 75 GW. That leaves an enormous gap between the data center megawatts consuming electricity today and the load Southern has contractually positioned itself to serve during the next decade. For the data center industry, that gap may be the most important part of Southern’s second-quarter story. It offers a look at how utilities are beginning to convert the AI infrastructure boom from forecasts and campus announcements into contracts, generation procurement, transmission investment and eventually energized capacity. From Contracts to Megawatts Southern added roughly 6 GW of contracted large load during the quarter alone. Alabama Power signed three projects representing about 3 GW, while Georgia Power reached a 25-year agreement to serve OpenAI’s planned project in Effingham County near Savannah. That facility is expected to require approximately 3.2 GW and begin taking electric service in phases in 2028. The numbers nevertheless require an important distinction. Seventeen gigawatts contracted does not mean 17 GW will suddenly appear on Southern’s grid. Large data center campuses ramp gradually, often over several years, and Southern executives acknowledged that actual customer ramp schedules do not always match the assumptions made when projects are first approved. CEO Chris Womack said

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PORTS-Pike Takes Shape as an 8-GW AI Infrastructure Model

Back on March 31, 2026, we discussed we discussed SoftBank and SB Energy’s plans to redevelop the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant site near Piketon as a 10-GW artificial intelligence data center campus supported by almost an equal amount of new power generation. At the time, the plan called for as much as 10 GW of new generation, including 9.2 GW of natural gas capacity, along with approximately $4.2 billion of high-voltage transmission infrastructure developed with AEP Ohio. An initial 800-MW data center phase was targeted for service in 2028. The March story was notable because Pike County appeared to offer a preview of a new model for building hyperscale infrastructure: develop the generation, transmission and data center simultaneously rather than wait for an increasingly congested regional grid to deliver multiple gigawatts of capacity. Not to mention the reuse of a brownfield site with the encouragement of the federal government. Since then, almost every important part of the project has moved forward, and on August 17, the most consequential missing pieces fell into place. NVIDIA announced that it will become the exclusive AI compute infrastructure provider for the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus. OpenAI will be the data center customer, signing a 20-year lease with SB Energy for approximately 8 GW of IT capacity. NVIDIA will invest another $1.5 billion in SB Energy and provide credit support for the land, power and shell infrastructure behind an initial 4.25 GW of IT load, with an option covering approximately another 3.75 GW. The Securities and Exchange Commission filing accompanying the announcement makes the financial commitment even more significant. NVIDIA disclosed that its aggregate payment obligation associated with its initial commitment is capped at $105 billion. That is not a conventional capital commitment to spend $105 billion building the campus, nor is it simply a

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Nvidia scales back financing guarantee for OpenAI data center

Nvidia is scaling back a proposed financial guarantee tied to a massive OpenAI data center project in Ohio, reducing its initial commitment from as much as $250 billion to less than $120 billion, according to report in the Wall Street Journal. Earlier this month, Nvidia announced partnerships with major financial firms including Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR, aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion in capital for AI computing infrastructure. The change represents a significant restructuring of Nvidia’s role in financing the planned facility, which is being developed by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank. Under the revised arrangement, Nvidia would guarantee financing for the project’s first phase, representing roughly 5 gigawatts of capacity, or half of the total proposed capacity. Financing for the remaining capacity would be considered separately at a later stage.

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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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