2026-04-17 22:07:41
Ellie’s Pi Day post: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/pi-day-2026-food-institute/
How Ellie orchestrated the baking of 30 pies: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/behind-the-scenes-of-thirty-pies/
2026-04-17 20:10:00
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.
There’s a theory that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” The idea is that Homo sapiens and a cousin species once bred, leaving some people today with a trace of Neanderthal DNA.
This DNA is arguably the 21st century’s most celebrated discovery in human evolution. But in 2024, a pair of French geneticists called into question the theory’s very foundations.
They proposed that what scientists interpret as interbreeding could instead be explained by population structure—the way genes concentrate in smaller, isolated groups.
Find out what it all means for human evolution.
—Ben Crair
This story is from the next issue of our print magazine, which is all about nature. Subscribe now to read it when it lands on Wednesday, April 22.
—Uri Maoz
AI is starting to shape real wars. It’s at the center of a legal battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon, playing a growing role in the conflict with Iran, and raising questions about how much humans should remain “in the loop.”
Under Pentagon guidelines, human oversight is meant to provide accountability, context, and security. But the idea of “humans in the loop” is a comforting distraction.
The real danger isn’t that machines will act without oversight; it’s that human overseers have no idea what the machines are actually “thinking.” Thankfully, science may offer a way forward.
Read the full op-ed on the urgent need for new safeguards around AI warfare.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Despite blacklisting Anthropic, the White House wants its new model
Trump officials are negotiating access to Mythos. (Axios)
+ Anthropic said it was too dangerous for a public release. (Bloomberg $)
+ Finance ministers are alarmed about the security risks. (BBC)
+ Anthropic just rolled out a model that’s less risky than Mythos. (CNBC)
+ The Pentagon has pursued a culture war against the company. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Sam Altman’s side hustles have raised conflict-of-interest concerns
His opaque investments could influence decisions at OpenAI. (WSJ $)
+ A jury will soon decide if OpenAI abandoned its founding mission. (Wired $)
+ The company is making a big play for science. (MIT Technology Review)
3 A Starlink outage during drone tests exposed the Pentagon’s SpaceX reliance
It was one of several Navy test disruptions linked to Starlink. (Reuters $)
+ The DoD is also tapping Ford and GM for military innovations.(NYT $)
4 Data center delays threaten to choke AI expansion
40% of this year’s projects are at risk of falling behind schedule. (FT $)
+ Partly because no one wants a data center in their backyard. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Alibaba just released its own version of a world model
Happy Oyster is the latest attempt to extend AI’s ability to comprehend physical reality. (SCMP)
+ But they still need to understand cause and effect. (FT $)
6 Google’s Gemini is now generating AI images tailored to personal data
By analyzing users’ Google services and data. (Quartz)
+ Google says it will cut the need for detailed prompts. (TechCrunch)
7 OpenAI is beefing up its agentic coding and development system
Its Codex update is a direct shot at Claude Code. (The Verge)
+ But not everyone is convinced about AI coding. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Europe’s online age verification app is here
It’s available for free to any company that wants it. (Wired $)
9 Smartglasses are giving Korean theaters hope of a K-Pop moment
Their AI-powered translations are taking the shows to the world. (NYT $)
10 Global voice actors are fighting Hollywood’s AI push
Their voices are training the models that are replacing them. (Rest of World)
Quote of the day
—Rob Joyce, former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, tells Bloomberg how AI is creating new hacking threats.
One More Thing
The race to produce rare earth elements
Access to rare earth elements will determine which countries meet their goals for lowering emissions or generating energy from non-fossil-fuel sources. But some nations, including the US, are worried about the supply of these elements.
China dominates the market, while extraction in the US is limited. As a result, scientists and companies are exploring unconventional sources. Read the full story on their search for critical minerals.
—Mureji Fatunde
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ This ska cover of Rage Against the Machine is an upbeat way to start a revolution.
+ We finally know how far Stretch Armstrong can really stretch.
+ Customize these ambient sounds to wash away disruptive thoughts.
+ Here’s proof childhood dreams can come true: a girl guiding a seal to perform tricks.
2026-04-17 18:00:00
Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba.
