Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More As the use of agentic AI continues to grow, so too does the need for safety and security. Today, Nvidia announced a series of updates to its NeMo Guardrails technology designed specifically to address the needs of agentic AI. The basic idea behind guardrails is to provide some form of policy and control for large language models (LLMs) to help prevent unauthorized and unintended outputs. The guardrails concept has been broadly embraced in recent years by multiple vendors, including AWS. The new NeMo Guardrails updates from Nvidia are designed to make it easier for organizations to deploy and provide more granular types of controls. NeMo Guardrails are now available as a NIM (Nvidia Inference Microservices), which are optimized for Nvidia’s GPUs. Additionally, there are three new specific NIM services that enterprises can deploy for content safety, topic control and jailbreak detection. The guardrails have been optimized for agentic AI deployments, rather than just singular LLMs. “It’s not just about guard-railing a model anymore,” Kari Briski, VP for enterprise AI models, software and services at Nvidia, said in a press briefing. “It’s about guard railing and a total system.” What the new NeMo Guardrails bring to enterprise Agentic AI Agentic AI use is expected to be a dominant trend in 2025.  While agentic AI has plenty of benefits, it also brings new challenges, particularly around security, data privacy and governance requirements, which can create significant barriers to deployment. The three new NeMo Guardrails NIMs are intended to help solve some of those challenges. They include: Content Safety NIM: Trained on Nvidia’s Aegis content safety dataset with 35,000 human-annotated samples, this service blocks harmful, toxic and unethical content. Topic Control NIM: Helps ensure

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What to expect from Neuralink in 2025 In November, a young man named Noland Arbaugh announced he’d be livestreaming from his home for three days straight. His broadcast was in some ways typical fare: a backyard tour, video games, meet mom. The difference is that Arbaugh, who is paralyzed, has thin electrode-studded wires installed in his brain, which he used to move a computer mouse on a screen, click menus, and play chess. The implant, called N1, was installed last year by neurosurgeons working with Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-interface company.
Arbaugh’s livestream is an indicator that Neuralink is a whole lot closer to creating a plug-and-play experience that can restore people’s daily ability to roam the web and play games, giving them what the company has called “digital freedom.” But this is not yet a commercial product. The current studies are small-scale—they are true experiments, explorations of how the device works and how it can be improved. Read on for  our analysis of what to expect from the company in 2025.
—Antonio Regalado Meta’s new AI model can translate speech from more than 100 languages What’s new: Meta has released a new AI model that can translate speech from 101 different languages. It represents a step toward real-time, simultaneous interpretation, where words are translated as soon as they come out of someone’s mouth.  Why it matters: Typically, translation models for speech use a multistep approach which can be inefficient, and at each step, errors and mistranslations can creep in. But Meta’s new model, called SeamlessM4T, enables more direct translation from speech in one language to speech in another. Read the full story. —Scott J Mulligan Interest in nuclear power is surging. Is it enough to build new reactors?

Lately, the vibes have been good for nuclear power. Public support is building, and public and private funding have made the technology more economical in key markets. There’s also a swell of interest from major companies looking to power their data centers.  These shifts have been great for existing nuclear plants. We’re seeing efforts to boost their power output, extend the lifetime of old reactors, and even reopen facilities that have shut down. That’s good news for climate action, because nuclear power plants produce consistent electricity with very low greenhouse-gas emissions.I covered all these trends in my latest story, which digs into what’s next for nuclear power in 2025 and beyond. But as I spoke with experts, one central question kept coming up for me: Will all of this be enough to actually get new reactors built? —Casey Crownhart This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate and energy newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Donald Trump is exploring how to save TikTokAn executive order could suspend its ban or sale by up to 90 days. (WP $)+ But questions remain over the legality of such a move. (Axios)+ YouTuber MrBeast has said he’s interested in buying the app. (Insider $)+ The depressing truth about TikTok’s impending ban. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has made it into spaceBut it lost a booster along the way. (The Verge) 3 Angelenos are naming and shaming landlords for illegal price gougingA grassroots Google Sheet is tracking rentals with significant price increases among the wild fires. (Fast Company $)
4 How the Trump administration will shake up defense tech It’s likely to favor newer players over established firms for lucrative contracts. (FT $)+ Weapons startup Anduril plans to build a $1 billion factory in Ohio. (Axios)+ Palmer Luckey on the Pentagon’s future of mixed reality. (MIT Technology Review) 5 The difference between mistakes made by humans and AIMachines’ errors are a whole lot weirder, for a start. (IEEE Spectrum)+ A new public database lists all the ways AI could go wrong. (MIT Technology Review) 6 The creator economy is bouncing backFunding for creator startups is rising, after two years in the doldrums. (The Information $) 7 Predicting the future of tech is notoriously toughBut asking better initial questions is a good place to start. (WSJ $) 8 IVF isn’t just for combating fertility problems any moreIt’s becoming a tool for genetic screening before a baby is even born. (The Atlantic $)+ Three-parent baby technique could create babies at risk of severe disease. (MIT Technology Review) 9 The killer caterpillars could pave the way to better medicine 🐛Studying their toxic secretions could help create new drugs more quickly. (Knowable Magazine)
10 How to document your life digitallyIf physical diaries aren’t for you, there are plenty of smartphone-based options. (NYT $) Quote of the day “Americans may only be able to watch as their app rots.”
—Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a technologist at the nonprofit Internet Society, tells Reuters how TikTok’s complicated network of service providers means that the app could fall apart gradually, rather than all at once, if the proposed US ban goes ahead. The big story How refrigeration ruined fresh food October 2024 Three-quarters of everything in the average American diet passes through the cold chain—the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk, and more chilled on the journey from farm to fork. As consumers, we put a lot of faith in terms like “fresh” and “natural,” but artificial refrigeration has created a blind spot. We’ve gotten so good at preserving (and storing) food, that we know more about how to lengthen an apple’s life span than a human’s, and most of us don’t give that extraordinary process much thought at all. But all that convenience has come at the expense of diversity and deliciousness. Read the full story. —Allison Arieff We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + The biggest and best tours of 2025 look really exciting (especially Oasis!)+ If you love classic mobile phones, you need to check out Aalto University’s newly launched Nokia Design Archive immediately.+ The one and only Ridley Scott explains how a cigarette inspired that iconic hand-in-wheat shot in Gladiator.+ Set aside your reading goals for the year—your only aim should be to read the books you really want to.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Lately, the vibes have been good for nuclear power. Public support is building, and public and private funding have made the technology more economical in key markets. There’s also a swell of interest from major companies looking to power their data centers.  These shifts have been great for existing nuclear plants. We’re seeing efforts to boost their power output, extend the lifetime of old reactors, and even reopen facilities that have shut down. That’s good news for climate action, because nuclear power plants produce consistent electricity with very low greenhouse-gas emissions. I covered all these trends in my latest story, which digs into what’s next for nuclear power in 2025 and beyond. But as I spoke with experts, one central question kept coming up for me: Will all of this be enough to actually get new reactors built?
To zoom in on some of these trends, let’s take a look at the US, which has the largest fleet of nuclear reactors in the world (and the oldest, with an average age of over 42 years). In recent years we’ve seen a steady improvement in public support for nuclear power in the US. Today, around 56% of Americans support more nuclear power, up from 43% in 2020, according to a Pew Research poll.
The economic landscape has also shifted in favor of the technology. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 includes tax credits specifically for operating nuclear plants, aimed at keeping them online. Qualifying plants can receive up to $15 per megawatt-hour, provided they meet certain labor requirements. (For context, in 2021, its last full year of operation, Palisades in Michigan generated over 7 million megawatt-hours.)  Big Tech has also provided an economic boost for the industry—tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon are all making deals to get in on nuclear. These developments have made existing (or recently closed) nuclear power plants a hot commodity. Plants that might have been candidates for decommissioning just a few years ago are now candidates for license extension. Plants that have already shut down are seeing a potential second chance at life. There’s also the potential to milk more power out of existing facilities through changes called uprates, which basically allow existing facilities to produce more energy by tweaking existing instruments and power generation systems. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved uprates totaling six gigawatts over the past two decades. That’s a small but certainly significant fraction of the roughly 97 gigawatts of nuclear on the grid today.  Any reactors kept online, reopened, or ramped up spell good news for emissions. But expanding the nuclear fleet in the US will require not just making the most of existing assets, but building new reactors.  We’ll probably also need new reactors just to maintain the current fleet, since so many reactors are scheduled to be retired in the next couple of decades. Will the enthusiasm for keeping old plants running also translate into building new ones?  In much of the world (China being a notable exception), building new nuclear capacity has historically been expensive and slow. It’s easy to point at Plant Vogtle in the US: The third and fourth reactors at that facility began construction in 2009. They were originally scheduled to start up in 2016 and 2017, at a cost of around $14 billion. They actually came online in 2023 and 2024, and the total cost of the project was north of $30 billion. Some advanced technology has promised to fix the problems in nuclear power. Small modular reactors could help cut cost and construction times, and next-generation reactors promise safety and efficiency improvements that could translate to cheaper, quicker construction. Realistically, though, getting these first-of-their-kind projects off the ground will still require a lot of money and a sustained commitment to making them happen. “The next four years are make or break for advanced nuclear,” says Jessica Lovering, cofounder at the Good Energy Collective, a policy research organization that advocates for the use of nuclear energy.  

