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68 recent industry stories relevant to the field â releases, launches, and announcements beyond the papers.
The neolab is betting that automating routine computer tasks will soon outpace coding as AI's biggest use case.
AI companies, including Nvidia and Mistral, urge policymakers to avoid broad restrictions on open-weight AI models as Washington debates responses to Chinese AI and alleged model distillation.
The Trump administration unveiled the first "Genesis Mission" grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion toward hundreds of AI-driven science projects in an effort the White House has described as "comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project." At roughly the same time, Trump's science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on […]
Google released Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and Flash Cyber, but the continued absence of Gemini 3.5 Pro raises fresh questions about its AI strategy.
A federal judge has signed off on Anthropic's $1.5 billion class action settlement with authors who accused the company of training its AI models on copyrighted books, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an order on Monday, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín writes that the settlement will provide "meaningful relief," offering authors around $3,000 for each book […]
The conversation about AI often centers on algorithms, computing power, or huge investments in new semiconductor fabrication plants and hyperscale data centers. But beneath each of these advances is another layer of innovation that makes them possible: advanced materials. Every new generation of AI technology demands more processing power, more memory, greater energy efficiency, and…
The final approval settles one case, but it doesn't resolve the broader issue of using copyrighted works to train AI models.
Databricks has remade its image into an AI company and has published research on the cost savings of open weight AI models for coding.
A $400 million chip-backed loan points to the next wave of AI infrastructure deals.
OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other models boost their defenses against cyberattacks. Last week the company released the latest version of its flagship LLM, GPT-5.6. OpenAI says that training it against GPT-Red made the model its most robust release yet. GPT-Red automates…
Shaped like dogs, stars, and the Mona Lisa, you could mistake these DNA structures for fun-shaped macaroni if they werenât only nanometers wide. South Korean scientists made the constructions using a technique called DNA origami, which can bend genetic material into any form. Designing DNA strands so theyâll fold into a specific shape typically requires tedious manual work, but the researchers behind the playful fabrications have developed a shortcut using generative AI.The AI model, called Generative SNUPI (short for Structured Nucleic Acids Programming Interface, and, yes, inspired by the dog), was created by research teams at Seoul National University (SNU) and Hanyang University. The work behind it, which was accepted for publication in Nature Communications, shows the model can conjure DNA origami designs that work in the real world for user-requested shapes. For a design like the Mona Lisa, that doesnât mean simply tracing an outline; the model considers the chemical rules of DNA to tell researchers how unpaired DNA strands should be sequenced so that molecular forces will cause them to self-contort into the required shape.DNA origami techniques have been around for two decades now, with potential applications ranging from nanoscale robots to therapeutic structures that interact with cells. But these innovations have been slowed by how time-consuming and expensive the DNA structure design process can be.âTraditionally, we need some expertise, background knowledge, and know-how to design the proper nanostructures that we intend to make,â says Kyounghwa Jeon, a Ph.D. candidate at SNU. The work requires humans running algorithms and tweaking results until the desired shape is achieved and structurally stable. With Generative SNUPI, she says, users could, in theory, go straight from drawing a target shape to physically assembling the DNA. Rebecca Taylor, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the research, says the new generative platform is exciting for researchers. âThe entire field is sort of enabled and held back by its tools. When you make a new tool that enables a new tech, a new capability, thatâs just such a big advance for the field.â Generative SNUPI designs DNA sequences that, when synthesized, fold into nanoscale replicas of user-requested shapes.Source images: Chien Truong-Quoc, Kyounghwa Jeon, et al.How AI can design DNA origamiDesigning DNA origami using Generative SNUPI begins with a target shape. That could be something with complex curvature, like the outline of a dogâs face, or a more simple geometric pattern. Next, the new tech comes into play: Generative SNUPI applies a diffusion model, which adds and refines noise to the input shape to create the desired output in DNA form. Diffusion models are how platforms like DALL-E and Midjourney create AI-generated imagery.âWhat it looks like is one of those kids crafts, where you decorate something with glue and then put glitter all over it,â says Taylor. When the noise is removedâor the glitter is shaken offâthe design is revealed. âTheyâre basically just saying âpopulate this guide that I have with the DNA,â but they also know how DNA comes together. ⌠Thatâs the thing that itâs really been trained on.âThe arts-and-crafts metaphors only continue once Generative SNUPI returns the DNA sequences that form the target shape. Scientists chemically synthesize short DNA strands called staples and used biological methods to produce a long strand called a scaffold. The staples pull the scaffold into shape in a way that Jeon says is âvery similar to stapling paper.â The staple-scaffold relationship exploits DNAâs imperative to bond guanine to cytosine and adenine to thymine; the exact positions of each of these molecules are dictated by Generative SNUPI during the design process. Researchers were able to produce a variety of DNA origami structures, but some did not hold their shape at first, notes Do-Nyun Kim, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at SNU. âThis occurred not because Generative SNUPI had an error, but because the drawn shape was, in fact, structurally unstable,â he says. In response, they added a step before actually designing the DNA sequence to predict the structural integrity of the input shape. To expand Generative SNUPIâs capacity for real-world applications, Kim says that DNA origami designs will need to be less rigid than what the model is currently able to produce. The technology reaching its full potential could mean life-saving uses like drug delivery and immunotherapy, but these uses often require flexibility.âMost molecular structures are dynamic and reconfigure in response to external stimuli to perform their designated functions,â he says. âSo, we plan to extend the current work to the design of dynamically reconfigurable structures in future research.â
The funding discussions point to investor interest in applying AI to make breakthroughs in life sciences.
Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and other publishers allege that Google trained its AI on copyrighted works without the necessary permissions.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is proposing an AI "standards body" modeled after FINRA, to test frontier models and develop best practices for their release.
Reflection AI has signed a $1 billion deal to access Nebius' compute. Reflection was founded in 2024 and is developing open source AI technology.
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue says enterprises increasingly want open models, due to cost, accessibility, and ownership. Do frontier models still matter if most production AI ends up running on open models?
Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start […]
The AI chip boom just produced its biggest Wall Street moment yet. Now SK Hynix and Samsung are being asked to build U.S. factories.
OpenAI's latest family of models promises improvements across a range of areas, including cybersecurity.
The AI firm Anthropic has developed a technique that has given it the clearest glimpse yet at whatâs really going on inside large language models as they answer questions or carry out tasks. What they found ranges from the mundane to the unnerving. Researchers at the company built a tool called the Jacobian lens (or…
Meta's pitch to users is Spark's ability to handle large agentic workloads, fix bugs, and help with large code migrations â the kind of automation that enterprises are increasingly turning to AI companies to provide.
The company is taking a modular approach to designing these chips, anticipating that their needs will change as AI evolves rapidly by the time the chips are in production.
About two weeks after OpenAI's GPT-5.6 was caught up in regulatory drama - rolled out only to government-approved organizations during a "limited preview" period - the company has received the Trump administration's greenlight for a public rollout of the model. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it "the best model we have ever produced." To celebrate, […]
The large language models (LLMs) that form the basis of generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can generate uncannily human-like text and images. But these models still struggle with a skill that, ironically, looks at face value to be right in their wheelhouse: analyzing structured data. A new type of generative AI is set to change this situation.Although you can get your favorite chatbot to solve intractable math problems, review dense legal documents, compose a catchy pop song, or put together some slick PowerPoint slides, give it anything more than a small table and it doesnât have a clue what to do.For most companies and organizations, the most important data sits in spreadsheets. Whether itâs a bankâs transaction logs, a marketing agencyâs website metrics, clinical trial participantsâ vital signs, or the vast amount of proton collision information produced at atom smashers like the Large Hadron Collider, structured, row-and-column data runs the world, and LLMs canât deal with it.AI startup Fundamental is pioneering a new type of AI foundation model, known as a large tabular model (LTM), to fill the gap. Fundamental came out of stealth mode on 5 February 2026 with US $275 million in funding and a model called NEXUS, purpose-built for tabular data. Now, the model is being adopted by companies such as Amazon Web Services, while others race to build their own LTMs. Why LLMs struggle with spreadsheetsPart of why structured data has garnered less attention is a very human bias, argues Boris van Breugel, a senior AI researcher based in Amsterdam. âPeople like to see images, videos, and ChatGPT responses,â he says. âBut tabular data really lags behind because itâs not fun to look at numbers.â Different tabular datasets are also difficult to compare, explains van Breugel, who co-wrote a prescient position paper on this topic in 2024. Whereas most language has similar semantics, making LLMs well-suited to being trained on vast amounts of text data, van Breugel argues that it is much harder to train a single tabular model on tables with very different variables. Additionally, language is sequential by nature (as are music, images, and video). Changing the order of words in a sentence may change or completely destroy its meaning. But the structured data you find in spreadsheets isnât sequential. You can swap the order of columns or play around with rows, but the underlying factual meaning of the data remains the same.This independence from linear order is incompatible with an LLMâs fundamental purpose of predicting the next value in a linear sequence. âWith LLMs, even slightly changing the input, you get a different output,â says Jeremy Fraenkel, CEO of Fundamental. âThatâs fine and actually often desirable for LLMs, but when youâre making a prediction of whether a transaction is fraudulent or not, you want to make sure that the prediction is the same, or deterministic, no matter what.âDeveloping Fundamentalâs LTMCurrent tabular data solutions are limited to machine learning algorithms, such as XGBoost, that have been around for more than 15 years and are used by organizations globally. These algorithmsâcalled gradient-boosted decision treesâhave to be trained and optimized by data scientists over the course of months for each and every use case. In contrast, NEXUS and other emerging LTMs are foundational, leveraging learning amassed from pre-training on diverse databases so that they can be applied across a range of different predictive tasks with minimal bespoke feature engineering or task-specific model building.And unlike LLMs, which primarily model sequences of tokens, LTMs model the structure of tabular data directly. They jointly learn from each entryâs numerical value, what it represents, and how it relates to other entries. For example, imagine an entry in a grocery stock inventory table for bananas: The LTM can take in not just the magnitudeâsay, 500âbut the fact that the entry represents the current banana stock quantity, its category (produce), and the statistical properties that link the entry with the rest of the column. This contextual understanding enables more accurate reasoning and prediction over structured data.According to Fraenkel, one of Fundamentalâs biggest challenges in developing NEXUS was obtaining the right training data. Unlike natural language, which is abundant and broadly uniform in structure, tabular data is relatively hard to findâmuch of the data is sensitive or proprietaryâand diverse. There are very few similarities between, for instance, a biology dataset and a financial one. That combination of factors meant Fundamental needed to invest in building a huge training set.