Researchers announce babies born from a trial of three-person IVF

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Researchers announce babies born from a trial of three-person IVF

Eight babies have been born in the UK thanks to a technology that uses DNA from three people: the two biological parents plus a third person who supplies healthy mitochondrial DNA. The babies were born to mothers who carry genes for mitochondrial diseases and risked passing on severe disorders. The eight babies are healthy, say the researchers behind the trial. “Mitochondrial disease can have a devastating impact on families,” Doug Turnbull of Newcastle University, one of the researchers behind the study, said in a statement. “Today’s news offers fresh hope to many more women at risk of passing on this condition, who now have the chance to have children growing up without this terrible disease.” The study, which makes use of a technology called mitochondrial donation, has been described as a “tour de force” and “a remarkable accomplishment” by others in the field. In the team’s approach, patients’ eggs are fertilized with sperm, and the DNA-containing nuclei of those cells are transferred into donated fertilized eggs that have had their own nuclei removed. The new embryos contain the DNA of the intended parents along with a tiny fraction of mitochondrial DNA from the donor, floating in the embryos’ cytoplasm. “The concept of [mitochondrial donation] has attracted much commentary and occasionally concern and anxiety,” Stuart Lavery, a consultant in reproductive medicine at University College Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said in a statement. “The Newcastle team have demonstrated that it can be used in a clinically effective and ethically acceptable way to prevent disease and suffering.” Not everyone sees the trial as a resounding success. While five of the children were born “with no health problems,” one developed a fever and a urinary tract infection, and another had muscle jerks. A third was treated for an abnormal heart rhythm. Three of the babies were born with a low level of the very mitochondrial-DNA mutations the treatment was designed to prevent. Heidi Mertes, a medical ethicist at Ghent University, says she is “moderately optimistic.” “I’m happy that it worked,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s concerning … it’s a call for caution and treading carefully.” Pavlo Mazur, a former embryologist who has used a similar approach in the conception of 15 babies in Ukraine, believes that trials like this one should be paused until researchers figure out what’s going on. Others believe that researchers should study the technique in people who don’t have mitochondrial mutations, to lower the risk of passing any disease-causing mutations to children. Long time coming The news of the births has been long awaited by researchers in the field. Mitochondrial donation was first made legal in the UK in 2015. Two years later, the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates fertility treatment and research in the UK, granted a fertility clinic in Newcastle the sole license to perform the procedure. Newcastle Fertility Centre at Life launched a trial of mitochondrial donation in 2017 with the aim of treating 25 women a year. That was eight years ago. Since then, the Newcastle team have been extremely tight-lipped about the trial. That’s despite the fact that other teams elsewhere have used mitochondrial donation to help people achieve pregnancy. A New York–based doctor used a type of mitochondrial donation to help a Jordanian couple conceive in Mexico in 2016. Mitochondrial donation has also been trialed by teams in Ukraine and Greece. But as the only trial overseen by the HFEA, the Newcastle team’s study was viewed by many as the most “official.” Researchers have been itching to hear how the work has been going, given the potential implications for researchers elsewhere (mitochondrial donation was officially made legal in Australia in 2022). “I’m very glad to see [the results] come out at last,” says Dagan Wells, a reproductive biologist at the University of Oxford who worked on the Greece trial. “It would have been nice to have some information out along the way.” At the Newcastle clinic, each patient must receive approval from the HFEA to be eligible for mitochondrial donation. Since the trial launched in 2017, 39 patients have won this approval. Twenty-five of them underwent hormonal stimulation to release multiple eggs that could be frozen in storage. Nineteen of those women went on to have mitochondrial donation. So far, seven of the women have given birth (one had twins), and an eighth is still pregnant. The oldest baby is two years old. The results were published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. “As parents, all we ever wanted was to give our child a healthy start in life,” one of the mothers, who is remaining anonymous, said in a statement. “Mitochondrial donation IVF made that possible. After years of uncertainty this treatment gave us hope—and then it gave us our baby … Science gave us a chance.” When each baby was born, the team collected a blood and urine sample to look at the child’s mitochondrial DNA. They found that the levels of mutated DNA were far lower