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Inside Interoception: The hidden sense of how you feel inside

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Your brain lives in the dark space of your skull. Yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs on your skin, when your heart is racing, when your gut tightens with fear. It’s also, right now, predicting what you’ll read next as your eyes move across this page. It’s picking up signals that help it make sense of what’s happening around you and prepare you to act if you need to stay safe. You aren’t usually aware that your brain is doing all that. Our senses take in information at a staggering rate—roughly 11 million bits flood in every second from our skin, eyes, ears, and more. That’s nearly three paperback novels’ worth of data every second. Only a sliver reaches our conscious awareness.  Researchers estimate that our conscious minds can process roughly 10 to 60 bits of information per second, about the rate at which you’re reading this sentence. That’s a ratio of about one conscious bit to hundreds of thousands of unconscious bits. And that’s a mercy. As Moriah Thomason, a neuroscientist at NYU Langone, says, “Thank goodness we’re built like this. There’s a layer of what we have access to in conscious awareness. And then we have a right-under-the-surface amount. There is only a certain amount we are meant to ‘hold in mind’ in order to function successfully.”  What you are aware of: Your stomach growling when you’re hungry. Your palms sweating before you speak in public. The breath you just took, if you pay attention to it. Even your heartbeat, which some people can sense from the inside without feeling their pulse in their wrist. Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside: interoception.  The term was coined in 1906 by the British neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington. For most of the 20th century it remained largely confined to textbooks. Today, thanks to a 2021 Nobel Prize and new tools that can map the interoceptive system across the body, the study of this facility is suddenly quite hot. As researchers decode how signals move between body and brain, a clearer picture is starting to take shape—with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to chronic pain to anxiety. The field began to take off in the 1990s. In 1994, the neurologist Antonio Damasio published a book with a pointed title: Descartes’ Error. He challenged the historical separation of thinking and feeling, arguing that our ability to choose and act is driven by feelings, and those feelings in turn are shaped by the body’s signals, such as your gut clenching or your skin going clammy. When we lose that connection between feeling and thinking, as one of Damasio’s patients did after surgery to treat a brain tumor, we may still be able to reason with perfect logic about the pros and cons of traveling on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. But without the emotional signals that help us predict what a choice will feel like, our reason spins and circles, and we cannot decide. A contemporary of Damasio’s, the neuroscientist Bud Craig, spent his career asking one question: How do you feel? He charted how the brain builds an inner map of the body and updates it in real time every moment you are alive. Think of the captain’s bridge on the USS Enterprise, where a live map displays the status of the ship’s critical systems: oxygen levels, energy availability, hull integrity, shield strength. Another set of indicators senses things outside the ship: asteroid belts, enemy ships, radiation, life signs, and spatial anomalies not yet understood. Your brain, only about the size of your two fists pressed together, creates a map like this for your entire body, along with a map of the outside world, from data streaming in through your five senses. Together, they feed into your brain’s working model of you in the world, now and across time—where you are, who you are, your expectations for what’s about to happen (based on everything you know), and what all that means for you. When someone asks “How are you doing?” we consult our maps and report back on our status. We might say we’re happy, depleted, anxious, or energetic. These feelings are always a braid of emotional and physical sensations. They’re what your interoceptive navigational system serves up to your awareness when you sense yourself from the inside. As we grow up, we learn to interpret what these sensations mean—interpretations that, in turn, can alter our physiology, emotions, and behavior. Research by the psychologist Alia Crum shows that people who embrace a “stress is enhancing” mindset produce more growth hormones than people who have a “stress is debilitating” mindset. They also experience more positive emotions and greater cognitive flexibility. Language also matters. We learn words for the textures of our feelings—words that then shape how we feel and act. People low in emotional “granularity”—as the psychologist Marc Brackett calls the ability to distinguish between closely related feelings—react more impulsively under stress and are less able to find meaning in difficult experiences. But mindsets and emotional intelligence are malleable. We can learn that “anxious” is different from “terrified,” and we can even reframe how we interpret our body’s sensations. Instead of thinking of the butterflies in our bellies as annoying, we can welcome them as our body’s way of preparing us for a peak performance. Scientists have long understood that the interoceptive information informing these lived experiences travels via two major systems: nerves and humors (blood and lymph). Now they’re actively studying a third system—the “interstitium,” a network of fluid-filled spaces woven throughout the body’s connective fascia that may also play a role in communication. But until recently, scientific understanding of this interoceptive system looked like a high-level schematic that left out vital details—how information travels from the outside environment in, how it moves from your body to your brain, and how it is integrated and interpreted within your brain. Researchers are now racing to explore what the neuroscientist Catherine Tallon-Baudry calls this “new continent of awareness.” The wandering highway One of the most active areas of research centers on the vagus nerve, the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system and an information highway carrying news from your organs up to your brain and back down to your body. The vagus has become a celebrity nerve, ubiquitous in wellness podcasts and trauma therapy. “Tone your vagus nerve.” “Activate your parasympathetic system.” The language suggests a single thing you can target, like a muscle. The reality, as Steve Liberles at Harvard Medical School is discovering, is far more interesting. Liberles has spent most of his career mapping what he calls “the great wide unknown” of one of our largest and longest nerves. He speaks the way he works—methodically, without overselling. But the questions driving him are huge. How do we sense our body’s inner state? What information flows through which channels? And how does the brain decide what to do with it? “When I’m nervous giving a talk in front of a thousand people,” he says, “my heart might race. I might get butterflies in my stomach. I might get goosebumps on my skin.” We all know what he’s talking about. “It’s bizarre,” he muses. “Your brain has to send a signal to the gut, and then the gut back to the brain, to tell you you’re nervous?” He pauses. “This just shows there is this intimate connectivity between the brain and the body that’s real.” The vagus is often called the calming nerve, because it controls “rest and digest” functions that quiet our body after the sympathetic nervous system revs us up with “fight or flight” impulses to handle danger or stress.  But it is also doing something else: It’s listening to us inside. Anatomists have known for over a century that roughly 80% of its fibers carry information upward, from body to brain. Think of it as a two-lane highway with far more traffic headed north. What scientists are just beginning to understand in detail is what those signals are saying.  Liberles is decoding the vagus with molecular precision and finding that its messaging system is unexpectedly diverse. So far, his research has uncovered dozens of types of vagus nerve cells, each wired to a specific organ. Team Red relays information about the heart; Team Blue, the gut. Within those teams, each courier has a unique job that’s different from those all its teammates perform. Liberles found 10 types in the lungs alone. Until then, only one lung reflex had ever been identified, in 1868. One nerve courier carries information about breathing rate; another the stretch of your lungs; yet another information about airway threats, like food going down the wrong pipe. “It’s super exciting to think about what each of these neurons is doing,” he told me in a conversation last fall, a flash of intensity breaking through the calm. “Where does it go in the body? What is it sensing? What is it controlling?” The doors of the cell Liberles is mapping the vagus information highways. But highways need on-ramps for signals to enter. For years, one of neurobiology’s biggest mysteries was the molecular on-ramp for our sense of touch. Somewhere, something in our bodies was converting physical force into an electrical signal that the nervous system could understand. But no one knew how.  Solving that mystery required a scientist willing to trust a hunch when the data couldn’t show the way.  