âWe pre-trained NEXUS on billions of tables using a combination of proprietary datasets acquired through partnerships and licensing, high-quality public and open-source datasets, and data augmentation techniques that expanded the diversity and coverage of our training corpus,â Fraenkel says, though he is keen to point out that NEXUS is not trained on customer data. In fact, it is a confidential computing platform, which means that Fundamental physically cannot access customer data, let alone train on it.This feature was most likely a key consideration when in June, Amazon Web Services (AWS) embedded NEXUS in Amazon SageMaker, widely considered the default operating system for secure machine learning. This brings NEXUS to many customersâ often sensitive dataâa contrasting approach to LLMs, where the data has to be imported to the model.âWith Amazon, we have a first-party partnership, which means that our model exists as if itâs a native AWS solution,â Fraenkel says. âAnd over time, the goal is to expand these types of relationships to allow [end users] to really access their data wherever they do their predictions.âThe future of data analysisThough Fundamental has taken the lead, at least in enterprise applications, the company is not alone in pursuing foundational LTMs. In March, Feedzai, which provides fraud and financial crime prevention services, and credit card company Mastercard separately launched similar proprietary technologies focused on finance. Then, in late June, Google launched its own foundational competitor, TabFM, trained entirely on hundreds of millions of synthetic datasets. And machine learning researchers are not far behind either. FlexTab, TabICL, and iLTM are just three of a raft of LTMs developed by the research community in the past year, all in the pursuit of bringing the success of LLMs to the tabular domain.For all involved, the direction of travel is clear. âI would be very surprised if most data processing and analysis is not done through an automated system in the future, whether thatâs an LLM, an LTM, or some combination,â van Breugel says. âMost people donât necessarily like to do data analysis, and these systems will be able to do it a lot better.âFraenkel agrees. âI see the relationship between LLMs and LTMs as being a bit like the human brain: The left side is good at reasoning and understanding and summarizing text, and the right side is really good at understanding numbers and statistics and patterns,â he says. âBut itâs when you combine both of those that you really get something much more powerful.â
At an internal meeting, the Meta CEO reportedly said that AI development efforts were not moving as quickly as anticipated.
The news comes about a week after OpenAI announced its own custom AI chip in a partnership with Broadcom.
Cloudflare is giving AI companies until September 15 to separate web crawlers used for search from those used for AI training and agents, or risk being blocked by default on many publisher sites.
Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business, selling access to AI compute power and models. The move would pit it against the big cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
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. Claude Science is Anthropicâs newest flagship product At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers yesterday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research…
Anthropic said it would begin restoring access to the Fable on July 1.
After weeks of negotiating with the Trump administration, Anthropic is finally going to be able to bring Claude Fable 5 back online. In a post on X, Anthropic said it plans to begin restoring access Wednesday to users globally on Claude platforms, and that the company would re-enable access on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft […]
At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers on Tuesday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research in the same way that Claude Code supports software engineering. Like Claude Code, Claude Science can autonomously carry out meaningful work when given concise, high-level instructions, and it has access…
Anthropic's Claude Science is a workbench that gives scientists one environment to do computational research, saving them from the need to bounce between databases, pipelines, and tools.
Engineers on the new team will embed within companies to deploy purpose-built agents, focusing on fast deployments and customer self-sufficiency.
Artificial intelligence is transforming what is possible in agriculture, but industry leaders should be wary of investing in AI without first laying the groundwork.  The use cases are promising, especially for an industry navigating volatile fertilizer costs, unpredictable weather, and margins that leave little room for error. Research shows AI-enabled predictive models can improve crop…
Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but the era of total dependence might be ending.   OpenAI just shared its plans to spice things up with JalapeĂąo, its custom inference chip built with Broadcom, joining Google, Apple, and SpaceX in a growing list of companies building their way out of single-supplier risk. The goal is less of a […]
Less than 24 hours after news broke that OpenAI would stagger its next model release at the request of the Trump administration, that model, GPT-5.6, is here. On Friday, the company unveiled the limited preview of its new GPT 5.6 model suite: Sol, the flagship; Terra, a medium-tier model for "high-volume work"; and Luna, a […]
Agent-testing startup Patronus AI, founded by former Meta AI researchers, is experiencing nearly insatiable demand, its investor says.
