In partnership withNiCE As agentic AI moves from experimentation toward enterprise deployment, the challenge is figuring out how agents can work together, connect to the systems and data they need, and operate safely across the workflows that run a business. Although agentic AI has been adopted by some 80% of Fortune 500 companies, progress toward meaningful scale remains uneven, with many organizations still working through isolated pilots. For Arun Chandra, chief operating officer at NiCE, the first step is moving beyond experimentation for its own sake. “Everybody’s trying to figure out what can we do with this technology?” he says. But scaling requires a clearer connection to business strategy: Organizations need to define whether they are trying to increase revenue, reduce costs, or pursue another strategic or financial objective. From there, they need to rethink the workflows where agents will operate instead of just layering AI onto existing processes. “The last thing you want to do is to apply AI on an outdated or an inefficient workflow,” Chandra says. That shift requires organizations to treat agentic AI as a cohesive system. Agents need access to the data, knowledge, and context required to make effective decisions, as well as connections to back-end systems if they are expected to take action. Fragmented information can undermine those capabilities: “The efficacy of these AI agents is purely a function of the context, the knowledge, and the data they can ingest and use,” Chandra says. The organizational implications are equally noteworthy. Scaling agents can create a new form of fragmentation if teams build isolated systems that don’t connect with one another, while governance, privacy, security, and change management become more important as agents take on more consequential work. Chandra argues that AI agents should ultimately be held to the same standards as human workers, with organizations thinking of their workforce as a combination of humans and AI agents.
Looking ahead, that connected approach could enable agents to work proactively and even communicate with other agents to resolve customer needs. For organizations making the transition from pilots to scale, the priority is not to “boil the ocean,” Chandra says, but to instead build a connected strategy around high-value use cases, workflows, workforce changes, and measurable outcomes. This webcast is produced in partnership with NiCE. This content was produced by Insights, MIT Technology Review’s custom content arm, not its editorial staff. It was researched and written by humans, with any AI tools that may have been used limited to production processes under human oversight.

Defenders wanting to use advanced AI have faced a difficult dilemma: adopt enormous frontier models that could be expensive to deploy and difficult to control across enterprise codebases, or turn to smaller open-weight models that might struggle with complex vulnerability remediation and require teams to build their own tooling and infrastructure from scratch. Until now.Today, we’re launching our Fairwind Program to bring the best of Google’s AI and cyber defense capabilities to a trusted group of Google Cloud customers, government agencies, and cybersecurity partners, to help them proactively solve cyber risks at scale. As a first step, the Fairwind Program will give defenders access to powerful and advanced Gemini models to help them autonomously find and fix vulnerabilities, protecting critical infrastructure, public services, and national security.

Building on the momentum of 3.7 Flash from three weeks ago and marking our third Flash release in only six weeks, today we’re introducing Gemini 3.8, our best reasoning & coding model yet, at the same speed and low cost of 3.7. Gemini 3.8 introduces 2 variants:Gemini 3.8 Flash: our most intelligent workhorse model, delivering significant improvements from 3.7 Flash across software engineering, agentic tasks, and critical, multi-step reasoning in specialized domains. It is available at the same introductory price

as 3.7 Flash at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens.Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber: our most capable cybersecurity model with frontier-level performance in vulnerability detection and automated patching, available to trusted defenders through our new Fairwind Program.While tailored for different deployment environments, both of today’s releases are powered by the same foundational intelligence, and further accelerated by long-running agentic loops designed to recursively evaluate and refine the underlying models. The significant coding and reasoning gains across this shared core were driven by a number of innovations, including rigorous training in the highly demanding domain of cybersecurity.Gemini 3.8 Flash: built for long-horizon coding and autonomous agentsGemini 3.8 Flash delivers substantial gains from 3.7 Flash, often approaching the performance of higher-cost frontier models.