than they would have expected without mitochondrial donation. Three of the mothers were “homoplasmic”—100% of their mitochondrial DNA carried the mutation. But blood tests showed that in the women’s four babies (including the twins), 5% or less of the mitochondrial DNA had the mutation, suggesting they won’t develop disease. A mixed result The researchers see this as a positive result. “Children who would otherwise have inherited very high levels are now inheriting levels that are reduced by 77% to 100%,” coauthor Mary Herbert, a professor of reproductive biology at Newcastle University and Monash University, told me during a press briefing. But three of the eight babies had health symptoms. At seven months, one was diagnosed with a rare form of epilepsy, which seemed to resolve within the following three months. Another baby developed a urinary tract infection. A third baby developed “prolonged” jaundice, high levels of fat in the blood, and a disturbed heart rhythm that required treatment. The baby seemed to have recovered by 18 months, and doctors believe that the symptoms were not related to the mitochondrial mutations, but the team members admit that they can’t be sure. Given the small sample size, it’s hard to make comparisons with babies conceived in other ways. And they acknowledge that a phenomenon called “reversal” is happening in some of the babies. In theory, the children shouldn’t inherit any “bad” mitochondrial DNA from their mothers. But three of them did. The levels of “bad” mitochondrial DNA in the babies’ blood ranged between 5% and 16%. And they were higher in the babies’ urine—the highest figure being 20%. The researchers don’t know why this is happening. When an embryologist pulls out the nucleus of a fertilized egg, a bit of mitochondria-containing cytoplasm will inevitably be dragged along with it. But the team didn’t see any link between the amount of carried-over cytoplasm and the level of “bad” mitochondria. “We continue to investigate this issue,” Herbert said. “As long as they don’t understand what’s happening, I would still be worried,” says Mertes. Such low levels aren’t likely to cause mitochondrial diseases, according to experts contacted by MIT Technology Review. But some are concerned that the percentage of mutated DNA could be higher in different tissues, such as the brain or muscle, or that the levels might change with age. “You never know which tissues [reversal] will show up in,” says Mazur, who has seen the phenomenon in babies born through mitochondrial donation to parents who didn’t have mitochondrial mutations. “It’s chaotic.” The Newcastle team says it hasn’t looked at other tissues, because it designed the study to be noninvasive. There has been at least one case in which similar levels of “bad” mitochondria have caused symptoms, says Joanna Poulton, a mitochondrial geneticist at the University of Oxford. She thinks it’s unlikely that the children in the trial will develop any symptoms but adds that “it’s a bit of a worry.” The age of reversal No one knows exactly when this reversal happens. But Wells and his colleagues have some idea. In their study in Greece, they looked at the mitochondrial DNA of embryos and checked them again during pregnancy and after birth. The trial was designed to study the impact of mitochondrial donation for infertility—none of the parents involved had genes for mitochondrial disease. The team has seen mitochondrial reversal in two of the seven babies born in the trial, says Wells. If you put the two sets of results together, mitochondrial donation “seems to have this possibility of reversal occurring in maybe about a third of children,” he says. In his study, the reversal seemed to occur early on in the embryos’ development, Wells says. Five-day-old embryos “look perfect,” but mitochondrial mutations start showing up in tests taken at around 15 weeks of pregnancy, he says. After that point, the levels appear to be relatively stable. The Newcastle researchers say they will monitor the children until they are five years old. People enrolling in future trials might opt for amniocentesis, which involves sampling blood from the fetus’s amniotic sac at around 15 to 18 weeks, suggests Mertes. That test might reveal the likely level of mitochondrial mutations in the resulting child. “Then the parents could decide what to do,” says Mertes. “If you could see there was a 90% mutation load [for a] very serious mitochondrial disease, they would still have an option to cancel the pregnancy,” she says. Wells thinks the Newcastle team’s results are “generally reassuring.” He doesn’t think the trials should be paused. But he wants people to understand that mitochondrial donation is not without risk. “This can only be viewed as a risk reduction strategy, and not a guarantee of having an unaffected child,” he says. And, as Mertes points out, there’s another option for women who carry mitochondrial DNA mutations: egg donation. Donor eggs fertilized with a partner’s sperm and transferred to a woman’s uterus won’t have her disease-causing mitochondria. That option won’t appeal to people who feel strongly about having a genetic link to their children. But Poulton asks: “If you know whose uterus you came out of, does it matter that the [egg] came from somewhere else?”

