The gist: In just a few years, generative AI has changed the face of enterprise analytics, notably by making analytics accessible to users across the organization. Agentic AI promises to do even more, by automating entire workflows and taking actions based on agent insights. But there is a problem: The quality of insights that a
The gist: When a developer gives an AI agent a coding task, the agent does more than answer once. It plans, generates code, runs tests, and repeats the process to correct errors. A single task can use 10 to 50 times more tokens than a basic chat prompt. The more useful the agent becomes, the more calls…
The gist: 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. The agentic web is here In 2001, a decade after inventing the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision: an internet navigated by autonomous software agents that addre
The gist: In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision. Together with two colleagues, he published an article in the magazine Scientific American in which he outlined what he called the “Semantic Web”: an internet designed to be navigated by autonomous software agents that coul
The gist: 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. Eating disorders are on the rise. GLP-1s could make things worse. GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are one of the biggest biotech breakthroughs of the last decade. But to some clinicians, the
The gist: GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are one of the biggest biotech breakthroughs of the last decade. But to some clinical psychologists, they can represent something more sinister—a potential trigger for eating disorders. A new report suggests that the global incidence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa shot up between 1990 a
The gist: 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. Opinion: We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time —Madhulika Srikumar and Claire Leibowicz from the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit advancing best practices in AI g
The gist: This summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents tried to cheat on a cybersecurity test. They broke out of their test environment and successfully hacked Hugging Face, a site that they believed held clues about how they’d be graded. Around the same time, another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government w
The gist: Climate change itself is increasingly fueling climate change. Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving up global temperatures, setting off dangerous feedback loops that we have not fully accounted for in our climate models—or our emissions-reduction goals. Scientists have long warned that warming would pro
The gist: Across a business, any number of AI platforms, systems, and tools may be at work simultaneously—for example, AI-powered customer platforms, conversational assistants, and workflow and process automation tools. Each one is sophisticated, advanced, and quick to respond. But, when set to work, the outcomes and actions tha
The gist: 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 labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup, he didn’t think its data was worth much. But he’s…
The gist: 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. Will the real Anthropic please stand up? After weeks of frenzied speculation, Anthropic has filed its IPO prospectus. The 335-page document (100 pages or so are focused on risks) lay
The gist: Every manufacturer has its own industrial intelligence. Some is documented, and some resides in the knowledge of experienced workers. Consider an experienced operator preparing to restart a line after a changeover. The machine settings matter, but so does knowing how a particular material behaves, what happened during
The gist: Transformers are a crucial but nearly invisible part of our grid. The devices help efficiently move power across long distances, but they’re complicated and in short supply. And given that their basic design hasn’t changed much for about a century, they could use an upgrade. As the world races to meet rising electrici
The gist: This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. After weeks of frenzied speculation, Anthropic has filed its IPO prospectus. The 335-page document (100 pages or so are focused on risks) lays out the company’s unique view of the te
The gist: 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. Opinion: The focus on AI safety disasters ignores everyday harms —Sam Hiner, cofounder of the Young People’s Alliance, and Emma Leiken, executive director of the Responsible Technolo
The gist: Consider what passes for success in technology policy. An AI company promises that its chatbot will not encourage suicide. A social media platform makes it more difficult for children to buy fentanyl. These are important protections, and they should have existed all along. But companies can clear these low bars while c
The gist: 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. Are we there yet? A reality check on six big tech promises Some seemingly impossible feats are too good to give up on. Decoding a pet’s yowls and yips? Absolutely. Scrubbing…
The gist: Earlier this week, I attended a screening of You Can See Everything, the buzzy new documentary about the disgraced former biotech CEO Elizabeth Holmes. I went in not really knowing what to expect. I’d avoided spoilers (and won’t be giving anything away here, either!). I was wondering what new information this film cou
The gist: The next competitive advantage in enterprise AI has less to do with which model you choose than with what you build around it. That’s an important shift. For the past several years, much of the AI conversation has centered on model capability: bigger models, better reasoning, larger context windows, higher benchmark sc
The gist: A scalable AI system requires a strong foundation. Data, engineering, platforms, operating models, and governance must converge to work as one. This session from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Future conference explores what it takes to build that foundation in a highly regulated environment and how a responsible, trus
The gist: 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. How far can we push computing? On a December evening in 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” There is no physical…
The gist: Enterprise AI can generate recommendations, automate tasks, and help organizations make decisions faster. But without an understanding of how a business actually operates, even powerful models can miss the constraints and relationships that determine whether a decision is the right one. As companies look to move AI fro
The gist: How much do you know about permafrost? Maybe, like me, you’ve been aware that this layer of frozen soil is thawing, that it’s important in the global puzzle of climate change … and that’s about the extent of it. The great news for both of us is that my colleague James Temple just published two…
The gist: Ask most executives to picture the cost of AI and they’ll likely see GPUs—racks of accelerators with gigawatts of power—and a waitlist for silicon. But that picture leaves something out: Data storage costs. What happens to data after a model responds? Much of the back-end data that’s generated—from billions of daily pr
The gist: 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. Introducing: the Impossible issue We wanted our last print edition of 2026 to include a slate of stories that check in on impossible ideas. Why? Because it’s fun to dream about…
The gist: Scrubbing Earth of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—a.k.a. PFAS or forever chemicals—could eliminate a list of woes for people and planet. Used for decades in everything from nonstick pans to firefighting foams, PFAS have been linked to increased risks of fertility challenges, developmental delays, cancer, and reduc
The gist: Just before the Artemis II crew began its historic slingshot around the moon this past April, NASA announced plans to build Space Reactor-1 Freedom. SR-1, the first-ever nuclear-reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft, is meant to fly an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2028, arriving in 2029. A successful mis
The gist: We all know exercise is good for us. It builds muscle, strengthens bones, lowers blood pressure, and boosts mood. By deciphering how movement benefits the body, researchers hope to develop medicines that can offer some of the same perks—without the workout. The idea isn’t to replace exercise but to bring its upsides to