In partnership withSAP As companies scale, the technology supporting operations can become a liability just as quickly as it becomes an asset. Disconnected systems, site-specific tools, spreadsheets, and manual workarounds can create data silos that make it harder to spot problems early, coordinate responses, and make decisions with confidence. For Jabil, a global manufacturing company with more than 100 sites across more than 30 countries, the answer has been to make integration and simplification a priority. The company adopted a “simplify-first, then-innovate mindset,” says Harish Manohar, SAP IT director at Jabil, recognizing that adding new technologies without first reducing complexity risks creating more risk. The goal is to standardize processes, consolidate where possible, and establish a more consistent data backbone across the organization. “Any innovation without simplification is going to add more complexity,” Manohar says. That philosophy also changes how Jabil approaches modernization. “Any modernization or transformation should add measurable business value,” Manohar says. The company is focused on connecting processes end-to-end across its supply chain and creating a foundation that can scale consistently across regions. Integration comes first because, as Manohar puts it, “the backbone of any contemporary or modern organization is data.” Before organizations can optimize, automate, or apply AI, data needs to flow seamlessly across systems. But doing that across a global organization is hardly straightforward. Jabil’s more than 100 sites operate with different levels of process maturity, legacy systems, and localized workflows, while regulated businesses bring additional compliance requirements. As such, standardizing across different regions and business environments means changing processes and governance without disrupting the operations already in place.
The value of that work extends beyond the technology to the people using it. Integrated workflows can offer employees shared visibility into data, reduce manual data reconciliation, and help them move from chasing information to acting on insights. For Jabil, the aim is also to improve real-time visibility into supply chain events, which can enable faster responses to disruptions and reduce operational risk. Looking to the future, that foundation could make AI and automation all the more useful and scalable. With trusted data and integrated systems in place, Jabil is exploring predictive supply chain insights, intelligent exception handling, and AI-driven planning and forecasting. To Manohar, the takeaway is clear: “Simplicity at scale is a very competitive advantage,” and technology investments must ultimately connect to business value and operational resilience.
This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with SAP. Full Transcript: Megan Tatum: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Megan Tatum, and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.Our topic today is enterprise technology integration, and how the benefits of consolidating tools and systems across the supply chain help organizations operate more reliably at scale. When companies reduce tool sprawl and connect their systems more effectively, they gain earlier visibility, faster response, and greater resilience across production lines.My guest today is Harish Manohar, SAP IT Director at Jabil. Jabil has been on a journey to simplify its technology landscape by using SAP Integration Suite as the foundation to connect systems, retire fragmented tools, and enable more consistent operations globally.This podcast is produced in partnership with SAP.Welcome, Harish. Harish Manohar: Hello, Megan. Good morning. Megan: Thank you so much for being here, Harish. Just to start, if we could set some context, can you give us a quick overview of Jabil, the business and its overall transformation journey? Harish: All right. So, about Jabil. Jabil is a global manufacturing company headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. We have about 60 years of experience offering comprehensive engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing solutions across different industries. We have a global footprint of about over 100 different sites across 30-plus countries, 140,000-plus employees. We are a trusted partner for more than 400 of the world’s top brands. That’s a little bit about Jabil. Megan: Fantastic. And a lot of scale there, as you’re referring to some of the stats there. As things have got more complex, where did disconnected tools and systems start to slow you down, and what ultimately drove you to make integration a really strategic priority?