The real ambition for many of these researchers was the robot of science fiction—one that could move through the world, adapt to different environments, and interact safely and helpfully with people. For the socially minded, such a machine could help those with mobility issues, ease loneliness, or do work too dangerous for humans. For the more financially inclined, it would mean a bottomless source of wage-free labor. Either way, a long history of failure left most of Silicon Valley hesitant to bet on helpful robots.
That has changed. The machines are yet unbuilt, but the money is flowing: Companies and investors put $6.1 billion into humanoid robots in 2025 alone, four times what was invested in 2024.
What happened? A revolution in how machines have learned to interact with the world.
Imagine you’d like a pair of robot arms installed in your home purely to do one thing: fold clothes. How would it learn to do that? You could start by writing rules. Check the fabric to figure out how much deformation it can tolerate before tearing. Identify a shirt’s collar. Move the gripper to the left sleeve, lift it, and fold it inward by exactly this distance. Repeat for the right sleeve. If the shirt is rotated, turn the plan accordingly. If the sleeve is twisted, correct it. Very quickly the number of rules explodes, but a complete accounting of them could produce reliable results. This was the original craft of robotics: anticipating every possibility and encoding it in advance.
Around 2015, the cutting edge started to do things differently: Build a digital simulation of the robotic arms and the clothes, and give the program a reward signal every time it folds successfully and a ding every time it fails. This way, it gets better by trying all sorts of techniques through trial and error, with millions of iterations—the same way AI got good at playing games.
The arrival of ChatGPT in 2022 catalyzed the current boom. Trained on vast amounts of text, large language models work not through trial and error but by learning to predict what word should come next in a sentence. Similar models adapted to robotics were soon able to absorb pictures, sensor readings, and the position of a robot’s joints and predict the next action the machine should take, issuing dozens of motor commands every second.
This conceptual shift—to reliance on AI models that ingest large amounts of data—seems to work whether that helpful robot is supposed to talk to people, move through an environment, or even do complicated tasks. And it was paired with other ideas about how to accomplish this new way of learning, like deploying robots even if they aren’t yet perfect so they can learn from the environment they’re meant to work in. Today, Silicon Valley roboticists are dreaming big again. Here’s how that happened.
A movable social robot carried out conversations long before the age of LLMs.
An MIT robotics researcher named Cynthia Breazeal introduced an armless, legless, faceless robot called Jibo to the world in 2014. It looked, in fact, like a lamp. Breazeal’s aim was to create a social robot for families, and the idea pulled in $3.7 million in a crowdsourced funding campaign. Early preorders cost $749.
The early Jibo could introduce itself and dance to entertain kids, but that was about it. The vision was always for it to become a sort of embodied assistant that could handle everything from scheduling and emails to telling stories. It earned a number of devoted users, but ultimately the company shut down in 2019.
In retrospect, one thing that Jibo really needed was better language capabilities. It was competing against Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, and all those technologies at the time relied on heavy scripting. In broad terms, when you spoke to them, software would translate your speech into text, analyze what you wanted, and create a response pulled from preapproved snippets. Those snippets could be charming, but they were also repetitive and simply boring—downright robotic. That was especially a challenge for a robot that was supposed to be social and family oriented.
What has happened since, of course, is a revolution in how machines can generate language. Voice mode from any leading AI provider is now engaging and impressive, and multiple hardware startups are trying (and failing) to build products that take advantage of it.
But that comes with a new risk: While scripted conversations can’t really go off the rails, ones generated by AI certainly can. Some popular AI toys have, for example, talked to kids about how to find matches and knives.
A robot hand trained with simulations tries to model the unpredictability and variation of the real world.
By 2018, every leading robotics lab was trying to scrap the old scripted rules and train robots through trial and error. OpenAI tried to train its robotic hand, Dactyl, virtually—with digital models of the hand and of the palm-size cubes Dactyl was supposed to manipulate. The cubes had letters and numbers on their faces; the model might set a task like “Rotate the cube so the red side with the letter O faces upward.”
Here’s the problem: A robotic hand might get really good at doing this in its simulated world, but when you take that program and ask it to work on a real version in the real world, the slight differences between the two can cause things to go awry. Colors might be slightly different, or the deformable rubber in the robot’s fingertips could turn out to be stretchier than it was in simulation.