General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop something closer to human intuition.
Amazonâs latest India investment comes as global tech companies race to expand AI infrastructure in the country.
Named JalapeĂąo, the new processor was designed specifically for the unique needs of OpenAI's inference systems.
OpenAI has just revealed a new "intelligence processor" chip for AI servers made in partnership with Broadcom. The chip, called Jalapeño, is designed to power current and future large language models, according to an announcement on Wednesday. Jalapeño is an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), meaning it's designed for a specific purpose: AI inference. With AI […]
SummaryRFIC design is a complex âdark artâ that limits progress in wireless technologies like 5G, autonomous vehicles, and satellite communications.Princeton researchers use reinforcement learning and inverse design to rapidly create RFICs from scratch.Diffusion models rapidly generate novel or human-interpretable RF layouts, achieving record performance and drastically reducing design time.Future progress needs large, shared chip design datasets and open ecosystems so AI can learn universal electromagnetic and circuit behaviors.Take a moment and try to imagine your life without the wireless advances of the past three decades.Have you lost your luggage? What a shame AirTags have not been invented. The airline representative has promised to call with updates, so settle in for a long wait by the kitchen telephone, because there are no affordable cellphones. Youâll be stuck listening to whatever is on the radio while you wait, because there are no streaming services. Thatâs not even to speak of all the movie plots that would have been ruined.This is just a tiny sliver of how wireless technology makes itself felt in your day-to-day existence. The effects it has had on supply chains, infrastructure, and how the economy runs have been world-altering.None of it would be possible without the radio-frequency integrated circuits that allow all our devices to unobtrusively send and receive information.Now imagine what the further evolution of this technology will bring: Wide-spread autonomous vehicles, quantum communications, 6G mobile service and satellite communications. Continued momentum will depend on newer and more advanced versions of todayâs RF chips.But thereâs the rub. Whereas the design of most of the worldâs computing chips has been standardized into its own science, RF design has remained stubbornly in the realm of art. A dark art, even, that is mastered only through years of experience. As any sorcerer will tell you, the dark arts keep their own schedule. And that schedule is impeding progress not just in RF chip design but in every other technology that depends on it.About seven years ago, in the wake of AlphaGoâs victory over world Go champion Lee Sedol, my students at Princeton and I began to wonder: Could AI be taught this art as well? Recent successes suggest that, to a large extent, it can. Over the last few years, our group and other leaders in the field have started to develop machine-learning-driven algorithmic methods for designing RFICs. Some of the resulting chips look more like modern art than circuit layouts. Yet in many cases, the physical prototypes bested state-of-the art circuits in terms of performance. The real achievement, however, is that it took the AI orders of magnitude less time to conceive a working design than it would a human designer.This is not about one or two RF chips. AI-enabled design could be the future of all RF design, and maybe much more.The Dark Art of RFIC DesignSo why do these chips all have to be crafted by hand? Why arenât RFICs designed with an algorithmic synthesis process, much as CPUs and GPUs are?The design of RFICs is an exercise in engineering across multiple physical domains. Maxwellâs equations, operating across different spatial and temporal scales, govern how electromagnetic fields interact with active and passive devices that must be carefully codesigned for the chip to function. Alongside these are the laws of thermodynamics, which determine how heat is generated and removed during operation, as well as the mechanics of thermal expansion and contraction that dictate how reliably the chip and its packaging survive temperature changes.AI Could Short-Circuit RFIC Design The design of a radio-frequency integrated circuit requires human intuition and multiple, often-repeated optimization steps. The hope is that through an understanding of Maxwellâs Equations, an AI can be taught to short-circuit this process and quickly produce a design.Simultaneously accounting for all the physical constraints these impose makes the design space almost impossibly large. Every decision involves complex priorities that often compete with one another, preventing the optimization of any of them.To better understand the issue, letâs walk through the steps involved, after which youâll better understand why a single new chip design takes years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of the area of radio-frequency integrated circuits is dominated by complex electromagnetic structures. Human-designed RFICs, like this broadband power amplifier [1], start with templates and follow a symmetric, understandable pattern. But freed from the constraints of human-designed templates and the need for humans to even understand the rationale of electromagnetic structures, power amplifier ICs [2â5] and low-noise amplifiers [6] can take on truly wild-looking yet efficient designs. SENGUPTA LABLetâs say youâre an engineer assigned to design a new 28-gigahertz power amplifier for a 5G-millimeter-wave handset. (This is the type of RFIC that boosts the 5G signals on your phone and transmits them to the antenna where they can be picked up by a distant base station). Where do you start?RFIC design has some features in common with house building. Just as the blueprint for a house dictates the number of bedrooms and bathrooms to be built and the hallways connecting them, the blueprint for an RFICâcalled the architectureâestablishes the kinds of elements the RFIC needs to fulfill its intended function. Instead of rooms, the architecture includes, for example, the number of stages of amplification your power amplifier needs. Instead of hallways, it shows the paths that signals must take to