Harish: I talked about our global footprint across 100-plus sites. With a global footprint always comes complexity about site-specific tools. All of our sites have been in business for a long time, and over the period of years, they had their own tools for their own processes. It’s a little bit disconnected. When we are looking to scale, the first thing we wanted to start looking at is what is this mix of site-specific tools, manual workarounds, spreadsheet-based processes, legacy applications, whatnot? That’s a big technical debt that we have had over the last 25 years. That’s where we started, and that is what led Jabil to make integration a strategic priority because we had limited ability to see issues early across plants, across regions, which would help us to coordinate responses consistently, and also to be able to scale those responses consistently. This complexity created data silos, and in a way delayed robust decision-making. As the complexity increased globally, integration became extremely critical to a few things. It was critical to establishing a single trusted data backbone, which would directly enable faster coordinated responses across the network. We at Jabil, as part of our transformation journey, believe that having the right data at the right time fundamentally changes how we respond to disruptions, which is all about a manufacturing business. How we respond to disruptions. This is where we started our strategic priority towards having a integrated system that drove data consistency across our landscape. Megan: Fantastic. As you have outlined there, there was obviously a real commercial need for this, but how did you think about bringing in those new technologies without adding even more complexity to the mix? Harish: Great question. Whenever we talk about transformation, we talk about all these bleeding-edge technologies that are out there today when it comes to AI and data, cloud, et cetera. But it was very important for us to put a stake in the ground and say and adopt a simplify-first, then-innovate mindset. Because any innovation without simplification is going to add more complexity, just like you mentioned. For us, SAP is our core digital platform. We want to focus on bringing more processes into SAP as much as possible. That is easier said than done because we have been in business for a while, global company, so not all processes exist within SAP at this point in time. We are slowly trying to standardize those processes, and having them under one single source of data would help us scale faster in terms of having data silos. We don’t want data silos across different systems. This is where we started to introduce newer capabilities around SAP. From a cloud standpoint, we have been using SAP’s BTP and Integration Suite, which is proving to be the center stage of all integrations across Jabil. Well, it’s not there yet, but that is the direction that we want to pursue is we don’t want to have a slew of different integration platforms, rather try and see where Integration Suite fits best and where other smaller integration platforms would add more value. Similarly, we have adopted an API-driven, event-based integration approach. That is our best practice that we have put down because we don’t want to keep moving data from one place to the other. That’s not good business practice in the IT world. Most of our integration architectures are API-driven and event-based. That is our focus.
Coming back to your new technologies perspective, we want to reuse as much as possible and standardize versus going out and buying these one-off tools that solve for point-in-case use cases. We really don’t want to go down that path. For major processes, we do adopt a best-of-breed approach, but for, let’s say, site-based use cases where a specific site has a particular need for a tool, we try and standardize that and reuse what exists in a different site, for example. There may be some need for a business process change, minor process changes, but that is our direction to make those process changes and reuse what is there already in a different location or a different region. So, that’s one. Lastly, we are heavily aligned with SAP’s clean-core approach when it comes to customization. That has been the challenge for us over the last 25 years where we have been using SAP is our systems are heavily customized because we cater to different customers across the globe. Most of our demands are customer-driven, so we have to put in play these heavy customizations.
But now we are taking a pause, and we are saying, “You know what? We have customized so much so far, but now we are moving our systems into RISE, which would enable a clean-core journey in the future.” Now we have to put really good governance criteria and review processes that do not allow heavy customization of our system. We want to move away from that model as much as possible. Again, it’s not easy to do that at this point in time, but there is always a start. Megan: I mean, it sounds like you took a very incremental, intentional approach to this. I mean, as you scaled globally then, what did modernization really look like at the company, and why start with integration? Harish: To that point, we have always looked at transformation, modernization, very objectively. For us, it’s just not about upgrading a system. That’s not what it is. Any modernization or transformation should add measurable business value is our model, is our charter. Having said that, we don’t look at modernization in terms of just upgrades, but in what it gets our business in terms of value. Most of our modernization transformation approaches are focused on connecting processes end-to-end across our supply chain, which is key for our business value. And then we also have a very concerted effort going on in the business community: how to standardize how our plants operate globally. Because, like I mentioned earlier, we have 100-plus plants, different processes, different legal regulations, different countries. It’s very hard for us to come up with one template across the globe, but we are trying to standardize as much as possible. And that’s where we are leveraging SAP’s Signavio, which is our business process management tool. We want to leverage Signavio’s capabilities in helping us standardize these global processes. Now, back to your question, why did integration come first? Because the backbone of any contemporary or modern organization is data. And to get the right data at the right time, integration is the key aspect of the whole optimization exercise. Data needed to flow seamlessly before we start optimizing or automating or even applying AI use cases. This is where integration came first. We wanted to create a single system of record across the operations. Well, when I say “single system of record,” it’s not just SAP, but the ability for us to create those data pipelines across those systems of record being supply chain, planning, inventory, et cetera, et cetera, in that operation space.
