2025 was supposed to be the year of “AI agents,” according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and other AI industry personnel. And it has been, in many ways, with numerous leading AI model providers such as OpenAI, Google, and even Chinese competitors like Alibaba releasing...

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 aging clocks can help us understand why we age—and if we can reverse it Wrinkles and gray hairs aside, it can be difficult to know how well—or...

From addictive algorithms to exploitative apps, data mining to misinformation, the internet today can be a hazardous place. Books by three influential figures—the intellect behind “net neutrality,” a former Meta executive, and the web’s own inventor—propose radical approaches to...

Be honest: Have you ever looked up someone from your childhood on social media with the sole intention of seeing how they’ve aged?  One of my colleagues, who shall remain nameless, certainly has. He recently shared a photo of a former classmate. “Can you believe we’re the same age?”...

Visa is introducing a new security framework designed to solve one of the thorniest problems emerging in artificial intelligence-powered commerce: how retailers can tell the difference between legitimate AI shopping assistants and the malicious bots that plague their websites. The...

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are gaining renewed attention for developing and open sourcing a technique that allows large language models (LLMs) — like those underpinning ChatGPT and most modern AI chatbots — to improve themselves by generating...

Enterprises often find that when they fine-tune models, one effective approach to making a large language model (LLM) fit for purpose and grounded in data is to have the model lose some of its abilities. After fine-tuning, some models “forget” how to perform certain tasks or other...

A new research paper quietly published last week outlines a breakthrough method that allows large language models (LLMs) to simulate human consumer behavior with startling accuracy, a development that could reshape the multi-billion-dollar market research industry. The technique...

Amid the turbulence of the wider global economy in recent years, the pharmaceuticals industry is weathering its own storms. The rising cost of raw materials and supply chain disruptions are squeezing margins as pharma companies face intense pressure—including from countries like the...