The solution is called domain randomization. You essentially create millions of simulated worlds that all vary slightly and randomly from one another. In each one the friction might be less, or the lighting more harsh, or the colors darkened. Exposure to enough of this variation means the robots will be better able to manipulate the cube in the real world. The approach worked on Dactyl, and one year later it was able to use the same core techniques to do something harder: solving Rubik’s Cubes (though it worked only 60% of the time, and just 20% when the scrambles were particularly hard).
Still, the limits of simulation mean that this technique plays a far smaller role today than it did in 2018. OpenAI shuttered its robotics effort in 2021 but has recently started the division up again—reportedly focusing on humanoids.
Training on images from across the internet helps robots translate language into action.
Around 2022, Google’s robotics team was up to some strange things. It spent 17 months handing people robot controllers and filming them doing everything from picking up bags of chips to opening jars. The team ended up cataloguing 700 different tasks.
The point was to build and test one of the first large-scale foundation models for robotics. As with large language models, the idea was to input lots of text, tokenize it into a format an algorithm could work with, and then generate an output. Google’s RT-1 received input about what the robot was looking at and how the many parts of the robotic arm were positioned; then it took an instruction and translated it into motor commands to move the robot. When it had seen tasks before, it carried out 97% of them successfully; it succeeded at 76% of the instructions it hadn’t seen before.
The second iteration, RT-2, came out the following year and went even further. Instead of training on data specific to robotics, it went broad: It trained on more general images from across the internet, like the vision-language models lots of researchers were working on at the time. That allowed the robot to interpret where certain objects were in the scene.
“All these other things were unlocked,” says Kanishka Rao, a roboticist at Google DeepMind who led work on both iterations. “We could do things now like ‘Put the Coke can near the picture of Taylor Swift.’”
In 2025, Google DeepMind further fused the worlds of large language models and robotics, releasing a Gemini Robotics model with improved ability to understand commands in natural language.
An AI model that allows robotic arms to act like coworkers.
In 2017, before OpenAI shuttered its first robotics team, a group of its engineers spun out a project called Covariant, aiming to build not sci-fi humanoids but the most pragmatic of all robots: an arm that could pick up and move things in warehouses. After building a system based on foundation models similar to Google’s, Covariant deployed this platform in warehouses like those operated by Crate & Barrel and treated it as a data collection pipeline.
By 2024, Covariant had released a robotics model, RFM-1, that you could interact with like a coworker. If you showed an arm many sleeves of tennis balls, for example, you could then instruct it to move each sleeve to a separate area. And the robot could respond—perhaps predicting that it wouldn’t be able to get a good grip on the item and then asking for advice on which particular suction cups it should use.
This sort of thing had been done in experiments, but Covariant was launching it at significant scale. The company now had cameras and data collection machines in every customer location, feeding back even more data for the model to train on.
It wasn’t perfect. In a demo in March 2024 with an array of kitchen items, the robot struggled when it was asked to “return the banana” to its original location. It picked up a sponge, then an apple, then a host of other items before it finally accomplished the task.
It “doesn’t understand the new concept” of retracing its steps, cofounder Peter Chen told me at the time. “But it’s a good example—it might not work well yet in the places where you don’t have good training data.”
Chen and fellow founder Pieter Abbeel were soon hired by Amazon, which is currently licensing Covariant’s robotics model (Amazon did not respond to questions about how it’s being used, but the company runs an estimated 1,300 warehouses in the US alone).
Companies are putting this humanoid to the test in real-world settings.
The new investment dollars flowing to robotics startups are aimed largely at robots shaped not like lamps or arms but like people. Humanoid robots are supposed to be able to seamlessly enter the spaces and jobs where humans currently work, avoiding the need to retool assembly lines to accommodate new shapes such as giant arms.
It’s easier said than done. In the rare cases where humanoids appear in real warehouses, they’re often confined to test zones and pilot programs.
That said, Agility’s humanoid Digit appears to be doing some real work. The design—with exposed joints and a distinctly unhuman head—is driven more by function than by sci-fi aesthetics. Amazon, Toyota, and GXO (a logistics giant with customers like Apple and Nike) have all deployed it—making it one of the first examples of a humanoid robot that companies see as providing actual cost savings rather than novelty. Their Digits spend their days picking up, moving, and stacking shipping totes.
The current Digit is still a long way from the humanlike helper Silicon Valley is betting on, though. It can lift only 35 pounds, for example—and every time Agility makes Digit stronger, its battery gets heavier and it has to recharge more often. And standards organizations say humanoids need stricter safety rules than most industrial robots, because they’re designed to be mobile and spend time in proximity to people.