There are a few factors that could help the progress we’ve seen recently in nuclear extend to new builds. For one, public support from the US Department of Energy includes not only tax credits but public loans and grants for demonstration projects, which can be a key stepping stone to commercial plants that generate electricity for the grid.  Changes to the regulatory process could also help. The Advance Act, passed in 2024, aims at sprucing up the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the hopes of making the approval process more efficient (currently, it can take up to five years to complete).  “If you can see the NRC really start to modernize toward a more efficient, effective, and predictable regulator, it really helps the case for a lot of these commercial projects, because the NRC will no longer be seen as this barrier to innovation,” says Patrick White, research director at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit think tank. We should start to see changes from that legislation this year, though what happens could depend on the Trump administration. The next few years are crucial for next-generation nuclear technology, and how the industry fares between now and the end of the decade could be very telling when it comes to how big a role this technology plays in our longer-term efforts to decarbonize energy.  Related reading For more on what’s next for nuclear power, check out my latest story. One key trend I’m following is efforts to reopen shuttered nuclear plants. Here’s how to do it.   Kairos Power is working to build molten-salt-cooled reactors, and we named the company to our list of 10 Climate Tech Companies to watch in 2024.   Another thing  Devastating wildfires have been ravaging Southern California. Here’s a roundup of some key stories about the blazes. 
→ Strong winds have continued this week, bringing with them the threat of new fires. Here’s a page with live updates on the latest. (Washington Post) → Officials are scouring the spot where the deadly Palisades fire started to better understand how it was sparked. (New York Times)
→ Climate change didn’t directly start the fires, but global warming did contribute to how intensely they burned and how quickly they spread. (Axios)  →The LA fires show that controlled burns aren’t a cure-all when it comes to preventing wildfires. (Heatmap News) → Seawater is a last resort when it comes to fighting fires, since it’s corrosive and can harm the environment when dumped on a blaze. (Wall Street Journal) Keeping up with climate   US emissions cuts stalled last year, despite strong growth in renewables. The cause: After staying flat or falling for two decades, electricity demand is rising. (New York Times) With Donald Trump set to take office in the US next week, many are looking to state governments as a potential seat of climate action. Here’s what to look for in states including Texas, California, and Massachusetts. (Inside Climate News) The US could see as many as 80 new gas-fired power plants built by 2030. The surge comes as demand for power from data centers, including those powering AI, is ballooning. (Financial Times)
Global sales of EVs and plug-in hybrids were up 25% in 2024 from the year before. China, the world’s largest EV market, is a major engine behind the growth. (Reuters) A massive plant to produce low-emissions steel could be in trouble. Steelmaker SSAB has pulled out of talks on federal funding for a plant in Mississippi. (Canary Media) Some solar panel companies have turned to door-to-door sales. Things aren’t always so sunny for those involved. (Wired)

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Botika, a started focused on AI-generated fashion models, has raised $8 million and launched its new mobile iOS app. While human fashion models are not going to like this, Botika said that it empowers online clothing companies of all sizes with its AI-generated models that can make their clothing look good. The app, alongside the latest advancements to Botika’s generative AI platform, helps fashion brands create high-quality, on-model images for e-commerce. In addition to this announcement, Botika has successfully closed an $8 million seed funding round, co-led by Stardom, and Secret Chord Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp. Botika makes fashion model images available to all clothiers. This funding will drive continued product innovation and support the company’s expansion in the fashion industry, where it has achieved remarkable growth – multiplying its revenue by nine times and its customer base by eleven times in the past year. With this significant infusion of capital and the launch of the mobile app, Botika aims to provide an accessible, cost-effective solution to enable online clothing brands to enhance their visual content, improve sales, and reduce production costs.  Botika’s unique AI technology is designed to aid brands in seamlessly transforming basic product images into professional, studio-quality shots, complete with AI generated models and backgrounds that reflect each brand’s aesthetic, with the company also training its own custom foundation models. More than half of shoppers rely on brand or retailer-provided imagery when deciding whether or not to purchase a piece of clothing. Yet, the production cost of a photography shoot for ecommerce can range anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per shoot, the company said.  Botika’s AI generated fashion model addresses this critical pain point for fashion brands and breaks

In November, a young man named Noland Arbaugh announced he’d be livestreaming from his home for three days straight. His broadcast was in some ways typical fare: a backyard tour, video games, meet mom. The difference is that Arbaugh, who is paralyzed, has thin electrode-studded wires installed in his brain, which he used to move a computer mouse on a screen, click menus, and play chess. The implant, called N1, was installed last year by neurosurgeons working with Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-interface company. The possibility of listening to neurons and using their signals to move a computer cursor was first demonstrated more than 20 years ago in a lab setting. Now, Arbaugh’s livestream is an indicator that Neuralink is a whole lot closer to creating a plug-and-play experience that can restore people’s daily ability to roam the web and play games, giving them what the company has called “digital freedom.” But this is not yet a commercial product. The current studies are small-scale—they are true experiments, explorations of how the device works and how it can be improved. For instance, at some point last year, more than half the electrode-studded “threads” inserted into Aurbaugh’s brain retracted, and his control over the device worsened; Neuralink rushed to implement fixes so he could use his remaining electrodes to move the mouse.