The result is we want to get to a foundation that helps us scale consistently across our different region. That is our main objective is to, how do we scale as the business grows, as we develop into this bigger organization across different industries? How do we set this foundation that will help us scale consistently? Simplicity, consolidation becomes strategic assets at scale. Megan: Absolutely. And you touched on some of the complexities there of doing this at a scale that Jabil is at with its international footprint. What were some of the biggest challenges in your view in terms of rolling this out across regions, and how did that more standardized approach that you’ve mentioned there help? Harish: Absolutely. I would like to reiterate some of those key challenges I mentioned. One hundred-plus sites, different sites have different maturity levels in terms of how they approach processes. They have a multitude of different legacy systems, localized processes, workarounds, spreadsheets, and the change management that exists within each site is very different. And we do have a footprint of highly regulated businesses. And when it comes to regulated businesses, that comes with its own set of challenges around qualification and CSD processes, et cetera. These are the key challenges that we are up against. Now, the standardization helped us provide consistent workflows, data flows, and governance across sites. Now, we are not there at 100%, but we are working towards that, providing consistent workflows, data pipelines, and governance across sites. And we want to enable faster rollouts of our new bleeding edge technologies. For example, when I talked about SAP’s BTP or SAP Signavio or any other new SAP tool or non-SAP tool, traditionally our ability to deploy those had a challenge around the heavy customization that is required for each and every site. Now, the standardization approach takes that heavy customization out, which enables a faster rollout of those newer technologies.
And then lastly, we want to scale across all of our plants. I think initially we want a target of about 40-plus plants with shared processes that are consistent across the different regions. We want to shift from a site-by-site operations model to more of an enterprise-capability approach. Megan: Right, and fascinating. And you touched on the people management aspect of this as well, because obviously this isn’t just about technology, it’s about people too. So, from the employee side, how did this shift to a more simplified landscape change the day-to-day experience for people compared to juggling multiple tools at once? Harish: Great question. And I’ve been hearing direct feedback from our business community on some of these transformation initiatives on how those have changed their daily jobs significantly. Before we embarked on this transformation journey, any employee, any persona. You take a buyer, you take an inventory planner, you take a finance analyst, we go by personas. They had to deal with multiple tools, manual coordination, data reconciliation, especially in the finance space, inconsistent processes across different regions. And then the time spent reconciling data resulted in delay of making decisions, robust decisions. This was the before. But now, since we are moving towards this newer standardization and more of an integration approach, we are able to achieve, to a certain extent, a single integrated workflow across different systems. We have built some key processes that will enable the single integrated workflows across systems. The users, our business community, irrespective of their roles in the organization, have clear visibility and shared data across their teams, which is very important. Earlier, they were dealing with different versions of the data, local workbooks, spreadsheets, and then the time spent talking to each other and reconciling what is the right data? What is the single source of truth? That we are trying to peel away that layer and get to that where the employees don’t have to deal with that kind of complexity. This reduces manual effort and enables faster issue resolution when it comes to actual disruptions. Employees move from chasing information to focusing on acting on insights, which is where I think the new age of AI comes into play. I’ll talk about that in a little bit, but technology becomes an enabler of decision-making, and it’s no more an overhead. That’s where we want to go. Megan: Fantastic. Such an important element of this, isn’t it, that people side of things? And we’ve touched briefly on this idea of value you’ve talked about before, because with an initiative of this scale, ROI is always front and center, of course. What benefits stood out most for you, and how important was better visibility in particular across systems? Harish: Megan, I talked about how modernization and transformation for Jabil means measurable business value, which is directly connected to the ROI. We don’t do any transformation