But Digit shows that this revolution in robot training isn’t converging on a single method. Agility relies on simulation techniques like those OpenAI used to train its hand, and the company has worked with Google’s Gemini models to help its robots adapt to new environments. That’s where more than a decade of experiments have gotten the industry: Now it’s building big.
2026-04-17 18:00:00
The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering “a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance.” One of Brand’s several biographers described him as a mainstay of both counterculture and cyberculture, and with Maintenance, Brand wants us to understand that the upkeep and repair of tools and systems has profound impact on daily life. As he puts it, “Taking responsibility for maintaining something—whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our planet—can be a radical act.”
Radical how? This volume doesn’t say. In an outline for the overall work, Brand says his goal is to “end with the nature of maintainers and the honor owed them.”
The idea that maintainers are owed anything, much less honor, might surprise some readers. Actually, maintenance and repair have been hot topics in academia since the mid-2010s. I played some role in that movement as a cofounder of the Maintainers, a global, interdisciplinary network dedicated to the study of maintenance, repair, care, and all the work that goes into keeping the world going.
Brand is right, too, that maintainers haven’t gotten the laurels they deserve. Over the past few decades, scholars have shown that work from oiling tools to replacing worn parts to updating code bases all tends to be lower in status than “innovation.” Maintenance gets neglected in many organizational and social settings. (Just look at some American infrastructure!) And as the right-to-repair movement has shown, companies in pursuit of greater profits have frequently locked us out of being able to do repairs or greatly reduced the maintainable life of their products. It’s hard to think of any other reason to put a computer in the door of a refrigerator.
Some of Brand’s earlier work helped inspire those insights. But his new book makes me think he doesn’t see things that way. For Brand, maintenance seems to be a solitary act, profound but more about personal success and fulfillment than tending to a shared world or making it better.
Born in 1938, Brand is 87 years old. A sense hangs over the book—with its battles against corrosion, rust, and decay, with its attempts to keep things going even as they inevitably falter—of someone looking over life and pondering its end. Maintenance: Of Everything connects to every stage of Brand’s life. It’s worth reviewing where it falls in that arc. Brand has always been interested in tools and fixing things, but rarely has he focused on the systems that need the most care.
More than a half-century ago, Brand was a member of the Merry Pranksters, a countercultural, LSD-centered hippie collective famously led by Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In 1966, Brand co-produced the Trips Festival, where bands like the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company performed for thousands amid psychedelic light shows.
Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog had a vision that might feel progressive, but its libertarian, rugged-individualist philosophy of remaking civilization alone stood in contrast to more collective social change movements.
In some ways, the Trips Festival set a paradigm for the rest of his life’s work. Brand’s biographers have described him as a network celebrity—someone who got ahead by bringing people together, building coalitions of influential figures who could boost his signal. As Kesey put it in 1980, “Stewart recognizes power. And cleaves to it.”
Brand applied this network logic to the undertaking he will always be best remembered for: the Whole Earth Catalog. First published in 1968 and aimed at hippies and members of the nascent back-to-the-land movement, the publication had the motto “Access to tools.” Its pages were full of Quonset huts, geodesic domes, solar panels, well pumps, water filters, and other technologies for life off the grid. It was a vision that might feel progressive or left-leaning, but the libertarian, rugged-individualist philosophy of eschewing corrupt systems and remaking civilization alone stood in contrast to the more collective movements pushing for deep social change at the time—like civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism.
That vision also led straight to the empowerment that came with new digital tools, and to Silicon Valley. In 1985, Brand published the Whole Earth Software Catalog, the last of the series, and also cofounded the WELL—the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, a pioneering online community famous for, among other things, facilitating the trade of Grateful Dead bootlegs. He also wrote a hagiographic book about the MIT Media Lab, known for its corporate-sponsored research into new communications tech. “The Lab would cure the pathologies of technology not with economics or politics but with technology,” Brand wrote. Again, not collective action, not policymaking: tools. And Brand then cofounded the Global Business Network, a group of pricey consulting futurists that further connected him to MIT, Stanford, and the Valley. Brand had literally helped bring about the modern digital revolution.
