The 7 next big things in foundational AI for 2026

AI innovation may feel like it’s utterly dominated by a few giants, but the reality couldn’t be more different. These honorees have thrived by zeroing in on specific challenges, including teaching the technology to interpret sensor data, speeding up inference, and giving researchers better insight into how models actually work. Archetype AIFor turning sensor data into intelligenceLarge language models may know a lot, but because they have been trained on text and images, that limits their und...