Ardem Patapoutian grew up in Lebanon and fled the country’s civil war at 18, landing in Los Angeles, where he delivered pizzas and wrote horoscopes for a local newspaper before falling in love with science at UCLA. In the 1990s, as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, he became fascinated with our sense of touch—the last of the five major senses not yet understood at the molecular level. The lung stretch signal that Liberles’s vagus neurons carry to the brain? No one had ever figured out how that signal began. “How do you feel the embrace of a loved one? How do your fingers distinguish one texture of hair from another?” Patapoutian invites us to wonder in his 2021 Nobel Prize lecture. The problem: Most cellular communication works through chemistry. But mechanical force offers no molecule to bind. How does the body translate physical pressure into the electrochemical language that neurons speak? Scientists knew that the answer had to be an ion channel—a protein gate embedded in cell membranes that opens to let electrically charged particles into the cell. But tracking down the one responsible for touch turned out to be absurdly difficult. Ion channels are a hundred thousandth the size of a cell, invisible to ordinary microscopes. Worse, they don’t resemble each other. You can’t recognize one by its shape or its sequence of amino acids. Even with one right in front of you, nothing would tell you it was there. At Scripps, where he works now, Patapoutian decided to try an unusual approach. He’d try to find cells that showed sensitivity to touch and destroy their internal genetic blueprint one gene at a time—hunting for the move that would make the cell go numb. It was tedious, expensive, and possibly a dead end. “A lot of people made fun of us,” he says. Two years in, Patapoutian’s collaborator Bertrand Coste had burned through half his postdoctoral appointment with no results. Patapoutian said: Another 30 genes, and then we decide whether to continue. What kept them going, Patapoutian told me, was informed intuition. “As you gain more experience, you have this sense of what’s going to work, what’s not going to work. Sometimes the data cannot answer the question of when to stop or when to continue. There has to be another process. If you start trusting it, it gives you an avenue to continue.” Coste knocked out candidate gene 72. Flatline. The cell had gone numb. They’d found it—the mechanism behind something you feel every day. They named the protein they identified PIEZO, from the Greek piezi, meaning pressure. There are two variations, PIEZO1 and PIEZO2, each responsible for sensing different kinds of pressure in the body. They’re elegant in their design—over 2,500 amino acids folded into a three-bladed propeller-shaped gate embedded in cell membranes. When pressure stretches the membrane, the gate opens and electrically charged ions flood through, translating physical pressure into an electrical signal that the brain can understand—all within milliseconds. Patapoutian calls scientific discovery a dream that survives reality. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2021 for his discovery of PIEZO, sharing the award with David Julius of UCSF for his work on how cells sense temperature. Now researchers are finding PIEZO proteins everywhere—skin, organs, blood vessels, and even red blood cells, where they help the cells squeeze through narrow capillaries. They’re how your brain knows where your hand is in space without looking at it, a sense called proprioception. They’re in plants too, enabling roots to sense pressure as they push down into the earth. PIEZO was just the beginning. With a $14.5 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health, Patapoutian and his collaborators are now mapping the body’s entire interoceptive system—as many internal senses as he can find, he says.8 Patapoutian has translated his discovery into a unique form of public outreach. At scientific conferences, he sometimes rolls up his sleeve mid-lecture to reveal half his arm covered in ink—a gigantic PIEZO protein in exquisite anatomical detail, its blades spreading across his biceps. Then he flexes. The tattoo flexes with him, the structure bending exactly as the real protein does when pressure opens the gate. “At a pub or a party,” he explains, smiling, “how else would I demonstrate this beautiful structure?” Orchestrating the field Steve Liberles is mapping a major interoception highway. Ardem Patapoutian discovered the gates of touch. Meanwhile, Wen Chen at the National Institutes of Health is pulling the field together, putting neuroscientists, immunologists, physiologists, and clinicians into the same room. The demand, she says, has been enormous. She tested her pitch at a dinner party with NIH colleagues a few years ago. You’re hungry right now—that’s interoception. You’re thirsty—that’s interoception. Heads nodded as she pointed around the table. “We can’t have just the brain or just the body,” she told me. “We need to look at the whole person.” In 2018 she organized a symposium on interoception where Liberles was one of the invitees, along with researchers and practitioners of meditation and yoga. “It was not their thing,” she says, laughing as she recalls how uncomfortable some of the researchers looked. But the practitioners were excited to finally meet scientists who were studying the inner mechanisms of what they did. That was followed by a series of NIH workshops on interoception that spanned topics from basic science to clinical practice. Patapoutian was the keynote speaker for the first one.  The NIH began funding scientists to chart the neural circuits of interoception and bringing them together to talk about their findings. Partway through one of these meetings, the equipment failed for an hour. More than 1,000 people stayed online, waiting for it to come back. “We were shocked at the turnout,” she says. “There was much bigger interest than we could have imagined.” Chen is now building infrastructure to match the demand: a formal community, funding mechanisms, a venue where cardiologists and neuroscientists and clinicians can all find each other. And she’s redefining the field as she goes; interoception is not a one-way signal from body to brain but a continuous two-way communication system, each direction shaping the other in real time.10    Liberles’s nervousness on stage is that two-way loop in action. Signals from his racing heart and belly butterflies travel up to the brain, which weaves them into an interpretation: This is anxiety, and this is what to do to handle it. His actions produce fresh signals that the brain reads in light of its ongoing predictions about what will happen next. In the body-brain communication loop, each player constantly updates the other. I asked Wen what her work on interoception might mean for another inner sense: intuition. “People talk about ‘gut feelings,’” I said. “How does that relate to interoception?”  “Intuition might be the bridge where interoception moves from unconscious processing to conscious awareness,” she answered. “If that’s true, then intuition is not magic. It’s physiology.” But it depends on how we read the signals. Intuition is like pain. It tells you something, but it’s not always clear what. “Perhaps we can treat intuition as a source of data,” she says. “Meaningful, but probably not complete.” “Maybe we can be grounded in both—in feeling and fact.” Which raises a more personal question: What do you do with the signals your body is sending? One avenue for exploration is therapeutic intervention—both pharmacological and neural stimulation. Vagal nerve stimulation has treated epilepsy and depression for four decades, but as Liberles puts it, it’s like pressing all the keys on the piano to hit one note. Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic act in part through vagal pathways but can cause nausea as a side effect, because the targeting isn’t precise enough. Map the body’s circuits with enough accuracy and you might hit the note you actually want. Another area of active research is psychological and behavioral—teaching people how to detect and even shape interoceptive signals. Low interoceptive awareness is linked to mental-health disorders and stress-related physical conditions.11 But like emotional intelligence, it’s not fixed. Researchers are finding that people can boost their body awareness by, for example, learning to detect their heartbeats from the inside—now a common measure of interoceptive awareness.12 Other interventions focus on body-based therapies and conscious activation of the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system to improve emotional and physical well-being. The placebo effect is another example of the mind acting on the body through expectation alone. The signals we once dismissed as vague feelings—when your gut tightens before you know why, when your body says yes or no before your mind catches up—those are real. How we interpret them and whether we act on them is another frontier. It’s clear that gut feelings play a role in scientific research, especially when the path forward looks foggy. Patapoutian’s informed intuition kept him and his colleagues going long enough to find PIEZO, a reminder that major discoveries often start with a hunch that is later tested against evidence. Chen puts it well: Maybe we can be grounded in both feeling and fact. Katherine W. Isaacs is a writer and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of psychology, technology, and innovation. Originally trained as a biologist and later as a social psychologist, she is currently working on a book called Gut Feel, about intuition, interoception, and embodied decision-making.