His attention then turned toward its upkeep. Brand’s 1994 book, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, argued against high-modernist architectural ideas. Nearly all buildings eventually get remade, he argued, but he especially favored cheap, simple structures that inhabitants could easily retool to suit changing needs. In some ways, Brand was recapitulating the liberated—or libertarian—philosophy of the Whole Earth Catalog: People can remake their world, if they have access to tools. In a chapter titled “The Romance of Maintenance,” he asked readers to see the beauty, value, and occasional pleasures of fixer-uppers of all kinds.
This chapter was a touchstone for many of us in the academic subfield of maintenance studies. Researchers in disciplines like history, sociology, and anthropology, as well as artists and practitioners in fields like libraries, IT, and engineering, all started trying to understand the realities and, yes, romance of maintenance and repair. Brand joined and contributed to Listservs, attended conferences, chatted with intellectual leaders. So it’s a bit uncharitable when he writes that his new book is “the first to look at maintenance in general.” He knows better. The real question, though, is what his work has to teach us that others have not said before. In this first volume, the answer is unclear.
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One is an odd book. If so much of Brand’s thinking has been about access to tools, he now asks, in a more extended way: How are our tools maintained? But where Brand began his career with a catalogue, in this volume we get … what? A digest? An almanac? An encyclopedia? Its form and riotous variety fit no genre easily.
The book has two chapters. The first, “The Maintenance Race,” recounts the story of three men who took part in the Golden Globe, a round-the-world race for solo sailors held in 1968. Each of the sailors, Brand explains, had a different philosophy of maintenance. One neglected it and hoped for the best. He died. Another thought of and prepared for everything in advance, and while he didn’t win the race, he completed it and once held the record for the “world’s longest recorded nonstop solo sailing voyage.” The final sailor won and did so through heroic acts of perseverance; his style was “Whatever comes, deal with it,” Brand explains. Structured like a fairy tale and unremittingly romantic, the story—like most of the anecdotes in the book—focuses on the derring-do of vigorous white guys. The strategy is no secret. Brand’s outline explains: “Start with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions—a true story told as a fable.” This myth is meant to inspire.
The second chapter, “Vehicles (and Weapons),” is over 150 pages long. It has five sections, multiple subsections, five subsections designated “digressions,” one called a “subdigression,” two “postscripts,” and several “footnotes” that are not footnotes in a formal sense but, rather, further addenda. At times, it all feels like notes for a future work. Brand makes no apology for the book’s woolliness. “All I can offer here,” he writes, “is to muse across a representative of maintenance domains and see what emerges.” Perhaps the most charitable reading of the potpourri is that it represents the return of a Merry Prankster, offering us a riotous varied light show. It’s a good book to leave on a table and occasionally open to a random page for entertainment. But it often seems as if it does not know what it wants to say or be.
“Vehicles (and Weapons)” begins by paraphrasing two famous works of maintenance philosophy, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. Maintenance involves both “problem finding” and “problem solving.” While much repair work is marked by anxiety, impatience, and boredom, it also offers positive values and outcomes. “Motorcycle maintainers take heart from what they repair for—the glory of the ride,” Brand writes.
The beauty and triumph of cheapness is a running theme throughout the work, harking back to How Buildings Learn. Henry Ford’s Model T won out over early electric vehicles and hugely expensive luxury vehicles like Rolls-Royce’s Silver Ghost because it was cheap and easier to maintain. The three most popular cars in human history—the Ford Model T, the Volkswagen Bug, and the Lada “Classic” from Russia—all privileged cheapness, “retained their basic design for decades, and … invited repair by the owner.” Or, to be fair, maybe demanded it? For every hobbyist who delighted in being able to self-reliantly keep a VW running, there must have been thousands who appreciated how cheap it was and hated that it broke a lot. Brand never points to social research, like surveys, that might help us know people’s feelings on such matters.
Other sections recount how Americans created interchangeable parts (enabling not only cheap mass production but also easy maintenance), examine how maintenance works with assault rifles and in war, and track the history of technical manuals from the early modern period to the age of YouTube. These stories are solid, but they’re also well known to students of technology, and nearly all are recycled from the work of others, featuring many large block quotes. The volume breaks little new ground.