Neuralink did not reply to emails seeking comment, but here is what our analysis of its public statements leads us to expect from the company in 2025. More patients How many people will get these implants? Elon Musk keeps predicting huge numbers. In August, he posted on X: “If all goes well, there will be hundreds of people with Neuralinks within a few years, maybe tens of thousands within five years, millions within 10 years.”
In reality, the actual pace is slower—a lot slower. That’s because in a study of a novel device, it’s typical for the first patients to be staged months apart, to allow time to monitor for problems.  Neuralink has publicly announced that two people have received an implant: Arbaugh and a man referred to only as “Alex,” who received his in July or August.  Then, on January 8, Musk disclosed during an online interview that there was now a third person with an implant. “We’ve got now three patients, three humans with Neuralinks implanted, and they are all working …well,” Musk said. During 2025, he added, “we expect to hopefully do, I don’t know, 20 or 30 patients.”   Barring major setbacks, expect the pace of implants to increase—although perhaps not as fast as Musk says. In November, Neuralink updated its US trial listing to include space for five volunteers (up from three), and it also opened a trial in Canada with room for six. Considering these two studies only, Neuralink would carry out at least two more implants by the end of 2025 and eight by the end of 2026. However, by opening further international studies, Neuralink could increase the pace of the experiments. Better control So how good is Arbaugh’s control over the mouse? You can get an idea by trying a game called Webgrid, where you try to click quickly on a moving target. The program translates your speed into a measure of information transfer: bits per second.  Neuralink claims Arbaugh reached a rate of over nine bits per second, doubling the old brain-interface record. The median able-bodied user scores around 10 bits per second, according to Neuralink. And yet during his livestream, Arbaugh complained that his mouse control wasn’t very good because his “model” was out of date. It was a reference to how his imagined physical movements get mapped to mouse movements. That mapping degrades over hours and days, and to recalibrate it, he has said, he spends as long as 45 minutes doing a set of retraining tasks on his monitor, such as imagining moving a dot from a center point to the edge of a circle. Noland Arbaugh stops to calibrate during a livestream on X@MODDEDQUAD VIA X Improving the software that sits between Arbaugh’s brain and the mouse is a big area of focus for Neuralink—one where the company is still experimenting and making significant changes. Among the goals: cutting the recalibration time to a few minutes. “We want them to feel like they are in the F1 [Formula One] car, not the minivan,” Bliss Chapman, who leads the BCI software team, told the podcaster Lex Fridman last year. Device changes Before Neuralink ever seeks approval to sell its brain interface, it will have to lock in a final device design that can be tested in a “pivotal trial” involving perhaps 20 to 40 patients, to show it really works as intended. That type of study could itself take a year or two to carry out and hasn’t yet been announced.