get through those stages.The blueprint for RFICs is actually mostly hallway; passive elements, like inductors and transmission lines, take up far more real estate than active elements like transistors.Hereâs why. As you have probably experienced yourself, a typical CPUâs transistors overheat when faced with operating frequencies of just a few gigahertz. The frequencies RFICs can operate at are higher by an order of magnitudeâ28 and 39 GHz for 5G signals, 26.5 to 40 GHz and even higher for satellite communications, and 77 GHz for automotive radar. Under this onslaught, a CPUâs transistors would fail.RFIC transistors avoid this fate because these chips cleverly manage the signalâs energy with careful electromagnetic design. This takes the form of byzantine networks of metal elements that dominate the chipâs real estate. These structures are geometrically regular, often symmetrical, and so intricately constructed they sometimes resemble lacelike filigree. But while they may look decorative, they are essential to the chipâs functioning.Electrically speaking, these âhallwaysâ work more like the chipâs plumbing. Like plumbing, this extensive labyrinth of passives confines electromagnetic energy only to the places it should be traveling around the chip.The major challenge in RFIC design is putting all these elements together to ensure they work, just as constructing a house from its blueprints demands exact specs for load-bearing beams, pipes, and external walls. On an RFIC, the architecture needs to be realized with physically fabricable transistors and passive components that are connected just so, to permit the signal to travel through the chip and be processed. The way these devices are connected locally is what we call the circuitâs topology.The RFIC Design ProcessTo make that power amplifier, then, your first step is to identify a candidate circuit template: The combination of structures that will meet the goals of a particular architecture with a specific circuit topology. Over the years, researchers have eased your burden by developing reusable design templates for specific functions. For example, templates suggest how many amplification stages a circuit needs (because sometimes, combining the output of two smaller amplifiers will result in better bandwidth and efficiency than you would get from a single larger one). And they suggest what the general configuration of the passive structures should be. Today there is an extensive library of such templates.However, these canât simply be used off-the-shelf, because each comes with trade-offs. Some have better gain at the expense of stability; some better bandwidth at the expense of efficiency; still others are more energy efficient at the expense of output power, and so on. There is rarely a clear best choice.To arrive at the âsweet spotâ where all these different parameters are balanced into optimal harmony, designers will typically lay out several different versions of the circuit, using intuitions and methods they have picked up in their years of training.The challenge is that the decision around the architecture, circuit topology, or the electromagnetic passives cannot be done separately. One decision influences the others. So, designing an RF circuit can often feel like trying to fit an oversized carpet into too small a roomâpress down one corner, and another pops up.At microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies, even the smallest misstep is the difference between a chip that works and one that doesnât, and any number of things can go wrong. For example, when an electromagnetic wave encounters a transistorâor any other component âthe path it travels must be properly âmatchedâ to what comes next. If it isnât, some of the energy reflects backward instead of flowing forward. Imagine trying to connect a high-pressure fire hose directly to a narrow garden hose. Without the right adapter, water will splash backward at the junction. Very little will make it through. In electronics, this is called the impedance-matching problem.To prevent those reflections, engineers design special transitions, essentially microscopic adapters, that smooth the handoff between components. On a chip, these adapters can be surprisingly intricate. They donât just pass the signal along; they can also split it, combine it, or distribute it across multiple paths with carefully controlled timing and strength.Once youâve done the architecture, plumbing, and everything in between comes the moment of truth. Have all the choices you have navigated through the enormous design space resulted in an RFIC that meets its specifications? If the specifications are not met, you will have to go back, either redoing the topology or the entire architecture, and repeat the whole process. So get ready for months of time- and resource-heavy simulation and iteration. Perhaps you now see why, for decades, a core belief has persisted in the RFIC community: âRF design is an art.â It was said that only an experienced designerâwith an artisanal understanding of how the pieces make up the wholeâcould master the subtleties of analog and RF design. Unfortunately, this entrenched notion has long held back algorithmic innovations in the field just when we need them most. Traditional, artisanal RFIC design is hitting its limits as the complexity of these systems inexorably grows.AI for RFIC DesignWhile RFIC designers continued their battle against their âoversized carpetâ problem, a series of interesting developments emerged in allied disciplines. Across a range of other previously intractable problems like protein folding and climate modeling, AI has been able to successfully navigate multidimensional complex spaces. This gave us the incentive to look deeper into AI for RF. After all, the combinatorial complexity of protein folding is not that different from the nature of the design space in our domain.We were not the first to think of using artificial intelligence to speed up parts of RFIC design. Researchers had previously trained machine learning algorithms on circuit templates in the hope of speeding up the normal optimization processes. While this approach was undoubtedly faster than humans at optimizing templates, it still relied fundamentally on libraries of existing designs invented by humans.Training an AI to Design a Chip A machine learning system learns to do end-to-end RFIC design like