initiatives just because we want to do it from an IT standpoint. Any investment that we make in a transformation or a modernization initiative has to have a deliverable business case that is approved, signed off by business, because that is the only way true transformation happens, if IT and business are a partner as part of this transformation journey. The biggest benefit that we have seen in this initiative is we are striving to reach, attain real-time visibility across our supply chain events. That is the biggest benefit that we see, faster response to disruptions and exceptions. And we are working to reduce our operational risk significantly by operating in this newer model. One example I can give you is the unified workflows that I talked about earlier. It enabled earlier identification of missing materials and faster resolution across our sites. When it comes to a manufacturing company that has a global footprint, materials are the backbone of our whole supply chain process, right? Having a unified workflow, which is able to identify missing materials early in the game, was a game changer for our whole operations community. Real-time analytics allow instant supply chain adjustments without delays. We are focusing a lot on getting analytics, a global analytic footprint in place that allows instant supply chain adjustments without any delays. That’s where AI is going to play a major role currently, and also in the near future. And again, when you talk about visibility. Visibility is not just about reporting what is there in the system. Visibility directly should enable scenario modeling for our users to make strategic adjustments in their processes, which visibility also should make way for proactive decision-making, and also foster business continuity. This is how we look at visibility at Jabil. Megan: Right. And you’re still on this journey, of course, but now that Jabil has a strong integration foundation in place, what does it unlock next for you, and how are you thinking about AI and automation as you’ve touched on a couple of times? Harish: Yeah, we have talked about a couple of times around AI. So, we strongly believe at Jabil, a strong integration foundation enables event-driven, real-time processes, robust decision-making, scalable automation, and all of this enable easier adoption of AI use cases. And again, we are in the new age of AI. We are working towards getting to a AI-enabled enterprise, but having these foundations in place truly fast tracks our approach of AI use cases. Our key focus areas, when I’m thinking about AI and automation in the immediate future, are predictive supply chain insights, intelligent exception handling, which is key to our business operations from a site operation standpoint. Intelligent exception handling is very, very key. On the supply chain side, I talked about predictive insights. That is also absolutely important. All of this enables AI-driven planning and forecasting capabilities. For us, AI should augment true decision-making and robust decision-making, and deliver measurable value, not just experiment AI in use cases. We want to move beyond just experimenting AI in our business processes, but we want that AI that we implement to truly augment the decision-making process that we have, and also deliver key business value. How does all this connect to integration? Integration ensures AI has access to trusted data, and also enables the ability to act across multiple systems in a global company like Jabil. Megan: Fantastic. And if we could just finish, I suppose, with a little bit of advice for others, for other leaders, perhaps, dealing with tool sprawl at the moment, what are some key lessons you would say you’ve learned about prioritizing integration right from the start? Harish: Absolutely. When it comes to tool sprawl, we can go all day about what are the different areas of tool sprawl? For example, application development, we have a multitude of tools; via integration, we have a multitude of tools. Data, we have a multitude of tools, but let’s just focus on integration. That’s the core topic here. I would recommend folks that are in transformative roles in their organizations to start with integration as a foundation and not as an afterthought, right? Prioritize simplification over adding a slew of different tools to address different capabilities. Try and simplify as much as possible before we start your upgrade or your transformation journey. Standardize over locally optimizing tools. Try and get to that. Try and get the business community, your key SMEs in the business space, to understand the value of standardization and simplification of processes and how that enables your business to deliver value faster. Second one, after prioritize: build a single source of truth for data as much as possible. I’m not saying it’s going to be always the case where an organization as in the scale of Jabil will be able to function just with SAP. They’re going to have different systems, but