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

Your brain lives in the dark space of your skull. Yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs on your skin, when your heart is racing, when your gut tightens with fear.

It’s also, right now, predicting what you’ll read next as your eyes move across this page. It’s picking up signals that help it make sense of what’s happening around you and prepare you to act if you need to stay safe. You aren’t usually aware that your brain is doing all that.

Our senses take in information at a staggering rate—roughly 11 million bits flood in every second from our skin, eyes, ears, and more. That’s nearly three paperback novels’ worth of data every second. Only a sliver reaches our conscious awareness.  Researchers estimate that our conscious minds can process roughly 10 to 60 bits of information per second, about the rate at which you’re reading this sentence. That’s a ratio of about one conscious bit to hundreds of thousands of unconscious bits.

And that’s a mercy. As Moriah Thomason, a neuroscientist at NYU Langone, says, “Thank goodness we’re built like this. There’s a layer of what we have access to in conscious awareness. And then we have a right-under-the-surface amount. There is only a certain amount we are meant to ‘hold in mind’ in order to function successfully.” 

What you are aware of: Your stomach growling when you’re hungry. Your palms sweating before you speak in public. The breath you just took, if you pay attention to it. Even your heartbeat, which some people can sense from the inside without feeling their pulse in their wrist.

Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside: interoception. 

The term was coined in 1906 by the British neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington. For most of the 20th century it remained largely confined to textbooks. Today, thanks to a 2021 Nobel Prize and new tools that can map the interoceptive system across the body, the study of this facility is suddenly quite hot. As researchers decode how signals move between body and brain, a clearer picture is starting to take shape—with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to chronic pain to anxiety.

The field began to take off in the 1990s. In 1994, the neurologist Antonio Damasio published a book with a pointed title: Descartes’ Error. He challenged the historical separation of thinking and feeling, arguing that our ability to choose and act is driven by feelings, and those feelings in turn are shaped by the body’s signals, such as your gut clenching or your skin going clammy. When we lose that connection between feeling and thinking, as one of Damasio’s patients did after surgery to treat a brain tumor, we may still be able to reason with perfect logic about the pros and cons of traveling on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. But without the emotional signals that help us predict what a choice will feel like, our reason spins and circles, and we cannot decide.

A contemporary of Damasio’s, the neuroscientist Bud Craig, spent his career asking one question: How do you feel? He charted how the brain builds an inner map of the body and updates it in real time every moment you are alive.

Think of the captain’s bridge on the USS Enterprise, where a live map displays the status of the ship’s critical systems: oxygen levels, energy availability, hull integrity, shield strength. Another set of indicators senses things outside the ship: asteroid belts, enemy ships, radiation, life signs, and spatial anomalies not yet understood.