other AIs learned to play such games as Go. Essentially, it turns the process into a game, learning from the results of its own efforts.We didnât want that. We wanted to break free from the restrictions of prefabricated topologies. Because while a designerâs experience and hard-won heuristics are crucial to building a working design, they also place fundamental limits on it. Furthermore, such an approach would necessarily require simulation steps as part of the optimization cycle, and even the fastest simulations use a lot of computing resources. Worse still, in many advanced cases, such as for broadband designs, there are no existing templates.But if we didnât start with templates, where could we start?The goal here was to allow algorithms to determineâentirely from scratchâevery parameter for architecture, constituent circuits, and electromagnetic passives. This approach differs fundamentally from conventional optimization, which is limited to determining the parametersâlike transistor dimensions and passive component geometriesâthat optimize structures originally devised by humans.In our new approach, the architecture begins essentially from nothing and is progressively assembled through successive iterations. The system explores the design space by generating myriad candidate circuit combinations and mapping the resulting performance trade-offs as it navigates this landscape. Because the process is not biased by prior human design choices, it can produce completely novel circuit topologies that look markedly different from those created by human designers.In some ways, the approach echoes AI systems such as AlphaGo Zero, which achieved superhuman performance not because it was trained on games played by humans but because it explored the rules by playing against itself. Similarly, our algorithm develops new circuit architectures by exploring and evaluating its own design strategies. In so doing, it learns to understand circuits, electromagnetics, and the close codesign they need to achieve the end-to-end design of RFIC.Inverse Design for RFICsTo realize this capability, we proceeded in two stages. First, we developed a reinforcement-learning (RL) framework that determines the optimal system architecture, circuit topology, device parameters, and even the properties of the electromagnetic interfaces that connect different circuit elements. In this stage, the algorithm effectively defines how signals should propagate and interact across the system.The algorithm trains very similarly to how a computer learns to play a game. If you let it play enough times, it can learn to play better by observing the relationship between the actions it took and the score it achieves. In a similar way, the RL agent here learns to design effective circuits by playing with a set of combinations, and over time, it can map the space between the circuit performance to its architecture, topology, and parameters. This training takes a few days to a week, but once trained, the agent can design circuits very quicklyThe next step was to determine the physical structure of the ICâs electromagneticsâthe plumbingâthat can create the desired properties of the passive elements, which are characterized by a set of metrics called scattering parameters. These measure if a signal entering a component actually moves forwardâor is reflecting backward, being wasted, as in our previous example with the fire hose and the garden hose.Deriving the structure from the desired scattering parameters is an example of an approach called inverse design, which appears across many areas of engineering. In structural engineering, for example, one might collaborate with an architect on a physical goalâsuch as creating large interior spaces with high ceilingsâand then determine the arrangement of arches or buttresses that can support it.Generative AI for Electromagnetic NetworksBut RF integrated crcuits pose a particular challenge for inverse design: The process must account simultaneously for circuit behavior and the electromagnetic responses of the interconnects and passive elements that link them together. But it has to figure that out without doing a lot of artisanal iterating.So we replaced our RF circuit simulator with an AI-based emulator. This AI model can predict the behavior of electromagnetic fields going through any structureâeven totally arbitrary two-dimensional shapesâwithout having to compute the underlying physics from scratch, as simulation tools do. It would predict the solution of Maxwellâs equations and tell you the scattering parameters for any structure you showed it, without actually doing the math. With such an AI in hand, what a time-consuming electromagnetic solver normally takes minutes or hours to accomplish is reduced to milliseconds.We chose to build our emulator around a convolutional neural networkâa machine learning model that has been remarkably successful for image processing. Such networks can extract spatial features from any structure, and it turns out that the image of a structure contains a lot of spatial information that can accurately predict its electromagnetic performance. Then we trained it on a vast number of random pixelated structures whose scattering parameters had been labeled.Once we had our inverse-design RL and suitable AI emulator, we essentially had an end-to-end AI designer. So we asked it to design us a power amplifier.Unconventional RF ArchitecturesIn 2023, we published this proof of conceptâa power amplifier targeting the millimeter-wave band, specifically spanning 30 to 100 GHz, which covers most of the relevant 5G and radar frequencies. The final design achieved the best combination of wide bandwidth, output power, and efficiency then reported for a silicon-based power amplifierâmeaning it could amplify a large amount of data across a wide swath of frequenciesâwhile maintaining record efficiency.The structure of the ICâs electromagnetic pathways was unlike anything any human would ever consider. Since the AI is not trained on human designs, the layout that emerged looked more like an arbitrary pattern or perhaps a QR code than the regular symmetrical structures we are used to seeing.One unexpected insight revealed by this prototype, and our research generally, is that thereâs no evidence that the templates weâve historically relied on are even close to optimal for modern design goals. Itâs not that a