darpa gallery
01Tony Tether | then: Director of Darpa (2001–2009) | now: Private technical consultant
02Jose Negron | then: Darpa’s day-to-day manager for the Grand Challenge | now: Cyberwarfare consultant
03Joseph Bebel | then: Student at Palos Verdes High School | now: PhD student in computer science at USC
04David Hall | then: CEO of Velodyne, a loudspeaker company | now: CEO of Velodyne, now making lidar laser sensors
05Melanie Dumas | then: Voice- recognition engineer | now: Program manager on Google’s security team
06Jim McBride | then: Engineer in Ford’s safety department | now: Autonomous vehicle specialist at Ford
07Sal Fish | then: CEO of Score International, which organized desert races like the Baja 1000 | now: Retired
08Alberto Broggi | then: Lead on Team TerraMax | now: General manager of VisLab, a computer vision developer
09Chris Urmson | then: Robotics student at Carnegie Mellon| now: Head of Aurora Innovation, a self-driving startup
10Red Whittaker | then: Robotics researcher at Carnegie Mellon | now: Same
11Sebastian Thrun | then: Machine-learning researcher at Stanford | now: Head of online university Udacity
These Researchers Made AI Drive a Toyota Corolla to Get In-N-Out
Three engineers put GPT, Claude, and Grok in charge of a real car. Only one of them was successful.
Will Knight
The Pentagon Hopes to Speed Up ‘Kill Chain’ AI Buys With 5-Minute Videos
The US government’s Tradewinds initiative has made it easier to throw millions of dollars at “nontraditional” defense contractors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Maddy Varner
Mistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race
The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity.
Joel Khalili
Tristan Harris’ Tech Nonprofit Is Laying Off Most Staff and Going ‘Founder-Led’
The Center for Humane Technology helped spark a movement against excessive screen time, but internal tensions over its direction and strategy have simmered for years, sources tell WIRED.
Paresh Dave
Jensen Huang’s Vision for Europe Runs on Plug-In Data Centers
At Nvidia’s GTC in Berlin, Huang unveiled the company’s new plug-in data center—the DSX Pod—as the key to unlocking Europe’s AI infrastructure lag. Oh, and autonomous humanoid robotics.
Tom Bristow
NASA’s Oldest Martian Spacecraft Have Been Running for Decades. Here’s How
Two orbiters have long outlasted their expected lifespans and completely reshaped our understanding of the Red Planet, all while operating 140 million miles from Earth.
Meghan Bartels
Mistral Says Its New AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Is the Best Open-Weight Offering Outside of China
With the release of its new trillion-parameter model, Mistral is hoping to demonstrate it’s “still in the race” to build frontier-level artificial intelligence.
Joel Khalili
Anthropic Says It Will Revolutionize Biology—Some Day
In breathless press releases and posts, the company has touted its models’ ability to deliver scientific breakthroughs. But its IPO filing taps the brakes on just how fast its AI will lead to big discoveries.
Emily Mullin
The Anthropic S-1 Filing Is Also an AI Doomsday Primer
Anthropic thinks “closing the loop” is the best path to AI triumph—and a recipe for “existential” threats to humanity.
Brian Barrett
These AI Experts Want to Do High-Stakes Research Out in the Open
Many frontier labs keep their risky research locked away. Trillium Labs wants to show off its work when it comes to self-improvement and model behavior.
Will Knight
WIRED Ghost Stories
Five hauntings from the other side of technology.
Cool, Cool, Cool, Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm Made a Genetically Modified Military Dog Startup
Warhound came out of stealth on Wednesday with $200 million in funding and a mission to create “elite working dogs” equipped with "advanced body armor."
Kate Knibbs