Your brain, only about the size of your two fists pressed together, creates a map like this for your entire body, along with a map of the outside world, from data streaming in through your five senses. Together, they feed into your brain’s working model of you in the world, now and across time—where you are, who you are, your expectations for what’s about to happen (based on everything you know), and what all that means for you.

When someone asks “How are you doing?” we consult our maps and report back on our status. We might say we’re happy, depleted, anxious, or energetic. These feelings are always a braid of emotional and physical sensations. They’re what your interoceptive navigational system serves up to your awareness when you sense yourself from the inside.

As we grow up, we learn to interpret what these sensations mean—interpretations that, in turn, can alter our physiology, emotions, and behavior. Research by the psychologist Alia Crum shows that people who embrace a “stress is enhancing” mindset produce more growth hormones than people who have a “stress is debilitating” mindset. They also experience more positive emotions and greater cognitive flexibility.

Language also matters. We learn words for the textures of our feelings—words that then shape how we feel and act. People low in emotional “granularity”—as the psychologist Marc Brackett calls the ability to distinguish between closely related feelings—react more impulsively under stress and are less able to find meaning in difficult experiences. But mindsets and emotional intelligence are malleable. We can learn that “anxious” is different from “terrified,” and we can even reframe how we interpret our body’s sensations. Instead of thinking of the butterflies in our bellies as annoying, we can welcome them as our body’s way of preparing us for a peak performance.

Scientists have long understood that the interoceptive information informing these lived experiences travels via two major systems: nerves and humors (blood and lymph). Now they’re actively studying a third system—the “interstitium,” a network of fluid-filled spaces woven throughout the body’s connective fascia that may also play a role in communication.

But until recently, scientific understanding of this interoceptive system looked like a high-level schematic that left out vital details—how information travels from the outside environment in, how it moves from your body to your brain, and how it is integrated and interpreted within your brain. Researchers are now racing to explore what the neuroscientist Catherine Tallon-Baudry calls this “new continent of awareness.”

The wandering highway

One of the most active areas of research centers on the vagus nerve, the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system and an information highway carrying news from your organs up to your brain and back down to your body. The vagus has become a celebrity nerve, ubiquitous in wellness podcasts and trauma therapy. “Tone your vagus nerve.” “Activate your parasympathetic system.” The language suggests a single thing you can target, like a muscle. The reality, as Steve Liberles at Harvard Medical School is discovering, is far more interesting.

Liberles has spent most of his career mapping what he calls “the great wide unknown” of one of our largest and longest nerves. He speaks the way he works—methodically, without overselling. But the questions driving him are huge. How do we sense our body’s inner state? What information flows through which channels? And how does the brain decide what to do with it?

“When I’m nervous giving a talk in front of a thousand people,” he says, “my heart might race. I might get butterflies in my stomach. I might get goosebumps on my skin.” We all know what he’s talking about.

“It’s bizarre,” he muses. “Your brain has to send a signal to the gut, and then the gut back to the brain, to tell you you’re nervous?” He pauses. “This just shows there is this intimate connectivity between the brain and the body that’s real.”

The vagus is often called the calming nerve, because it controls “rest and digest” functions that quiet our body after the sympathetic nervous system revs us up with “fight or flight” impulses to handle danger or stress. 

But it is also doing something else: It’s listening to us inside. Anatomists have known for over a century that roughly 80% of its fibers carry information upward, from body to brain. Think of it as a two-lane highway with far more traffic headed north. What scientists are just beginning to understand in detail is what those signals are saying. 

Liberles is decoding the vagus with molecular precision and finding that its messaging system is unexpectedly diverse. So far, his research has uncovered dozens of types of vagus nerve cells, each wired to a specific organ. Team Red relays information about the heart; Team Blue, the gut.

Within those teams, each courier has a unique job that’s different from those all its teammates perform. Liberles found 10 types in the lungs alone. Until then, only one lung reflex had ever been identified, in 1868. One nerve courier carries information about breathing rate; another the stretch of your lungs; yet another information about airway threats, like food going down the wrong pipe.

“It’s super exciting to think about what each of these neurons is doing,” he told me in a conversation last fall, a flash of intensity breaking through the calm. “Where does it go in the body? What is it sensing? What is it controlling?”

The doors of the cell

Liberles is mapping the vagus information highways. But highways need on-ramps for signals to enter. For years, one of neurobiology’s biggest mysteries was the molecular on-ramp for our sense of touch.

Somewhere, something in our bodies was converting physical force into an electrical signal that the nervous system could understand. But no one knew how. 

Solving that mystery required a scientist willing to trust a hunch when the data couldn’t show the way. 

Ardem Patapoutian grew up in Lebanon and fled the country’s civil war at 18, landing in Los Angeles, where he delivered pizzas and wrote horoscopes for a local newspaper before falling in love with science at UCLA.

In the 1990s, as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, he became fascinated with our sense of touch—the last of the five major senses not yet understood at the molecular level. The lung stretch signal that Liberles’s vagus neurons carry to the brain? No one had ever figured out how that signal began.

“How do you feel the embrace of a loved one? How do your fingers distinguish one texture of hair from another?” Patapoutian invites us to wonder in his 2021 Nobel Prize lecture. The problem: Most cellular communication works through chemistry. But mechanical force offers no molecule to bind. How does the body translate physical pressure into the electrochemical language that neurons speak?

Scientists knew that the answer had to be an ion channel—a protein gate embedded in cell membranes that opens to let electrically charged particles into the cell. But tracking down the one responsible for touch turned out to be absurdly difficult. Ion channels are a hundred thousandth the size of a cell, invisible to ordinary microscopes. Worse, they don’t resemble each other. You can’t recognize one by its shape or its sequence of amino acids. Even with one right in front of you, nothing would tell you it was there.