human designer can never come up with a better design. But with the removal of the templates and the time to synthesize cycle upon cycle of optimized circuits, it is now clear that AI-driven synthesis could break traditional design barriers and push the limits of RFIC capabilities.Our 5G amplifier had only one input port and one output port. Adding more inputs and outputs to a design is not straightforward. Every port electromagnetically couples to every other port, so the scattering parameters quickly add up. Two ports give you four scattering parameters. Four ports, 16 scattering parameters. The math gets ugly fast. Could our model keep up?We next trained our model on larger classes of electromagnetic structures with many input and output ports. In 2024, we published work showing that multiport integrated circuits are no problem for these AI algorithms either. Where previously multiport electromagnetic simulation required days or weeks of toil, this model evolved new structures in minutes. Since then, a plethora of work in the space by research communities across the globe have demonstrated the power of inverse design in RFIC.Combining the reinforcement learning framework with the inverse design, we now had the ability to create an RFIC from specifications all the way to a fabrication-ready layout. Weâve so far shown this is true for RFICs ranging from low-noise amplifiers to subterahertz and broadband power amplifiers. The hope is that this will work just as well for other circuits.Making AI Designs InterpretableOur goal was to make RFIC design better and easier, but we didnât want to make it beyond human understanding. Chip testing and debugging is a long, arduous process, sometimes even more so than design. Engineers often prefer ICs to have interpretable structures, so that if a problem crops up, they can understand how the chip works well enough to debug it.To create structures that are more interpretable, we turned to diffusion models, which you may know from their remarkable ability to generate realistic images from text prompts.AI-driven synthesis could break traditional design barriers and push the limits of RFIC capabilities. Imagine you go to your favorite image-generation engine and ask it to create a painting of the sky in the style of Picasso, Van Gogh, or Michelangelo. You will get images that capture the essence of their brushstrokes, their use of colors, and their framing. All are pictures of the sky nonetheless, but in different styles.Electromagnetic design is similar in that multiple structures can have very similar electromagnetic responses. Instead of using text input, we used scattering parameters as our input, and the electromagnetic structure of an RFIC chip as our output. As part of the inputs to the diffusion model, we created a dial that sets the spatial frequency of the final structure. By turning the dial, a designer can direct the model to synthesize structures with low (classical-looking and interpretable), medium (mazelike structures), or high (pixelated or arbitrarily-shaped) spatial frequency.From prompts to output, the entire process took about 6 minutes. With this diffusion model, algorithms can now both discover novel architectures and accelerate the creation of conventional, so-called classical ones.All an RFIC designer needs to do is specify virtually any valid set of scattering parameters. As long as they are physically realizable under Maxwellâs equations, the model pops out a corresponding structure as if it were a vending machine.The Future of AI-Driven RFIC DesignThe results of our investigations have drawn the attention of the RF community. The traditional bottom-up design process is clearly beginning to reverse.But there are still questions: How generalizable are these methods? Can they consistently deliver truly high performance? Can we get to a place where AI produces designs that maximize every conceivable trade-off, holistically optimizing every parameter to its most ideal physical state? We want to take this strategy beyond RFIC design and invent other kinds of circuits that are different from anything humans have ever done.These are exciting and ambitious prospects, but we are not there yet. AI can hallucinate a design that creates bad circuits that donât work. This means verification methods need to remain under human oversight. And, while hallucinations are rare, it would still be good to reduce their occurrence.History suggests that meeting these dreams of the future will take much more data than weâve been using. Before the creation of the ImageNet repositoryâa repository of 14 million varied, human-annotated imagesâimage-recognition models didnât function well in the real world. The datasets they had been trained on were too tiny to be effective. ImageNetâs massive amounts of training data ushered in a revolution that led to AI that can generalize and recognize images in the wild. The rest was history.If the goal for RFIC and analog design is a universal foundational modelâsomething that learns the governing laws of electromagnetics and circuit behaviorâthen we also need data.The good news is that this data is plentiful. Around the world, countless engineers at companies and academic labs simulate nearly identical RF circuits and passive structures every day. The bad news is that itâs all locked away behind nondisclosure agreements.Open ecosystems have propelled other areas, and we think the RFIC community should do the same. There had been some movement toward this. Natcast, the operator of the U.S. CHIPS and Science Actâs R&D program, would have bolstered shared infrastructure and innovation for the next generation of wireless, sensing, and defense technologies. Unfortunately, both the organization and the program it ran specifically for machine learning and RFICs have been closed.But the momentum Natcastâs effort sparked hasnât died out. Building on our early work, groups across the community have already demonstrated remarkable advances. AI-driven IC design is part of a much broader technological shift. From biology and materials science to automotive and aerospace engineering, AI is reshaping how complex systems are conceived and optimized. Deeper collaboration between AI researchers and chip designers will unlock the fieldâs full potential. Itâs by no means a foregone conclusion, but if we get this right, this genie wonât stay in its bottle.