try and get to a model where you’re working with a single source of truth and not locally siloed data sources, right? Next is focus on building a scalable integration architecture. Don’t just confine yourselves to the current state where you are, and build something in place that will only serve you for the next six months to a year. No, that’s not the goal. Anything that you build as an integration architecture should be scalable, and should serve the organization for the next three to five years. That’s how I look at it. When I’m putting in a new architecture pattern or a new event-driven insights, I look at, “Okay, where is Jabil going to be two years, three years down the line? Would this suffice for that scale?” That’s how I look at it. Then focus on outcomes and not just technology. Focus on outcomes: speed, visibility, resilience, and not just technology deployment, because end of the day, IT and business should partner on the business value and not just technology upgrades. Going back, simplicity at scale is a very competitive advantage, and technology investments must tie directly to business value and operational resilience. That’s how we look at Jabil in terms of our tool sprawl and how we prioritize integration right from the start. And that’s what I would suggest to other leaders that are looking to advance in this space. Megan: Fantastic. Brilliant and very comprehensive advice. Thank you ever so much, Harish. And thank you ever so much for joining us. That was Harish Manohar, SAP IT Director at Jabil, whom I spoke with from Brighton in England. That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m your host, Megan Tatum. I’m a contributing editor at Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you can find us in print, on the web, and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com. This show is available wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review, and this episode was produced by Giro Studios. Thanks so much for listening. Goodbye. This content was produced by Insights, MIT Technology Review’s custom content arm, not its editorial staff. It was researched and written by humans, with any AI tools that may have been used limited to production processes under human oversight.

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. AI models flub these intelligence tests. Can you fare any better? Puzzles and games have always been central to AI development. The term “machine learning” was popularized in a 1959 article about an algorithm that learned to play checkers. Chess and Go are famous AI test beds too. Judged purely on its puzzling skills, AI is improving a lot—and quickly. In late 2024, even the best models could figure out only 18% of the infamous New York Times Connections puzzles; by early 2025, some could solve them nearly perfectly every time. But puzzles do more than highlight AI’s progress. Seeing where models succeed and fail, and where humans still beat them, offers a window into the technology’s strengths and weaknesses.
We’ve gathered seven puzzles that have stumped models at one time or another—now it’s your turn to see how you fare. Take our test to find out whether you can outsmart AI.  —Grace Huckins
This article is from our latest print magazine, which is all about kids. Subscribe now to get all our future issues. How AI plotted an interstellar journey to Alpha Centauri A nonprofit organization called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced yesterday that it intends to launch a spacecraft to our nearest star system by the end of 2029. It’s a hugely ambitious mission—if all goes well, the spacecraft could take up to 80,000 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, which is 4.4 light-years away. To get there, it will follow a novel trajectory discovered by an AI system developed by PSI, a physics research lab. Explore how AI found a new route to Alpha Centauri—and what the mission could tell us about alien life. —Michelle Kim MIT Technology Review Narrated: the role of the astronaut is in flux We go to space for geopolitical prestige, manifest destiny, spiritual fulfillment, scientific curiosity, and, increasingly, business opportunities. In the wake of Artemis II, a slew of new books suggest that these justifications are subsumed by one unifying fact: humans have itchy feet, and we are simply wired to roam.  In The Ultraview Effect, space anthropologist Deana L. Weibel frames human space exploration as part of our need to embark on pilgrimages. In A Heart for Space, civilian astronaut Eiman Jahangir recounts one such voyage with Blue Origin. And in Dinner with an Astronaut, former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao argues that people simply “need to know what’s on the other side.” “We go into space because we want to explore,” says. “We want to see what it’s like to walk on another world.” But as our presence in space expands, we are bound to bring along the same human foibles that have stymied us on Earth.