At Scripps, where he works now, Patapoutian decided to try an unusual approach. He’d try to find cells that showed sensitivity to touch and destroy their internal genetic blueprint one gene at a time—hunting for the move that would make the cell go numb. It was tedious, expensive, and possibly a dead end. “A lot of people made fun of us,” he says.

Two years in, Patapoutian’s collaborator Bertrand Coste had burned through half his postdoctoral appointment with no results. Patapoutian said: Another 30 genes, and then we decide whether to continue.

What kept them going, Patapoutian told me, was informed intuition. “As you gain more experience, you have this sense of what’s going to work, what’s not going to work. Sometimes the data cannot answer the question of when to stop or when to continue. There has to be another process. If you start trusting it, it gives you an avenue to continue.”

Coste knocked out candidate gene 72. Flatline. The cell had gone numb.

They’d found it—the mechanism behind something you feel every day.

They named the protein they identified PIEZO, from the Greek piezi, meaning pressure. There are two variations, PIEZO1 and PIEZO2, each responsible for sensing different kinds of pressure in the body. They’re elegant in their design—over 2,500 amino acids folded into a three-bladed propeller-shaped gate embedded in cell membranes. When pressure stretches the membrane, the gate opens and electrically charged ions flood through, translating physical pressure into an electrical signal that the brain can understand—all within milliseconds.

Patapoutian calls scientific discovery a dream that survives reality. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2021 for his discovery of PIEZO, sharing the award with David Julius of UCSF for his work on how cells sense temperature. Now researchers are finding PIEZO proteins everywhere—skin, organs, blood vessels, and even red blood cells, where they help the cells squeeze through narrow capillaries. They’re how your brain knows where your hand is in space without looking at it, a sense called proprioception. They’re in plants too, enabling roots to sense pressure as they push down into the earth.

PIEZO was just the beginning. With a $14.5 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health, Patapoutian and his collaborators are now mapping the body’s entire interoceptive system—as many internal senses as he can find, he says.8

Patapoutian has translated his discovery into a unique form of public outreach. At scientific conferences, he sometimes rolls up his sleeve mid-lecture to reveal half his arm covered in ink—a gigantic PIEZO protein in exquisite anatomical detail, its blades spreading across his biceps. Then he flexes. The tattoo flexes with him, the structure bending exactly as the real protein does when pressure opens the gate.

“At a pub or a party,” he explains, smiling, “how else would I demonstrate this beautiful structure?”

Orchestrating the field

Steve Liberles is mapping a major interoception highway. Ardem Patapoutian discovered the gates of touch. Meanwhile, Wen Chen at the National Institutes of Health is pulling the field together, putting neuroscientists, immunologists, physiologists, and clinicians into the same room. The demand, she says, has been enormous.

She tested her pitch at a dinner party with NIH colleagues a few years ago. You’re hungry right now—that’s interoception. You’re thirsty—that’s interoception. Heads nodded as she pointed around the table.

“We can’t have just the brain or just the body,” she told me. “We need to look at the whole person.”

In 2018 she organized a symposium on interoception where Liberles was one of the invitees, along with researchers and practitioners of meditation and yoga. “It was not their thing,” she says, laughing as she recalls how uncomfortable some of the researchers looked. But the practitioners were excited to finally meet scientists who were studying the inner mechanisms of what they did.

That was followed by a series of NIH workshops on interoception that spanned topics from basic science to clinical practice. Patapoutian was the keynote speaker for the first one. 

The NIH began funding scientists to chart the neural circuits of interoception and bringing them together to talk about their findings. Partway through one of these meetings, the equipment failed for an hour. More than 1,000 people stayed online, waiting for it to come back.

“We were shocked at the turnout,” she says. “There was much bigger interest than we could have imagined.”

Chen is now building infrastructure to match the demand: a formal community, funding mechanisms, a venue where cardiologists and neuroscientists and clinicians can all find each other. And she’s redefining the field as she goes; interoception is not a one-way signal from body to brain but a continuous two-way communication system, each direction shaping the other in real time.10   

Liberles’s nervousness on stage is that two-way loop in action. Signals from his racing heart and belly butterflies travel up to the brain, which weaves them into an interpretation: This is anxiety, and this is what to do to handle it. His actions produce fresh signals that the brain reads in light of its ongoing predictions about what will happen next. In the body-brain communication loop, each player constantly updates the other.

I asked Wen what her work on interoception might mean for another inner sense: intuition. “People talk about ‘gut feelings,’” I said. “How does that relate to interoception?”

 “Intuition might be the bridge where interoception moves from unconscious processing to conscious awareness,” she answered. “If that’s true, then intuition is not magic. It’s physiology.”

But it depends on how we read the signals. Intuition is like pain. It tells you something, but it’s not always clear what. “Perhaps we can treat intuition as a source of data,” she says. “Meaningful, but probably not complete.”

“Maybe we can be grounded in both—in feeling and fact.”

Which raises a more personal question: What do you do with the signals your body is sending?

One avenue for exploration is therapeutic intervention—both pharmacological and neural stimulation. Vagal nerve stimulation has treated epilepsy and depression for four decades, but as Liberles puts it, it’s like pressing all the keys on the piano to hit one note. Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic act in part through vagal pathways but can cause nausea as a side effect, because the targeting isn’t precise enough. Map the body’s circuits with enough accuracy and you might hit the note you actually want.

Another area of active research is psychological and behavioral—teaching people how to detect and even shape interoceptive signals. Low interoceptive awareness is linked to mental-health disorders and stress-related physical conditions.11 But like emotional intelligence, it’s not fixed. Researchers are finding that people can boost their body awareness by, for example, learning to detect their heartbeats from the inside—now a common measure of interoceptive awareness.12 Other interventions focus on body-based therapies and conscious activation of the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system to improve emotional and physical well-being. The placebo effect is another example of the mind acting on the body through expectation alone.

