The Download: how AI could improve construction site safety, and our Roundtables conversation with Karen Hao

More than 1,000 construction workers die on the job each year in the US, making it the most dangerous industry for fatal slips, trips, and falls.

A new AI tool called Safety AI could help to change that. It analyzes the progress made on a construction site each day, and flags conditions that violate Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules, with what its creator Philip Lorenzo claims is 95% accuracy.

Lorenzo says Safety AI is the first one of multiple emerging AI construction safety tools to use generative AI to flag safety violations. But as the 95% success rate suggests, Safety AI is not a flawless and all-knowing intelligence. Read the full story.

—Andrew Rosenblum

Roundtables: Inside OpenAI’s Empire with Karen Hao

Earlier this week, we held a subscriber-only Roundtable discussion with author and former MIT Technology Review senior editor Karen Hao about her new book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

You can watch her conversation with our executive editor Niall Firth here—and if you aren’t already, you can subscribe to us here. 

MIT Technology Review Narrated: The tech industry can’t agree on what open-source AI means. That’s a problem.