“Mitochondrial disease can have a devastating impact on families,” Doug Turnbull of Newcastle University, one of the researchers behind the study, said in a statement. “Today’s news offers fresh hope to many more women at risk of passing on this condition, who now have the chance to have children growing up without this terrible disease.”

The study, which makes use of a technology called mitochondrial donation, has been described as a “tour de force” and “a remarkable accomplishment” by others in the field. In the team’s approach, patients’ eggs are fertilized with sperm, and the DNA-containing nuclei of those cells are transferred into donated fertilized eggs that have had their own nuclei removed. The new embryos contain the DNA of the intended parents along with a tiny fraction of mitochondrial DNA from the donor, floating in the embryos’ cytoplasm.

“The concept of [mitochondrial donation] has attracted much commentary and occasionally concern and anxiety,” Stuart Lavery, a consultant in reproductive medicine at University College Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said in a statement. “The Newcastle team have demonstrated that it can be used in a clinically effective and ethically acceptable way to prevent disease and suffering.”

Not everyone sees the trial as a resounding success. While five of the children were born “with no health problems,” one developed a fever and a urinary tract infection, and another had muscle jerks. A third was treated for an abnormal heart rhythm. Three of the babies were born with a low level of the very mitochondrial-DNA mutations the treatment was designed to prevent.

Heidi Mertes, a medical ethicist at Ghent University, says she is “moderately optimistic.” “I’m happy that it worked,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s concerning … it’s a call for caution and treading carefully.”

Pavlo Mazur, a former embryologist who has used a similar approach in the conception of 15 babies in Ukraine, believes that trials like this one should be paused until researchers figure out what’s going on. Others believe that researchers should study the technique in people who don’t have mitochondrial mutations, to lower the risk of passing any disease-causing mutations to children.

Long time coming

The news of the births has been long awaited by researchers in the field. Mitochondrial donation was first made legal in the UK in 2015. Two years later, the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates fertility treatment and research in the UK, granted a fertility clinic in Newcastle the sole license to perform the procedure. Newcastle Fertility Centre at Life launched a trial of mitochondrial donation in 2017 with the aim of treating 25 women a year.

That was eight years ago. Since then, the Newcastle team have been extremely tight-lipped about the trial. That’s despite the fact that other teams elsewhere have used mitochondrial donation to help people achieve pregnancy. A New York–based doctor used a type of mitochondrial donation to help a Jordanian couple conceive in Mexico in 2016. Mitochondrial donation has also been trialed by teams in Ukraine and Greece.

But as the only trial overseen by the HFEA, the Newcastle team’s study was viewed by many as the most “official.” Researchers have been itching to hear how the work has been going, given the potential implications for researchers elsewhere (mitochondrial donation was officially made legal in Australia in 2022). “I’m very glad to see [the results] come out at last,” says Dagan Wells, a reproductive biologist at the University of Oxford who worked on the Greece trial. “It would have been nice to have some information out along the way.”

At the Newcastle clinic, each patient must receive approval from the HFEA to be eligible for mitochondrial donation. Since the trial launched in 2017, 39 patients have won this approval. Twenty-five of them underwent hormonal stimulation to release multiple eggs that could be frozen in storage.

Nineteen of those women went on to have mitochondrial donation. So far, seven of the women have given birth (one had twins), and an eighth is still pregnant. The oldest baby is two years old. The results were published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“As parents, all we ever wanted was to give our child a healthy start in life,” one of the mothers, who is remaining anonymous, said in a statement. “Mitochondrial donation IVF made that possible. After years of uncertainty this treatment gave us hope—and then it gave us our baby … Science gave us a chance.”

When each baby was born, the team collected a blood and urine sample to look at the child’s mitochondrial DNA. They found that the levels of mutated DNA were far lower than they would have expected without mitochondrial donation. Three of the mothers were “homoplasmic”—100% of their mitochondrial DNA carried the mutation. But blood tests showed that in the women’s four babies (including the twins), 5% or less of the mitochondrial DNA had the mutation, suggesting they won’t develop disease.

A mixed result

The researchers see this as a positive result. “Children who would otherwise have inherited very high levels are now inheriting levels that are reduced by 77% to 100%,” coauthor Mary Herbert, a professor of reproductive biology at Newcastle University and Monash University, told me during a press briefing.