The signals we once dismissed as vague feelings—when your gut tightens before you know why, when your body says yes or no before your mind catches up—those are real. How we interpret them and whether we act on them is another frontier.

It’s clear that gut feelings play a role in scientific research, especially when the path forward looks foggy. Patapoutian’s informed intuition kept him and his colleagues going long enough to find PIEZO, a reminder that major discoveries often start with a hunch that is later tested against evidence. Chen puts it well: Maybe we can be grounded in both feeling and fact.

Katherine W. Isaacs is a writer and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of psychology, technology, and innovation. Originally trained as a biologist and later as a social psychologist, she is currently working on a book called Gut Feel, about intuition, interoception, and embodied decision-making.

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How Jeetu Patel made Cisco unrecognizable

From dashboard sprawl to Cloud Control The most visible proof point of the new Cisco is Cloud Control, the unified management plane that now spans networking, security, compute, observability, collaboration, and an expanding ecosystem of third-party tools. Cisco is careful to note that this is not just another single pane

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IBM, ServiceNow team to bring AI to legacy enterprise systems

Decades of deeply interconnected legacy systems are the biggest barrier to moving fast on AI, the companies stated. Their pairings will take advantage of Big Blue’s expertise in working with large systems, such as its mainframe environment, and extensive legacy applications, along with ServiceNow’s workflow and agent management platforms. “Most

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Energy Secretary Keeps Coal-Fired Power Generation Alive in the Northwest

WASHINGTON—U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today issued an emergency order to keep affordable, reliable, and secure coal generation online and address critical grid reliability issues facing the Northwestern region of the United States. The emergency order directs TransAlta Centralia Generation LLC (TransAlta) to ensure that Unit 2 of the Centralia Generating Station in Centralia, Washington, a coal-fired power plant, remains available to operate. Centralia Unit 2 was scheduled to shut down at the end of 2025. The order minimizes the risk and cost of unnecessary blackouts. “Taking reliable generation off the grid compromises energy reliability and needlessly raises energy costs for Americans,” said Energy Secretary Wright. “During peak summer demand, Northwesterners deserve continued access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy to power and cool their homes.” Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, coal plants across the country are being saved from premature retirement and reversing plans to shut down. In 2025, more than 17 gigawatts of coal-power electricity generation were saved from going offline. As outlined in DOE’s Resource Adequacy Report, power outages could increase by 100 times by 2030 if the U.S. continues to take reliable power offline. The availability of Centralia to operate will continue to be an asset to maintain reliability in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) Northwest region. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment assessed that the WECC Northwest region is at high risk of energy shortfalls over the next five years, noting that “rapid forecasted demand growth is driving the need for more resources” and that “periods of unserved energy are projected for both summer and winter.” This order is in effect beginning on June 15, 2026, through September 12, 2026. Background: According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s data, in 2025, Centralia generated an average of approximately 340,000 MWh per month, providing vital generation capacity to the region.  ###

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United States, Cyprus, Greece, Israel and Rice University To Establish Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center in Houston

HOUSTON, TEXAS—U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today signed a Declaration of Intent (DOI) with the Minister of Energy, Commerce, and Industry of the Republic of Cyprus Michael Damianos, Minister of Environment and Energy for Greece Stavros Papastavrou, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Dr. Yechiel Leiter, and President of Rice University Reginald DesRoches to establish the Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center (EMEC). The agreement establishes a framework to strengthen cooperation between the respective nations through the Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center (EMEC). It also advances a key initiative envisioned under Secretary Rubio’s Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership Act of 2019. The agreement advances President Trump’s commitment to strengthening America’s partnerships with key allies while expanding opportunities for U.S. energy development, innovation, and investment. As global energy demand continues to grow, the United States, Cyprus, Greece, and Israel will work together to promote energy security, strengthen critical infrastructure, support emerging technologies, and advance long-term economic growth throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. “The Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center will help fulfill President Trump’s vision of prosperity and energy security at home and abroad,” said Secretary Wright. “The Eastern Mediterranean is an increasingly important region for global energy development, and this agreement strengthens cooperation among key allies while advancing our shared goals of energy abundance, economic prosperity, and regional stability. By establishing the Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center at Rice University in Houston, we are ensuring all member nations of this agreement will benefit from a lasting partnership bound together by the brightest minds and industry leaders in hydrocarbon development.” The partnership will support collaboration on shared priorities including natural gas development, U.S. LNG infrastructure, energy transportation networks, grid reliability, critical infrastructure resilience, and emerging technologies. It will also facilitate scientific and technical exchanges, research partnerships, workforce development initiatives, and engagement with industry stakeholders. The Trump

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Energy Secretary Secures Carolinas’ Grid Ahead of Period of Hot Weather

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today issued an emergency order to mitigate blackouts in the Carolinas’ ahead of a period of hot weather. Issued pursuant to Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, the order authorizes Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC (“DEC”) and Duke Energy Progress, LLC (“DEP”) (collectively, “Duke Energy”) to operate specified units located within Duke Energy’s service territory to operate up to their maximum generation output levels, notwithstanding air quality or other permit limitations arising under federal, state, or local law or regulation, or other applicable source of law. The order was issued subsequent to Duke Energy’s application. The order will mitigate the risk of unnecessary blackouts brought on by unusually high load forecasts and high temperatures across the region. “Maintaining affordable, reliable, and secure power in the Duke Energy service territory is non-negotiable,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “The previous administration’s energy subtraction policies weakened the grid, leaving Americans more vulnerable during events like this. Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, we are reversing those failures and using every available tool ensuring Americans in the Carolinas’ have continued access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy to power and cool their homes.” On day one, President Trump declared a national energy emergency after the Biden administration’s energy subtraction agenda left behind a grid increasingly vulnerable to blackouts. The order is in effect beginning at 4:00 PM ET on June 11, 2026, and shall expire at 10:00 PM ET on June 12, 2026. Background: Duke Energy stated that some generating units are limited in providing needed generation because of conditions and limitations in their environmental permits. As a result, the system “may not have sufficient generation available to meet this unusually high demand and [Duke Energy] may be forced to curtail load in order to maintain security

