AI & ML Research 8 Hours

Last updated: September 29, 2026, 2:11 PM ET

AI & ML Research

A compaction experiment on 1,000 Apache Iceberg files found that reducing them to just six boosted query performance across three SQL workloads. Meanwhile, a critical piece argues that not every decision in AI requires a decoder, warning against conflating generation with judgment. The job of data scientists is expanding beyond productivity gains as AI reshapes ownership and decision-making. A guide on guardrails for AI agents outlines essential design patterns for data engineers. Building fair evaluation sets is framed as a combinatorial problem with an exact solution method.

Climate & AI Economics

MIT Technology Review highlights climate tech companies to watch and debates AI’s discovery problem in its daily newsletter. The publication also announced its 2026 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch, noting the planet will pass 1.5°C of warming. A separate analysis argues that making AI an asset rather than an expense requires shifting from token consumption to ownership.