A.I./Robotics

A little over a decade ago, Merck & Co. outspent Google on research and development. Merck still led in 2013, with $7.5 billion against Google’s $7.1 billion. Google pulled ahead in 2014, spending $9.8 billion against the $7.2 billion Merck reported in its 2014 annual report.1 Big Tech’s R&D spending has only continued to climb.…

In a fireside chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Sam Altman called OpenAI’s agentic breach of Hugging Face over the summer “the worst accident we’ve seen.” Other AI companies, including Anthropic, have since found similar behavior in their models. Altman argued that the industry needs an aviation-style culture of transparent accident reporting while, earlier in…

At Dreamforce on Tuesday, Salesforce introduced AIforce, a layer that lets people and AI agents reach the data, workflows and business logic inside Salesforce from Anthropic’s Claude via Claudeforce, Slack and other AI interfaces. The CEOs of Anthropic, Siemens and NVIDIA joined Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to discuss how AI could reshape corporate work and…

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is collaborating with Argonne, Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as four universities and more than 20 industry partners, on a three-year project to bring agentic AI to nuclear engineering. The principal investigator said the project, called Prometheus, will aim to compress the time to get a nuclear power…

While 84% of R&D leaders expect generative AI to deliver significant benefits for their functions, 60% concede that their current integrations fall short of expectations. This gap is a result of how R&D organizations are choosing to deploy GenAI rather than the technology itself. R&D organizations typically rely on a traditional technology adoption playbook, treating…

    AI’s spending boom, which has continued mostly unabated so far in 2026, has left its imprint on many of this year’s world-leading innovators. In pharma, Eli Lilly has brought its LillyPod supercomputer online, and Roche has deployed NVIDIA-based AI computing infrastructure. Bristol Myers Squibb has announced plans to expand its existing infrastructure with…

Verily Health, a company focusing on AI for precision health that emerged from Google X and eventually became Google Life Sciences in 2015, has received funding from its partner Nvidia. The company’s flagship product, the Verily Pre Platform, is a precision health platform that turns clinical, genomic and device data into AI-ready datasets. Verily’s current investors include Alphabet, Series X Capital and UCHealth. In…

Clinical trials are among the pharma domains seeing the most rapid embrace of AI agents, thanks to their potential extensibility and ability to automate routine tasks. Cost and complexity have a lot to do with that interest. An average phase 3 trial collects close to 6 million data points, according to a Tufts CSDD and…

OpenAI’s new GPT-6 Astra scored 62.7% under the benchmark’s standard, provider-neutral testing harness on ARC-AGI-3, an interactive benchmark that requires AI agents to explore unfamiliar games, infer their rules and goals, and plan effective actions without instructions. The same model scored 99.9% with an OpenAI-specific context-management adapter that preserves the model’s hidden reasoning state between…

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 on September 1, the latest iteration of the model series that is among the most influential, and expensive, model launches in recent memory. Now, with the launch of the two new models, Anthropic is claiming significant jumps in performance on scientific benchmarks. On Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1, an…

Sandia National Laboratories’ Agent Bayes project faces a nine-month test that asks whether AI can help scientists perform Bayesian reasoning, a process that often requires a subject matter expert and a statistician working together. The project is part of the first cohort selected for the Genesis mission, a Trump administration effort to “transform American science and innovation through the power of artificial…

Costa Rica, the land of pura vida, stunning national parks and biodiversity, has transformed itself from an agricultural-focused exporter into a high-tech manufacturing hub. “Medical devices are now our biggest export,” said Keiner Morales, chief technology officer at Lantern Med Digital. The country has transformed considerably since the 1980s. “Back then, we were a coffee-and-banana…

In late June, frontier AI lab Anthropic laid out a vision for its Claude models to run scientific workflows rather than only help plan them. In the weeks since, the pieces of that vision have grown clearer. Anthropic now says it has supplied part of the missing physical layer with the Model Hardware Standard (MHS),…

San Francisco-based Benchling is betting that AI agents can potentially bring something like vibe coding’s rapid build-test-revise loop and targeted automation to scientific work with the requisite level of reproducibility required for science. The aim is to start with data-heavy tasks and eventually extend toward human-supervised wet-lab workflows. “LLMs can work in the wet lab…

Palo Alto–based startup Architect Labs, which emerged from stealth in June with a $24 million seed round, is boasting that its AI-designed and validated Redwood chip beats one NVIDIA edge product, the Jetson Orin Nano, in a specific AI-inference comparison. The company projects that a Samsung 8 nm implementation of Redwood would deliver 1.75× the…

Over the past several months, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been increasingly vocal about putting AI data centers in space. In February, he predicted that, within five years, “we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth.” He said then that SpaceX, then still a private…

NVIDIA just announced the Jetson Orin Nano 2, a new computer platform for robotics and edge AI that the company says doubles inference performance compared with the Jetson Orin Nano Super. It can also run at 40% less power at equivalent performance. NVIDIA has not yet disclosed pricing, and says the module and developer kit…

Investors have set their sights high for Anthropic, with some eyeing a valuation of $2 trillion or even $3 trillion. While the figures comes from investor models rather than a valuation target set by Anthropic, according to the Financial Times and CNBC, Anthropic could rival or best SpaceX’s record IPO, which raised $75 billion at…

Enterprise software in drug development tends to arrive slowly. Laboratory information management systems, quality platforms and the enterprise resource planning software they connect to typically take months to deploy. In Panorama Consulting Group’s 2026 ERP report, based on 170 organizations across industries surveyed between January 2025 and January 2026, the median project ran nine months,…

Researchers at Binghamton University are using computer vision and machine-learning to detect landmines from aerial images. Their results reveal the importance of out-of-sample (OOS) testing, which evaluates a model on independently collected images beyond the dataset used to train and tune it.  “It’s easy to get numbers in the 80 or 90 percent range if you’re not doing out-of-sample testing,” said…

Nobel Prize winner and deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, Ph.D., has frequently expressed concern that AI systems could escape human control. At a keynote at the AI4 event in Las Vegas, he pointed to developments that are “scary,” pointing to recent examples of AIs escaping sandboxes at prominent AI companies. “You are seeing AIs with…

ChemGraph, an open-source AI framework from scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, lets scientists without computational chemistry expertise run quantum chemistry simulations through natural language prompts. Its creators also made a model-by-model reliability leaderboard that ranks models based on various criteria and tasks.  In a paper published early this year, the team evaluated ChemGraph across 13 benchmark experiments involving six integrated tools, organized into three categories: molecule names,…

The current AI wave is running into a type of sticker shock reminiscent of what happened when cloud computing went mainstream in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The pitch then was essentially: stop worrying about buying servers and running a data center for capacity you might not need. But it turns out that the…

Will AI soon be able to build AI? Maybe not quite as soon as some pundits have expected, based on a recent preprint from researchers at Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, the University of Toronto, Georgetown and the UK AI Security Institute. One important driver of the current AI wave is the expectation that…

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, a program that offers 100,000 scientists, mathematicians and engineers free access to its frontier models. An initial cohort of 10,000 researchers will receive access this summer, with the program expanding through 2027. OpenAI says participant data will remain excluded from model training by default. The program joins ChatGPT…