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Energy Department Issues RFP to Advance President Trump’s 172-Million-Barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve Exchange

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for an exchange of up to 40 million barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). Today’s solicitation opens competitive bidding, continuing DOE’s execution of President Trump’s 172-million-barrel release as part of a coordinated 400-million-barrel action by International Energy Agency (IEA) member nations’ strategic reserves. Under President Trump’s leadership, DOE has advanced an unprecedented series of large-scale SPR exchange solicitations at record speed. These actions have moved critical crude oil supplies into the market to address short term supply disruptions and bolster energy security for the United States and its allies. The crude oil will originate from the SPR’s Big Hill and Bryan Mound sites. This action builds on the Department’s four previous solicitations that collectively awarded more than 133 million barrels across three completed exchanges. DOE’s earlier exchanges demonstrated the SPR’s ability to rapidly deliver crude under emergency authorities while achieving a 26 percent premium in returned barrels—expanding the reserve at no additional cost to American taxpayers. “With today’s announcement, we are accelerating the President’s commitment to a coordinated and strategic release that stabilizes global oil markets,” said DOE Acting Assistant Secretary for the Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office Curt Coccodrilli. “This exchange will help move oil swiftly to refiners, ease short-term supply pressures, and ensure the Strategic Petroleum Reserve continues to grow stronger through the return of premium barrels.” Under DOE’s exchange authority, participating companies will return the 40 million borrowed barrels with additional premium barrels, ensuring immediate market supply while increasing the SPR’s long-term inventory. Bids for this solicitation are due no later than 11:00 A.M. Central Time on Monday, June 15, 2026. For more information on the SPR, please visit DOE’s website. 

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DOE’s Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office Invests $3.6 Million to Modernize America’s Coal-Fired Power Plants

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office (HGEO) today announced $3.6 million for nine design and engineering projects that will support the refurbishment or retrofit of existing coal power plants with transformational technologies that address wastewater systems and improve the efficiency, reliability, flexibility, and performance of coal and natural gas use. By upgrading our nation’s existing coal facilities, these initiatives will help strengthen the backbone of America’s power grid and ensure all American’s have access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy when they need it most. These efforts help to advance President Trump’s Executive Orders Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid to restore common-sense energy policies that prioritize dependable power, affordability, and American workers. “America’s coal fleet is an undeniable pillar of our energy dominance and economic strength, but for too long, policies have undermined this vital industry and the dedicated workforce behind it, threatening our grid’s stability and driving up costs for everyday Americans,” said DOE Acting Assistant Secretary of the Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office Curt Coccodrilli. “With the project investments announced today, we are decisively moving to champion our existing coal plants, ensuring they continue to deliver affordable, reliable power, keep the lights on, and fuel America’s progress for generations to come.” Projects have been selected under three topic areas to provide a path forward to rapidly and cost-effectively restore the stability of the nation’s bulk power system while also finding beneficial uses for wastes generated by coal-based energy production. The projects will be executed in three phases, with design and engineering completed in Phase I, final engineering and detailed design completed in Phase II, and technology implementation and validation completed in Phase III. Selectees to receive Phase I funding include: Baker Hughes Energy Transition LLC (Houston, Texas),

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Energy Department Releases Finalized Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap to Accelerate Commercial Fusion Power

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today released the finalized Fusion Science and Technology (FS&T) Roadmap, a national strategy to accelerate the development and commercialization of fusion energy on the most rapid, responsible timeline in history. Building on earlier roadmap efforts, the finalized roadmap brings together fusion science, technology, infrastructure, workforce development, and commercialization priorities into a single national strategy to support fusion pilot plants and commercial fusion power in the mid-2030s. Fusion is the process that powers the sun and stars. For decades, scientists and engineers have worked to bring that same process to Earth as a source of abundant, reliable energy. The finalized roadmap outlines how DOE, industry, universities, and national laboratories will work together to accelerate the path toward commercial fusion energy in the United States. This effort advances President Trump’s energy dominance agenda and reinforces the Administration’s commitment to expanding reliable American energy production, strengthening domestic supply chains, and maintaining U.S. leadership in critical technologies. By accelerating progress toward commercial fusion power, DOE is helping secure a future of abundant and reliable energy. “Fusion energy has entered a new era defined by extraordinary scientific progress and public-private momentum,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Dr. Darío Gil. “With this roadmap, we now have the clarity, coordination, and sustained commitment needed to turn the promise of fusion into a reality for the American people.” Developed with input from more than 800 scientists and engineers across the public and private sectors, the finalized FS&T Roadmap reflects contributions from more than 15 private companies, over 10 National Laboratories, and more than 70 universities. The roadmap identifies the critical science and technology gaps that must be closed to realize fusion pilot plants and strengthen U.S. leadership in the global fusion industry. The FS&T Roadmap establishes a unified strategy for the U.S.

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Amazon claims its data centers are 7x more water-efficient than the industry average

“Amazon is on the leading edge, but it’s not a secret recipe,” he said. What sets the company apart is scale, execution, facility design, geographic mix, and its aggressive pursuit of energy goals. Others are doing the similar things, if through different avenues: Microsoft is investing in closed-loop cooling systems that dramatically reduce evaporative water loss. Google is heavily focused on reclaimed water and using AI to optimize data centers. Meta has long relied on outside-air cooling. And overall, the industry is moving toward liquid cooling for dense AI deployments, “which changes the water equation again,” said Kimball. One of the big variables is location: Climate influences water efficiency, so where a company builds its infrastructure is as important as its cooling methods. Further, power-consumptive AI changes the discussion, he emphasized; traditional enterprise workloads and dense AI training clusters create very different thermal profiles.

