Plus: A CDC panel voted to recommend delaying the hepatitis B vaccine for babies. If you're a longtime reader, you probably know that our newsroom selects 10 breakthroughs every year that we think will define the future . This group exercise is mostly fun and always engrossing, with plenty of lively discussion along the way, but at times it can also be quite difficult. The 2026 list will come out on January 12--so stay tuned. In the meantime, we wanted to share some of the technologies from this year's reject pile, as a window into our decision-making process. These four technologies won't be on our 2026 list of breakthroughs, but all were closely considered, and we think they're worth knowing about.

For Bill Gates, artificial intelligence is the most important invention since the internet or the personal computer. For Google boss Sundar Pichai, it will have a more profound impact than electricity and fire. Already, though, there are signs the AI revolution may be faltering. Since OpenAI released its landmark GPT-4 system in March 2023, new large language models like Google's Gemini have offered only incremental improvements. GPT-5 could change this tomorrow, of course.

Pat Bennett, 68, once rode horses as an equestrian, jogged daily and worked in human resources, until a rare illness robbed her of her ability to speak in 2012. But help is on the way thanks to four baby-aspirin-sized sensors implanted in her brain, part of a clinical trial at Stanford University. The chips have helped Bennett communicate her thoughts directly from her mind to a computer monitor at a record-breaking 62 words per minute -- over three times faster than the technology's previous best. Cognitive scientists and medical researchers outside Stanford are impressed as well. One, Professor Philip Sabes at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies brain-machine interfaces and co-founded Elon Musk's Neuralink, described the new study as a'big breakthrough.'

When Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times, demoed an AI-powered version of Microsoft's search engine last month, he was blown away. "I'm switching my desktop computer's default search engine to Bing," he declared. A few days later, however, Kevin logged back on and ended up having a conversation with Bing's new chatbot that left him so unsettled he had trouble sleeping afterward. In that two-hour back-and-forth, Bing morphed from chipper research assistant into Sydney, a diabolical home-wrecker that declared its undying love for Kevin, vented its desires to engineer deadly viruses and steal nuclear codes, and announced, chillingly, "I want to be alive." The transcript of this conversation set the internet ablaze, and it left many wondering: "Is Sydney … sentient?"

You've probably heard us say this countless times: GPT-3, the gargantuan AI that spews uncannily human-like language, is a marvel. You can tell with a simple trick: Ask it the color of sheep, and it will suggest "black" as often as "white"--reflecting the phrase "black sheep" in our vernacular. That's the problem with language models: because they're only trained on text, they lack common sense. Now researchers from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have designed a new technique to change that. They call it "vokenization," and it gives language models like GPT-3 the ability to "see."

You've probably heard us say this countless times: GPT-3, the gargantuan AI that spews uncannily human-like language, is a marvel. You can tell with a simple trick: Ask it the color of sheep, and it will suggest "black" as often as "white"--reflecting the phrase "black sheep" in our vernacular. That's the problem with language models: because they're only trained on text, they lack common sense. Now researchers from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have designed a new technique to change that. They call it "vokenization," and it gives language models like GPT-3 the ability to "see."

Most companies recognize that aggressive adoption of digital technologies is increasingly critical to being competitive. Our research shows that the top 10% of early adopters of digital technologies have grown at twice the rate of the bottom 25%, and that they are using cloud systems -- not legacy systems -- to enable adoption, a trend we expect to accelerate among industry leaders over the coming five years. Many laggard and middle-of-the-pack companies, by comparison, are dramatically underestimating the cloud resources they will need in order to access, power, or train a new generation of intelligent applications presaged by breakthroughs like GPT-3, a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tool. The big breakthroughs in AI will be about language. The 2010s produced breakthroughs in vision-enabled technologies, from accurate image searches on the web to computer vision systems for medical image analysis or for detecting defective parts in manufacturing and assembly, as we described extensively in our book and research.

Peter: I love the Google Duplex example and I think it shows how powerful AI can be. Andrew Ng, your PhD advisor once said that "AI is the new electricity". Do you follow him in that? It means that every industry is going to be revolutionized by AI. Just like every industry – not merely the power generation industry – was revolutionized by electricity. It's not just IT companies like Google, Facebook, … that are going to be transformed by AI.

In 2015, Google announced it would release its internal tool for developing artificial intelligence algorithms, TensorFlow, a move that would change the tone of how AI research and development would be conducted around the world. The means to build technology that could have an impact as profound as electricity, to borrow phrasing from Google's CEO, would be open, accessible, and free to use. The barrier to entry was lowered from a Ph.D to a laptop. But that also meant TensorFlow's undeniable power was now out of Google's control. For a little over two years, academia and Silicon Valley were still the ones making the biggest splashes with the software, but now that equation is changing.

While drones and driverless cars dominate the headlines, another breakthrough--robot dexterity--is likely to have an even greater impact in both business and everyday life. "Robot manipulation is the next shoe to drop," says Robert Platt, computer science professor and head of the Helping Hands robotics lab at Northeastern. "Imagine a robot that can do things with it's hands in the real world--anything from defusing a bomb to doing your laundry. This has been a dream in the research community for decades, but now we're finally getting to the point where it could actually happen." Recent advances in machine learning, Big Data, and robot perception have put us on the threshold of a quantum leap in the ability of robots to perform fine motor tasks and function in uncontrolled environments, says Platt.