In fact, Neuralink is still tweaking its implant in significant ways—for instance, by trying to increase the number of electrodes or extend the battery life. This month, Musk said the next human tests would be using an “upgraded Neuralink device.” The company is also still developing the surgical robot, called R1, that’s used to implant the device. It functions like a sewing machine: A surgeon uses R1 to thread the electrode wires into people’s brains. According to Neuralink’s job listings, improving the R1 robot and making the implant process entirely automatic is a major goal of the company. That’s partly to meet Musk’s predictions of a future where millions of people have an implant, since there wouldn’t be enough neurosurgeons in the world to put them all in manually.  “We want to get to the point where it’s one click,” Neuralink president Dongjin Seo told Fridman last year. Robot arm Late last year, Neuralink opened a companion study through which it says some of its existing implant volunteers will get to try using their brain activity to control not only a computer mouse but other types of external devices, including an “assistive robotic arm.” We haven’t yet seen what Neuralink’s robotic arm looks like—whether it’s a tabletop research device or something that could be attached to a wheelchair and used at home to complete daily tasks. But it’s clear such a device could be helpful. During Aurbaugh’s livestream he frequently asked other people to do simple things for him, like brush his hair or put on his hat. Arbaugh demonstrates the use of Imagined Movement Control.@MODDEDQUAD VIA X And using brains to control robots is definitely possible—although so far only in a controlled research setting. In tests using a different brain implant, carried out at the University of Pittsburgh in 2012, a paralyzed woman named Jan Scheuermann was able to use a robot arm to stack blocks and plastic cups about as well as a person who’d had a severe stroke—impressive, since she couldn’t actually move her own limbs. There are several practical obstacles to using a robot arm at home. One is developing a robot that’s safe and useful. Another, as noted by Wired, is that the calibration steps to maintain control over an arm that can make 3D movements and grasp objects could be onerous and time consuming.
Vision implant In September, Neuralink said it had received “breakthrough device designation” from the FDA for a version of its implant that could be used to restore limited vision to blind people. The system, which it calls Blindsight, would work by sending electrical impulses directly into a volunteer’s visual cortex, producing spots of light called phosphenes. If there are enough spots, they can be organized into a simple, pixelated form of vision, as previously demonstrated by academic researchers. The FDA designation is not the same as permission to start the vision study. Instead, it’s a promise by the agency to speed up review steps, including agreements around what a trial should look like. Right now, it’s impossible to guess when a Neuralink vision trial could start, but it won’t necessarily be this year. 
More money Neuralink last raised money in 2003, collecting around $325 million from investors in a funding round that valued the company at over $3 billion, according to Pitchbook. Ryan Tanaka, who publishes a podcast about the company, Neura Pod, says he thinks Neuralink will raise more money this year and that the valuation of the private company could triple. Fighting regulators Neuralink has attracted plenty of scrutiny from news reporters, animal-rights campaigners, and even fraud investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of the questions surround its treatment of test animals and whether it rushed to try the implant in people. More recently, Musk has started using his X platform to badger and bully heads of state and was named by Donald Trump to co-lead a so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk says will “get rid of nonsensical regulations” and potentially gut some DC agencies.  During 2025, watch for whether Musk uses his digital bullhorn to give health regulators pointed feedback on how they’re handling Neuralink. Other efforts Don’t forget that Neuralink isn’t the only company working on brain implants. A company called Synchron has one that’s inserted into the brain through a blood vessel, which it’s also testing in human trials of brain control over computers. Other companies, including Paradromics, Precision Neuroscience, and BlackRock Neurotech, are also developing advanced brain-computer interfaces. Special thanks to Ryan Tanaka of Neura Pod for pointing us to Neuralink’s public announcements and projections.

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Financial services firms are fighting off increasingly sophisticated identity-based attacks intent on stealing billions and disrupting transactions, ultimately destroying trust that took years to build. Cybercriminals continue to sharpen their tradecraft, targeting the industry’s gaps in identity security. From attempting to weaponize LLMs to using the latest adversarial AI techniques to steal identities and commit synthetic fraud, cybercriminals, crime syndicates and nation-state actors are all taking aim at financial services. Here’s how Rate Companies (formerly Guaranteed Rate) is battling back against these increasingly complex identity-based attacks — and what other industries and enterprise leaders can learn from their strategy. How Rate Companies is defending against AI-driven threats Financial institutions face more than $3.1 billion in exposure from synthetic identity fraud, which grew 14.2% in the past year, while deepfakes jumped by 3,000% and are projected to rise another 50 to 60% in 2024. Not to mention that smishing texts, MFA fatigue and deepfake impersonations have become alarmingly common. As the second-largest retail mortgage lender in the U.S., Rate has billions of sensitive transactions flowing through its systems daily, making the company a prime target for cybercriminals. VentureBeat recently sat down (virtually) with Katherine Mowen, the financial institution’s SVP of information security, to get insights into how she is orchestrating AI across Rate’s infrastructure, with a strong focus on protecting customer, employee and partner identities. “Because of the nature of our business, we face some of the most advanced and persistent cyber threats out there,” Mowen told VentureBeat. “We saw others in the mortgage industry getting breached, so we needed to ensure it didn’t happen to us. I think that what we’re doing right now is fighting AI with AI.” Mowen explained