But three of the eight babies had health symptoms. At seven months, one was diagnosed with a rare form of epilepsy, which seemed to resolve within the following three months. Another baby developed a urinary tract infection.

A third baby developed “prolonged” jaundice, high levels of fat in the blood, and a disturbed heart rhythm that required treatment. The baby seemed to have recovered by 18 months, and doctors believe that the symptoms were not related to the mitochondrial mutations, but the team members admit that they can’t be sure. Given the small sample size, it’s hard to make comparisons with babies conceived in other ways.

And they acknowledge that a phenomenon called “reversal” is happening in some of the babies. In theory, the children shouldn’t inherit any “bad” mitochondrial DNA from their mothers. But three of them did. The levels of “bad” mitochondrial DNA in the babies’ blood ranged between 5% and 16%. And they were higher in the babies’ urine—the highest figure being 20%.

The researchers don’t know why this is happening. When an embryologist pulls out the nucleus of a fertilized egg, a bit of mitochondria-containing cytoplasm will inevitably be dragged along with it. But the team didn’t see any link between the amount of carried-over cytoplasm and the level of “bad” mitochondria. “We continue to investigate this issue,” Herbert said.

“As long as they don’t understand what’s happening, I would still be worried,” says Mertes.

Such low levels aren’t likely to cause mitochondrial diseases, according to experts contacted by MIT Technology Review. But some are concerned that the percentage of mutated DNA could be higher in different tissues, such as the brain or muscle, or that the levels might change with age. “You never know which tissues [reversal] will show up in,” says Mazur, who has seen the phenomenon in babies born through mitochondrial donation to parents who didn’t have mitochondrial mutations. “It’s chaotic.”

The Newcastle team says it hasn’t looked at other tissues, because it designed the study to be noninvasive.

There has been at least one case in which similar levels of “bad” mitochondria have caused symptoms, says Joanna Poulton, a mitochondrial geneticist at the University of Oxford. She thinks it’s unlikely that the children in the trial will develop any symptoms but adds that “it’s a bit of a worry.”

The age of reversal

No one knows exactly when this reversal happens. But Wells and his colleagues have some idea. In their study in Greece, they looked at the mitochondrial DNA of embryos and checked them again during pregnancy and after birth. The trial was designed to study the impact of mitochondrial donation for infertility—none of the parents involved had genes for mitochondrial disease.

The team has seen mitochondrial reversal in two of the seven babies born in the trial, says Wells. If you put the two sets of results together, mitochondrial donation “seems to have this possibility of reversal occurring in maybe about a third of children,” he says.

In his study, the reversal seemed to occur early on in the embryos’ development, Wells says. Five-day-old embryos “look perfect,” but mitochondrial mutations start showing up in tests taken at around 15 weeks of pregnancy, he says. After that point, the levels appear to be relatively stable. The Newcastle researchers say they will monitor the children until they are five years old.

People enrolling in future trials might opt for amniocentesis, which involves sampling blood from the fetus’s amniotic sac at around 15 to 18 weeks, suggests Mertes. That test might reveal the likely level of mitochondrial mutations in the resulting child. “Then the parents could decide what to do,” says Mertes. “If you could see there was a 90% mutation load [for a] very serious mitochondrial disease, they would still have an option to cancel the pregnancy,” she says.

Wells thinks the Newcastle team’s results are “generally reassuring.” He doesn’t think the trials should be paused. But he wants people to understand that mitochondrial donation is not without risk. “This can only be viewed as a risk reduction strategy, and not a guarantee of having an unaffected child,” he says.

And, as Mertes points out, there’s another option for women who carry mitochondrial DNA mutations: egg donation. Donor eggs fertilized with a partner’s sperm and transferred to a woman’s uterus won’t have her disease-causing mitochondria.

That option won’t appeal to people who feel strongly about having a genetic link to their children. But Poulton asks: “If you know whose uterus you came out of, does it matter that the [egg] came from somewhere else?”