Brand treats maintenance as an unalloyed good. But the field of maintenance studies has moved on, burrowing into the domain’s ironies, complexities, and difficulties. A simple example: In most cases, it is environmentally far better to retire and recycle an internal-combustion vehicle and buy an electric one than to keep the polluting beast going forever. Maintaining a gas-guzzler or a coal-burning power plant isn’t a radical act but a regressive one. Also, maintenance can become a life-breaking burden on the poor, and it falls inequitably on the shoulders of women and people of color. Keeping existing systems going can be a way of avoiding tough, necessary change—like making technological systems more accessible for people with disabilities. In this volume, Brand is uninterested in such difficult trade-offs. He avoids any question of how politics shapes these issues, or how they shape politics.
This avoidance comes out most clearly in a section of “Vehicles (and Weapons)” that talks about Elon Musk—a character of “unique mastery,” Brand informs us. He tells us that Bill Gates once shorted Tesla’s stock, only to lose $1.5 billion. The lesson is clear: Elon won.
In what political and social vision is money the best way to keep the score? Brand rightly points out that electric vehicles have fewer moving parts and, in that sense, are more maintainable than internal-combustion vehicles. He celebrates Musk most of all because his products “have all proven to be game changers in part because they combine ingenious design with surprisingly low cost.” Again, it’s Brand’s “cheap, available tools” hypothesis. But there’s a real superficiality and lack of follow-through in thinking here: Teslas remain luxury vehicles whose sales have slumped since federal tax subsidies disappeared. The company has faced several right-to-repair lawsuits; there’s even a law review article on the topic. Musk is in no sense a maintenance hero. Yet Brand writes that with his companies, “Musk may have done more practical world saving than any other business leader of his time.” By the time Brand was writing this book, the controversies surrounding Musk for at least flirting with antisemitism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and more were quite clear. About this, the book says not a word.
For sure, Brand needn’t agree with Musk’s critics, but failing to even broach the subject is tone deaf and out of touch. Others have argued that Silicon Valley’s “Move fast and break things” mentality undermines healthy maintenance. Brand doesn’t raise the idea—even to dismiss it.
It could be that with Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One Brand is just getting going; that in subsequent volumes he’ll have something more coherent to say; that he’ll raise really hard questions and try to answer them. But given his track record, we might reasonably doubt it. Kesey said Brand cleaves to power; he certainly doesn’t question it.
Lee Vinsel is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and host of Peoples & Things, a podcast about human life with technology.
2026-04-16 21:00:00
There’s a fault line running through enterprise AI, and it’s not the one getting the most attention. The public conversation still tracks foundation models and benchmarks—GPT versus Gemini, reasoning scores, and marginal capability gains. But in practice, the more durable advantage is structural: who owns the operating layer where intelligence is applied, governed, and improved. One model treats AI as an on-demand utility; the other embeds it as an operating layer—the combination of operation software, data capture, feedback loops and governance that sits between models and real work—that compounds with use.
Model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic sell intelligence as a service: you have a problem, you call an API, you get an answer. That intelligence is general-purpose, largely stateless, and only loosely connected to the day-to-day operations where decisions are made. It’s highly capable and increasingly interchangeable. The distinction that matters is whether intelligence resets on every prompt or accumulates over time.
Incumbent organizations, by contrast, can treat AI as an operating layer: instrumentation across operations, feedback loops from human decisions, and governance that turns individual tasks into reusable policy. In that setup, every exception, correction, and approval becomes a chance to learn—and intelligence can improve as the platform absorbs more of the organization’s work. The organizations most likely to shape the enterprise AI era are those that can embed intelligence directly into operational platforms and instrument those platforms so work generates usable signals.
The prevailing narrative says nimble startups will out-innovate incumbents by building AI-native from scratch. If AI is primarily a model problem, that story holds. But in many enterprise domains, AI is a systems problem—integrations, permissions, evaluation, and change management—where advantage accrues to whomever already sits inside high-volume, high-stakes operations and converts that position into learning and automation.
Traditional services organizations are built on a simple architecture: humans use software to do expert work. Operators log into systems, navigate operations, make decisions, and process cases. Technology is the medium. Human judgment is the product.
An AI-native platform inverts this. It ingests a problem, applies accumulated domain knowledge, executes autonomously what it can with high confidence, and routes targeted sub-tasks to human experts when the situation demands judgment that the system can’t yet reliably provide.
But inverting human-AI interaction isn’t just a UI redesign—it requires raw material. It’s only possible when the platform is built on a foundation of domain expertise, behavioral data, and operational knowledge accumulated over years.