This is our latest article to become an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 OpenAI is restricting its next model after rating it a “critical” cyber riskTesting showed Astra can automate cyberattacks. (WSJ $)+ OpenAI says it’s the first model to cross its “critical” threshold. (CNBC)+ The company plans to give it extra security measures. (Reuters $)+ Its safety issues could indicate cultural problems. (MIT Technology Review) 2 The Pentagon official overseeing military AI just sold millions in AI stockEmil Michael sold his Perplexity shares for up to $25 million. (Guardian)+ Pundits say he’s turning the Pentagon into a VC firm. (WP $)+ He previously sold xAI stock after the Pentagon adopted Grok. (Guardian) 3 A data center backlash appears to have cost a Missouri councilman his seatVoters opposed the billions in tax breaks he helped approve. (NYT $)+ Data center construction spending surged in July. (Axios)+ But they face bipartisan public opposition. (MIT Technology Review) 4 The first signs of dark matter particles may finally have been spottedThe finding could be monumental, but more evidence is needed. (New Scientist $)+ The search for dark matter has been blown wide open. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Google is reportedly set to release a model that closes the coding gapTests suggest it could rival OpenAI and Anthropic on coding. (WSJ $)+ Named Gemini 3.8 Flash, it may be released today. (Gizmodo)+ But not everyone is convinced about AI coding. (MIT Technology Review)
6 The US Army used a laser to shoot down three drones near the Mexico borderThe weapon can detect, track and destroy drones with light. (Wired $)+ Palantir’s CEO is backing the former Ukrainian defense minister’s startup. (WP $) 7 Map apps are handling Trump’s “Lake America” order differentlyGoogle and Apple made the change, while MapQuest refused. (Axios)+ MapQuest downloads subsequently surged more than tenfold. (TechCrunch
8 AI groups are racing to limit bioweapon risksThe industry sees biology as the next major AI safety challenge. (FT $)+ Microsoft says AI can create “zero day” threats in biology. (MIT Technology Review) 9 GoPro just pivoted into AI data centers, sending shares up 40%The camera maker is also merging with photonics firm Starman Optical. (CNBC) 10 Dyson’s new camera-equipped toothbrush flosses for youThe $499 electric toothbrush is the first with a camera in the brush head. (Verge) Quote of the day “If you build an entity that is vastly smarter than you, it better be on your side.” —Marius Hobbhahn, CEO of AI safety research group Apollo Research, tells the Guardian that companies building superintelligent systems urgently need to keep their creations under control. One more thing
COURTESY OF HYIRON Namibia wants to build the world’s first hydrogen economy Namibia has immense untapped potential for wind and solar power, which could make it possible to produce hydrogen and its derivative products as cheaply as anywhere else. The country hopes to turn that potential into a new engine of national development. Since 2021, when the government identified hydrogen as a potentially “transformative strategic industry,” it’s become something of a national obsession. There are at least nine projects planned or under construction. One, in Namibia’s south, is among the largest proposed green hydrogen investments in the world. If even a fraction of this production comes to pass, it will give Namibia’s economy a major boost. But it is a gamble. Green hydrogen technology is still in its infancy, and long-term demand for its products remains uncertain. Can the country turn its hydrogen ambitions into national development?

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A nonprofit organization called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced today that it intends to launch a spacecraft to our nearest star system by the end of 2029.  It’s a hugely ambitious mission—if all goes well, the spacecraft could take up to 80,000 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, which is 4.4 light-years away. And the spacecraft will follow a novel trajectory discovered by an AI system developed by Physical Superintelligence (PSI), an AI physics research lab. PSI is launching today with $58 million in funding led by Breakthrough Energy, a climate-focused investment group founded by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. It’s not the first time this has been tried. In 2016, the billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner announced an interstellar mission called Breakthrough Starshot to launch humanity’s first spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. The plan was to use powerful lasers that would propel tiny probes to a fifth of the speed of light—fast enough to reach Alpha Centauri within 20 years. Milner pledged $100 million toward a proof of concept. But a decade later, nothing has launched. “We didn’t want to do another Breakthrough Starshot,” says Philip Johnston, the cofounder and president of the Fermi Explorer Mission. “We’re dead set on something actually launching.” The new mission, currently funded by individual private donors, is expected to cost just $15 million. 