AI is booming. New use cases are emerging each day. To capitalize on the technologyâs potential, enterprises require data at scale. In many cases, though, the relevant information is blocked or unstructured, which limits its use by AI models.  To understand this challenge, consider the foundation of the web itself. The web was not designed…
What does an AI company do after one of those not-acqui-hire deals? Groq raised money, is leaning into its neocloud business, and is hiring new execs.
Reflection AI will pay $150 million a month beginning July 1, 2026 through 2029 for immediate access to Nvidia's latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware across SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee.
Large language models have moved out of the research lab and into engineersâ daily workflow. LLMs serve as reasoning engines that can orchestrate complex tasks including identifying vulnerabilities in source code and transforming fragmented project discussions into rigorous technical specifications.While the general public uses AI tools to write email and plan vacations, technical professionals use LLMs as core architectural elements that are fundamentally changing how digital infrastructures are built and maintained. As the AI models move into mainstream engineering practice, the demand for technical expertise is rising.The LLM technology market is expected to grow by about 33 percent every year through 2030, according to MarketsandMarkets. The rapid expansion suggests that proficiency in implementing and securing the models is transitioning from a niche into a core requirement for technologists.More than just a better search engineTo use LLMs effectively, technical professionals must move beyond treating them as conversational robots. At a fundamental level, the AI systems are built on the transformer architecture, a framework that replaced the older method of processing data in a fixed, sequential order. Unlike earlier models that analyzed information one step at a time, transformers use self-attention mechanisms to ingest vast datasets simultaneously.For technical professionals, LLMs are core architectural elements that are fundamentally changing how digital infrastructures are built and maintained.Relying on such LLMs without understanding their internal logic creates a significant reliability risk. To build tools that work consistently, developers must understand the core principles that govern how the models process information and generate results. By mastering how a model processes information and how its internal settings influence the result, developers can move away from a trial-and-error approach toward a more precise one to ensure the AI tool handles complex data reliably.Four ways LLMs are changing jobsHere are areas that integrate large language models.Moving past basic prompts. Developers are using application program interfaces (APIs) to connect LLMs directly to their databases and software tools. Employing the APIs allows AI to perform work such as executing code or searching through internal repositories.Fixing the âhallucinationâ problem. LLMs are at risk of hallucinations, which are generated facts or code that looks correct but actually is wrong or broken. To fix the problem, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) forces AI to look up information in a trusted source such as a companyâs database.Prioritizing data security. When using AI with proprietary code, security is a major concern. Engineers must learn how to set up âprivateâ instances of the models to ensure that sensitive company data stays within a secure cloud environment and is not used to train public versions.The future of collaboration. By automating repetitive coding tasks and summarizing thousands of pages of documentation, LLMs let engineers spend more time on high-level designs and solving important issues.Online course program helps with mastering the techThe gap between people who use AI and those who understand how to build with it is growing wider. To help technical professionals stay ahead, IEEE offers a five-course online program, Large Language Models Demystified, available through the IEEE Learning Network.The program, developed by IEEE Educational Activities in partnership with the IEEE Computer Society, is built for people who want to understand the âhowâ and the âwhyâ behind the technology. Rather than just teaching basic prompting, the curriculum dives into the engineering behind generative AI, including:Evolution, impact, and hands-on exercises: the shift from statistical methods to modern transformers, including hands-on model optimization.Understanding transformer architectures: the mathematical core of self-attention and positional encoding, implemented in NumPy and Python.Architectural analysis and implementation: advanced LLM design with practical model-building exercises.Training and modeling with PyTorch: end-to-end pipelines in PyTorch, leveraging parameter-efficient techniques such as low-rank adaptation and quantization.Optimization, alignment, and deployment: performance scaling, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), group-relative policy optimization, RAG, and agentic AI.Upon completion of the program, participants earn professional development credits and a digital badge from IEEE to verify their expertise.Enroll in the course program on the IEEE Learning Network.Organizations looking to prepare their teams to work on LLMs can connect with an IEEE content specialist to discuss group enrollment and tailored training paths.
Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails.  Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is […]
Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails.  Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is […]
Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade. The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has started to bring the receipts, sharing the…
OpenAI is bulking up before its IPO, landing Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and former Trump AI policy official Dean Ball in the same week.
AWS is in talks to sell its chips to other data centers. CEO Andy Jassy has said this represents a $50 billion opportunity for the company.
FERC told grid operators to give data centers a fast lane for interconnections, but it failed to address electricity supply shortages.