Plus: Trump has unveiled a "Super Intelligence Force" to oversee AI. People really hate AI, so why can't they get enough? Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM designed to come up with a wide variety of responses . He said something that's been stuck in my head since: "We often say that we're a self-loathing AI company. We don't know if we really like what we're doing." "I guess that makes me a self-loathing AI journalist."

Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that's designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do. At the start of the call, he said something that's been stuck in my head since: "We often say that we're a self-loathing AI company. We don't know if we really like what we're doing." "I guess that makes me a self-loathing AI journalist," I replied.

Yossi Matias, Vice President & Head of Google Research, explores how AI is beginning to reshape biology, infrastructure, manufacturing, and science, and why its greatest impact may come when it intersects with other fields. Step inside the newsroom with our MIT Technology Review editors for sharp analysis and unpublished insights from the team that researches and reports on emerging tech daily. There's much more to discover Across three days, EmTech Future explored some of the most important questions shaping technology right now: how AI is impacting industries, where quantum is heading, what new energy systems could make possible, how robotics are evolving, and what challenges and opportunities arise when these technologies start to converge. Hear the ideas, insights, and perspectives you missed at EmTech Future 2026. Hartmut Neven, founder and lead at Google Quantum AI, explores how quantum is advancing alongside other frontiers and why its significance may lie not only in what it can do on its own, but in how it begins to interact with the systems around it. Evelyn Wang, VP for energy & climate at MIT, explores how energy, computing, infrastructure, and climate technologies are increasingly interconnected, and what these converging systems could mean for the future of industry and society.

Composable infrastructure, sovereign data, and cross-functional coordination can enable intelligence to flow and AI to grow smarter. Enterprise AI is no longer a future ambition. It is in full operational flight. Model capabilities are advancing faster than most organizations can absorb, while the cost of performance continues to fall. Globally, AI investment is set to reach $2.5 trillion in 2026, up 44% from the previous year. For many enterprises, this investment has produced fragmentation.

Plus: OpenAI says rogue agents may have affected more than 100 organizations. This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. I recently turned 40, and I don't need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused on competitors', figures that are meant to provide a better way to measure the age-related health of our organs and bodies. Over six months, around 500 of us will try to reverse our biological age using a bunch of different measures. But is it even possible to measure whether someone is getting younger?

This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition.

Ten years after AlphaGo's match against Go champion Lee Sedol, today's AI still isn't tapping into the machinery that made that win possible. On an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent. Move 37 in game two of the five-game match looked so absurd that some commentators thought it was a programming glitch. AlphaGo won the game, ultimately triumphing 4-1 over Lee Sedol, one of the greatest professional Go players of all time. "I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and that it was merely a machine," Lee said afterwards . "But when I saw this move, I changed my mind.

Plus: the Pentagon has tapped Elon Musk to co-lead a future warfare project. An AI "mind-reading" tool can reconstruct what you're looking at based on a brain scan A new AI tool can guess what you're looking at just by analyzing your brain scans--and recreate that image with remarkable precision. It can go the other way too, and predict a person's brain activity based on what they're looking at. The researchers hope the "mindreading" tool could reveal more about how the brain works. It could also help locked-in people communicate and, incredibly, maybe even allow scientists to recreate the content of dreams. But other scientists warn that a similar approach could reveal people's inner thoughts and mental imagery, potentially without their consent.

A new AI tool can guess what you're looking at just by analyzing your brain scans--and recreate that image with remarkable precision. It can go the other way too, and predict a person's brain activity based on what they're looking at. In the image above, for example, the left-hand image of each pair is what the user actually saw--and its right-hand counterpart is what the model recreated based on the brain scan. Michal Irani, who developed the tool with her colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, hopes her "mindreading" tool will ultimately reveal more about how the brain works, and could perhaps be used to help locked-in people communicate, or allow scientists to recreate the content of dreams. Judy Illes, a neuroethicist and professor of neurology at the University of British Columbia in Canada, who was not involved in the research, describes the work as "magnificent." "The idea [of using this approach] to help people with neurologic conditions therapeutically is tremendously exciting," she says. But other scientists warn that a similar approach could be used to reveal the inner thoughts and mental imagery of people, potentially without their consent. "The results seem very impressive," says Tommy Sprague, a neuroscientist at the University of California Santa Barbara. "But if there's a way to surreptitiously extract information about what you're thinking about, then 150 years of sci-fi can come true anytime, and that's worrisome in a lot of ways."

From e-bikes to stoves, here's how companies are adding energy storage in surprising ways. If you want to install a big battery in New York City, you have to cut through a notoriously tough tangle of regulations. That's made it difficult to get large energy storage projects on the grid. Faced with those obstacles, some startups are getting creative, finding ways to use relatively small batteries in unexpected places, from induction stovetops to food carts. By deploying these more consumer-focused batteries, the companies are helping people directly, cutting pollution or power bills. And these units, while small on their own, could add up to a lot of capacity.