AI-native startups begin with a clean architectural slate and can move quickly. What they can’t easily manufacture is the raw material that makes domain AI defensible at scale:
Services companies already have all three. But these ingredients aren’t moats on their own. They become an advantage only when a company can systematically convert messy operations into AI-ready signals and institutional knowledge—then feed the results back into operations so the system keeps improving.
In most services organizations, expertise is tacit and perishable. The best operators know things they cannot easily articulate: heuristics developed over the years, edge-case intuitions, and pattern recognition that operate below the level of conscious reasoning.
At Ensemble, the strategy for addressing this challenge is knowledge distillation. The systematic conversion of expert judgment and operational decisions into machine-readable training signals.
In health-care revenue cycle management, for example, systems can be seeded with explicit domain knowledge and then deepen their coverage through structured daily interaction with operators. In Ensemble’s implementation, the system identifies gaps, formulates targeted questions, and cross-checks answers across multiple experts to capture both consensus and edge-case nuance. It then synthesizes these inputs into a living knowledge base that reflects the situational reasoning behind expert-level performance.
Once a system is constrained enough to be trusted, the next question is how it gets better without waiting for annual model upgrades. Every time a skilled operator makes a decision, they generate more than a completed task. They generate a potential labeled example—context paired with an expert action (and sometimes an outcome). At scale, across thousands of operators and millions of decisions, that stream can power supervised learning, evaluation, and targeted forms of reinforcement—teaching systems to behave more like experts in real conditions.
For example, if an organization processes 50,000 cases a week and captures just three high-quality decision points per case, that’s 150,000 labeled examples every week without creating a separate data-collection program.
A more advanced human-in-the-loop design places experts inside the decision process, so systems learn not just what the right answer was, but how ambiguity gets resolved. Practically, humans intervene at branch points—selecting from AI-generated options, correcting assumptions, and redirecting operations. Each intervention becomes a high-value training signal. When the platform detects an edge case or a deviation from the expected process, it can prompt for a brief, structured rationale, capturing decision factors without requiring lengthy free-form reasoning logs.
The goal is to permanently embed the accumulated expertise of thousands of domain experts—their knowledge, decisions, and reasoning—into an AI platform that amplifies what every operator can accomplish. Done well, this produces a quality of execution that neither humans nor AI achieve independently: higher consistency, improved throughput, and measurable operational gains. Operators can focus on more consequential work, supported by an AI that has already completed the analytical groundwork across thousands of analogous prior cases.
The broader implication for enterprise leaders is straightforward. Advantages in AI won’t be determined by access to general-purpose models alone. It will come from an organization’s ability to capture, refine, and compound what it knows, its data, decisions, and operational judgment, while building the controls required for high-stakes environments. As AI shifts from experimentation to infrastructure, the most durable edge may belong to the companies that understand the work well enough to instrument it and can turn that understanding into systems that improve with use.
This content was produced by Ensemble. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
2026-04-16 21:00:00
The AI boom has hit across industries, and public sector organizations are facing pressure to accelerate adoption. At the same time, government institutions face distinct constraints around security, governance, and operations that set them apart from their business counterparts. For this reason, purpose-built small language models (SLMs) offer a promising path to operationalize AI in these environments.
A Capgemini study found that 79 percent of public sector executives globally are wary about AI’s data security, an understandable figure given the heightened sensitivity of government data and the legal obligations surrounding its use. As Han Xiao, vice president of AI at Elastic, says, “Government agencies must be very restricted about what kind of data they send to the network. This sets a lot of boundaries on how they think about and manage their data.”
The fundamental need for control over sensitive information is one of many factors complicating AI deployment, particularly when compared against the private sector’s standard operational assumptions.
Unique operational challenges
When private-sector entities expand AI, they typically assume certain conditions will be in place, including continuous connectivity to the cloud, reliance on centralized infrastructure, acceptance of incomplete model transparency, and limited restrictions on data movement. For many state institutions, however, accepting these conditions could be anything from dangerous to impossible.