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With AWS, it deployed In-Row Heat Exchangers (IRHX), a custom-built liquid cooling system designed specifically for servers using Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs, it’s most powerful but also its hottest running processors used for AI training and inference. The IRHX unit has three components: a water‑distribution cabinet, an integrated pumping unit, and in‑row fan‑coil modules. It uses direct to chip liquid cooling just like the equinox servers, where cold‑plates attached to the chip draw heat from the chips and is cooled by the liquid. The warmed coolant then flows through the coils of heat exchangers, where high‑speed fans Blow on the pipes to cool them, like a car radiator. This type of cooling is nothing new, and there are a few direct to chip liquid cooling solutions on the market from Vertiv, CoolIT, Motivair, and Delta Electronics all sell liquid cooling options. But AWS separates the pumping unit from the fan-coil modules, letting a single pumping system to support large number of fan units. These modular fans can be added or removed as cooling requirements evolve, giving AWS the flexibility to adjust the system per row and site. This led to some concern that Amazon would disrupt the market for liquid cooling, but as a Dell’Oro Group analyst put it, Amazon develops custom technologies for itself and does not go into competition or business with other data center infrastructure companies.

Intel CEO: We are not in the top 10 semiconductor companies

The Q&A session came on the heels of layoffs across the company. Tan was hired in March, and almost immediately he began to promise to divest and reduce non-core assets. Gelsinger had also begun divesting the company of losers, but they were nibbles around the edge. Tan is promising to take an axe to the place. In addition to discontinuing products, the company has outsourced marketing and media relations — for the first time in more than 25 years of covering this company, I have no internal contacts at Intel. Many more workers are going to lose their jobs in coming weeks. So far about 500 have been cut in Oregon and California but many more is expected — as much as 20% of the overall company staff may go, and Intel has over 100,000 employees, according to published reports. Tan believes the company is bloated and too bogged down with layers of management to be reactive and responsive in the same way that AMD and Nvidia are. “The whole process of that (deciding) is so slow and eventually nobody makes a decision,” he is quoted as saying. Something he has decided on is AI, and he seems to have decided to give up. “On training, I think it is too late for us,” Tan said, adding that Nvidia’s position in that market is simply “too strong.” So there goes what sales Gaudi3 could muster. Instead, Tan said Intel will focus on “edge” artificial intelligence, where AI capabilities Are brought to PCs and other remote devices rather than big AI processors in data centers like Nvidia and AMD are doing. “That’s an area that I think is emerging, coming up very big and we want to make sure that we capture,” Tan said.

AMD: Latest news and insights

Survey: AMD continues to take server share from Intel May 20, 2025: AMD continues to take market share from Intel, growing at a faster rate and closing the gap between the two companies to the narrowest it has ever been. AMD, Nvidia partner with Saudi startup to build multi-billion dollar AI service centers May 15, 2025: As part of the avalanche of business deals that came from President Trump’s Middle East tour, both AMD and Nvidia have struck multi-billion dollar deals with an emerging Saudi AI firm. AMD targets hosting providers with affordable EPYC 4005 processors May 14, 2025: AMD launched its latest set of data center processors, targeting hosted IT service providers. The EPYC 4005 series is purpose-built with enterprise-class features and support for modern infrastructure technologies at an affordable price, the company said. Jio teams with AMD, Cisco and Nokia to build AI-enabled telecom platform March 18, 2025: Jio has teamed up with AMD, Cisco and Nokia to build an AI-enabled platform for telecom networks. The goal is to make networks smarter, more secure and more efficient to help service providers cut costs and develop new services. AMD patches microcode security holes after accidental early disclosure February 3, 2025: AMD issued two patches for severe microcode security flaws, defects that AMD said “could lead to the loss of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) protection.” The bugs were inadvertently revealed by a partner.

Nvidia hits $4T market cap as AI, high-performance semiconductors hit stride

“The company added $1 trillion in market value in less than a year, a pace that surpasses Apple and Microsoft’s previous trajectories. This rapid ascent reflects how indispensable AI chipmakers have become in today’s digital economy,” Kiran Raj, practice head, Strategic Intelligence (Disruptor) at GlobalData, said in a statement. According to GlobalData’s Innovation Radar report, “AI Chips – Trends, Market Dynamics and Innovations,” the global AI chip market is projected to reach $154 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20%. Nvidia has much of that market, but it also has a giant bullseye on its back with many competitors gunning for its crown. “With its AI chips powering everything from data centers and cloud computing to autonomous vehicles and robotics, Nvidia is uniquely positioned. However, competitive pressure is mounting. Players like AMD, Intel, Google, and Huawei are doubling down on custom silicon, while regulatory headwinds and export restrictions are reshaping the competitive dynamics,” he said.

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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