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Marvell announces 102.4 Tbps switch silicon built for AI

Data movement has become an important concern in modern AI data centers. In the past, a cluster of a few servers could adequately handle back-office applications and databases. But with AI’s gigantic models, all sections of the data center need to move and receive data at high speeds. That requires a lot more power use than in the past. GPU- and XPU-based systems are approaching 120KW per rack, and switching and networking components consume approximately 15-25% of total rack power, making low-power switch silicon a strategic requirement. The Teralynx T100 delivers up to 25% lower power consumption than competitive solutions at a higher data rate. This enables AI infrastructures to deploy more accelerators within existing power envelopes without requiring additional power infrastructure. “As AI workloads evolve and scale exponentially, hyperscalers require network architectures that optimize latency, power and scalability simultaneously,” said Rishi Chugh, vice president and general manager of the data center switch business unit at Marvell, in a statement.

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From the data center to the edge: How to build secure, effective enterprise AI infrastructure

While hyperscalers and neo-cloud providers may get the lion’s share of attention for providing AI infrastructure, many enterprises are taking a build-it-themselves approach to meet their specific AI requirements. The success of such projects is crucial to achieving business objectives, yet companies face significant challenges as they try to scale pilots to production. Organizations must keep up with the dynamic, ever-changing demands that AI applications place on compute and network infrastructure, from the data center to the edge. That means architecting systems to grow as demand warrants and to avoid performance bottlenecks. The architecture must also account for AI-driven security vulnerabilities and ensure appropriate defenses are in place. Yes, it’s a tall order. But here, in simplified form, is a three-step plan for meeting those objectives. Step one: Go modular Integrating all the required components in piecemeal fashion for an AI factory is complex, costly, and fraught with integration risk. Start with a modular design, based on proven NVIDIA reference architectures. A modular approach combines pre-validated accelerated computing hardware, AI software, and orchestration platforms, as well as networking and storage capabilities. A modular strategy speeds implementation and creates a faster time to value for your AI infrastructure. Using modules that combine compute, networking, and storage makes it easier to scale capacity as needed, whether in the data center or at edge facilities. In addition, the modular approach simplifies the job of addressing varying requirements, from inferencing engines at the edge to massive-scale model training in the data center, while staying within the same solution family. The same applies to easing integration processes, as modular platforms offer pre-validated software. The Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA approach, for example, includes hardware (Cisco AI PODS) that is pre-validated to work with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software; Cisco Security and Splunk Observability software; orchestration

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OpenAI weighs Nvidia-backed lease for 10 GW Ohio data center campus

OpenAI would control the computing equipment under a 20-year lease and begin payments once the site starts operating, with the first phase expected in 2028. Nvidia is expected to supply the hardware and guarantee both OpenAI’s lease obligations and the developer’s financing, the report added. The reported structure highlights a broader shift in AI infrastructure strategy, where model developers, chip suppliers, and energy providers are forging increasingly long-term partnerships to secure compute capacity amid surging demand. “These types of symbiotic deals are becoming the norm as AI infrastructure rolls out,” said Neil Shah, vice president for research and partner at Counterpoint Research. “If a CIO picks OpenAI to be the base layer, they shouldn’t just accept whatever infrastructure comes with it. CIOs need to negotiate and demand that OpenAI uses a mix of capacity so all your eggs are not in one premium basket like Nvidia.” OpenAI and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Arista unveils 1.6T rack-scale switch family for AI infrastructure

The new Arista family joins a growing ecosystem of vendors looking to tap into the 1.6T Ethernet world, which includes Cisco, Nvidia, Celestica and others. “Arista Network’s new 7060XE7 Series is a strong signal of where large-scale AI fabrics are heading: higher bandwidth, better power efficiency, and tighter integration between compute, optics, silicon, cooling, and network operating software,” wrote Sameh Boujelbene, vice president, data center switch and AI networks market research for Dell Oro, in a LinkedIn post. Among the features that stand out to her are “strong customer and ecosystem validation from Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Meta, AMD, and Broadcom.”

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Water Emerges as a Critical Constraint for AI Data Centers

“There really has been a major shift within the last couple of years,” Bajpayee said. “I would even say within the last 12 months is where we have seen suddenly a rapid increase in the data center operators’ desire to control their water destiny.” For Gradiant, the MIT-born water technology company that built its reputation serving semiconductor manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and industrial customers worldwide, that shift has translated into a rapidly expanding pipeline of data center opportunities. More importantly, Bajpayee believes it signals a fundamental change in how the industry thinks about water itself. The conversation is no longer centered primarily on sustainability metrics or corporate environmental goals. Instead, operators increasingly view water as a business continuity issue. “We’re seeing operators themselves come to us and tell us that these are issues they are facing,” Bajpayee said. “They want to make sure they don’t get stalled, their permits don’t get pulled, their business doesn’t get stopped, and communities don’t push them out because they didn’t figure out a way to control their water.” From Water Treatment to Water Strategy That shift is occurring as Gradiant expands deployments of its recently announced HyperSolved platform, an end-to-end cooling water management system purpose-built for AI data centers. The company says HyperSolved is now being deployed with several of the world’s largest hyperscale operators across North America, Europe, and Asia, reflecting growing industry demand for integrated approaches to water infrastructure. While compute, networking, and power systems have evolved rapidly during the AI era, water management often remains fragmented, requiring operators to coordinate multiple vendors responsible for sourcing, treatment, cooling, wastewater management, reuse, discharge, and regulatory compliance. Gradiant’s approach seeks to consolidate those functions into a single integrated platform and operating model. The timing reflects the growing scale of the challenge. New AI data center

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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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