Government agencies must ensure that their data stays under their control, that information can be checked and verified, and that operational disruptions are kept to an absolute minimum. At the same time, they often have to run their systems in environments where internet connectivity is limited, unreliable, or unavailable. These complexities prevent many promising public sector AI pilots from moving beyond experimentation. “Many people undervalue the operating challenge of AI,” Xiao says. “The public sector needs AI to perform reliably on all kinds of data, and then to be able to grow without breaking. Continuity of operations is often underestimated.” An Elastic survey of public sector leaders found that 65 percent struggle to use data continuously in real time and at scale.
Infrastructure constraints compound the problem. Government organizations may also struggle to obtain the graphics processing units (GPUs) used to train and access complex AI models. As Xiao points out, “Government doesn’t often purchase GPUs, unlike the private sector—they’re not used to managing GPU infrastructure. So accessing a GPU to run the model is a bottleneck for much of the public sector.”
A smaller, more practical model
The many nonnegotiable requirements in the public sector make large language models (LLMs) untenable. But SLMs can be housed locally, offering greater security and control. SLMs are specialized AI models that typically use billions rather than hundreds of billions of parameters, making them far less computationally demanding than the largest LLMs.
The public sector does not need to build ever-larger models housed in offsite, centralized locations. An empirical study found that SLMs performed as well or better than LLMs. SLMs allow sensitive information to be used effectively and efficiently while avoiding the operational complexity of maintaining large models. Xiao puts it this way: “It is easy to use ChatGPT to do proofreading. It’s very difficult to run your own large language models just as smoothly in an environment with no network access.”
SLMs are purpose-built for the needs of the department or agency that will use them. The data is stored securely outside the model, and is only accessed when queried. Carefully engineered prompts ensure that only the most relevant information is retrieved, providing more accurate responses. Using methods such as smart retrieval, vector search, and verifiable source grounding, AI systems can be built that cater to public sector needs.
Thus, the next phase of AI adoption in the public sector may be to bring the AI tool to the data, rather than sending the data out into the cloud. Gartner predicts that by 2027, small, specialized AI models will be used three times more than LLMs.
Superior search capabilities
“When people in the public sector hear AI, they probably think about ChatGPT. But we can be much more ambitious,” says Xiao. “AI can revolutionize how the government searches and manages the large amounts of data they have.”
Looking beyond chatbots reveals one of AI’s most immediate opportunities: dramatically improved search. Like many organizations, the public sector has mountains of unstructured data—including technical reports, procurement documents, minutes, and invoices. Today’s AI, however, can deliver results sourced from mixed media, like readable PDFs, scans, images, spreadsheets, and recordings, and in multiple languages. All of this can be indexed by SLM-powered systems to provide tailored responses and to draft complex texts in any language, while ensuring outputs are legally compliant. “The public sector has a lot of data, and they don’t always know how to use this data. They don’t know what the possibilities are,” says Xiao.
Even more powerful, AI can help government employees interpret the data they access. “Today’s AI can provide you with a completely new view of how to harness that data,” says Xiao. A well-trained SLM can interpret legal norms, extract insights from public consultations, support data-driven executive decision-making, and improve public access to services and administrative information. This can contribute to dramatic improvements in how the public sector conducts its operations.
The small-language promise
Focusing on SLMs shifts the conversation from how comprehensive the model can be to how efficient it is. LLMs incur significant performance and computational costs and require specialized hardware that many public entities cannot afford. Despite requiring some capital expenses, SLMs are less resource-intensive than LLMs, so they tend to be cheaper and reduce environmental impact.
Public sector agencies often face stringent audit requirements, and SLM algorithms can be documented and certified as transparent. Some countries, particularly in Europe, also have privacy regulations such as GDPR that SLMs can be designed to meet.
Tailored training data produces more targeted results, reducing errors, bias, and hallucinations that AI is prone to. As Xiao puts it, “Large language models generate text based on what they were trained on, so there is a cut-off date when they were trained. If you ask about anything after that, it will hallucinate. We can solve this by forcing the model to work from verified sources.”
Risks are also minimized by keeping data on local servers, or even on a specific device. This isn’t about isolation but about strategic autonomy to enable trust, resilience, and relevance.
By prioritizing task-specific models designed for environments that process data locally, and by continuously monitoring performance and impact, public sector organizations can build lasting AI capabilities that support real-world decisions. “Do not start with a chatbot; start with search,” Xiao advises. “Much of what we think of as AI intelligence is really about finding the right information.”
To learn more about AI in the public sector, visit Elastic.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