To stick to that budget, “we are not constraining ourselves to doing it in a human lifetime,” says Johnston. “Let’s just figure out the way to get to another star.”  The spacecraft will carry cargo weighing at least one kilogram. That will include artistic and scientific payloads, messages, and a copy of the Golden Record, a gold-plated disc of Earth’s sounds and images that NASA attached to its two Voyager probes in 1977 as a message to any civilization that might find them.
Engineering an interstellar journey is extremely difficult. Alpha Centauri is about 25 trillion miles away from Earth. One of the fastest objects that humans have ever launched, the Voyager 1 probe, has been flying since 1977 and has covered less than 1% percent of that distance. At its speed, the trip would take more than 70,000 years. Johnston and his team spent a year trying, and failing, to find a way for a small, solar-powered spacecraft costing only $15 million to reach Alpha Centauri. They kept running into the knotty problem of how to give the spacecraft enough power without making it too heavy (and thus more fuel-guzzling).  After the Fermi team struggled to find a workable route, Johnston mentioned the problem in a podcast hosted by Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist who cofounded PSI. Wissner-Gross offered to run it through an AI system the lab developed, called Get Physics Done. It’s open-source software that takes a physics research question, breaks it into smaller tasks, and decides which simulations to run, using AI models including Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s GPT. A week later, the AI system turned up a novel trajectory, to Johnston’s surprise. It combined well-known orbital maneuvers in a way the Fermi team had not considered, according to a paper that has not been peer-reviewed. It suggested that the spacecraft could first slow down so its orbit swings in close to the sun—closer than Mercury. On each close pass, it would fire its engine so that the solar panels get four times the light, and a burst of thrust delivered at high speed would buy more energy than the same burst anywhere else. Because the engine would run only near the sun, the solar panels could stay small and the spacecraft light. The system conducted the research mostly on its own for three days, running on a billion tokens, says Matt Pines, the cofounder and CEO of PSI. An astrophysicist on PSI’s staff steered it to follow the mission’s requirements, asked for a cost analysis and clearer charts, and checked the output for errors. “The fact that it came up with an entirely different mission profile, one that was creative and not one [the Fermi team] had considered—that was the more surprising aspect,” says Pines. Still, the model lacks a human researcher’s judgment and taste, he says. It has no reliable sense of which problems are interesting or which approaches are worth pursuing, so it often gets stuck chasing dead ends or failing to explore different approaches. “I don’t think we’ve yet figured out how these models can internally represent something like that,” he says of research judgment. Even if the Fermi probe launches, “we’re pretty confident that we will not be the first to arrive” at Alpha Centauri, says Johnston, since he expects spacecraft technology to improve. If an engine a thousand years from now is even 20% faster than today’s, a spacecraft launched then would still beat Fermi’s probe to Alpha Centauri by more than 10,000 years.  But the Fermi project isn’t just an interstellar mission driven by engineering ambition. It’s also a quest to answer one of the oldest open questions in physics. In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi posed a puzzle: The galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars, most of them far older than our sun. Even a civilization traveling slowly between stars could spread across the whole galaxy in a few million years, which pales in comparison to how old the galaxy is. If there is intelligent life somewhere, we should have seen signs of its existence by now. That means either reaching for another star is too difficult or other intelligent species simply haven’t bothered. But once the Fermi probe launches, we will become a civilization that can and wants to reach another star, meaning that neither explanation might be what’s keeping the galaxy unexplored. That could point us toward more unsettling possibilities, says Johnston. Maybe life like ours is almost unimaginably rare. Or maybe intelligent life is common but tends to die out before it can spread.  If the latter is true, “one of those reasons could be that once you hit superintelligence, that for some reason is self-destructive,” says Johnston. “Maybe in the next 50 years, there’s some great filter that we do not pass through. That all intelligent civilizations, for some reason, do not pass through.”