The Download: ethics in physics, and talking to ChatGPT
—Frances Houle, Kate Kirby, Laura Greene & Michael Marder In April 2024, Nature released detailed information about investigations into claims...
World
A controversial Chinese CRISPR scientist is still hopeful about embryo gene-editing. Here’s why.
Last Thursday, JK, who was released from prison in 2022, sat down with Antonio and Mat Honan, our editor in...
The US physics community is not done working on trust
Alas, a pattern of similar behavior has been known for at least two decades. The history of such deceptions led...
OpenAI has released a new ChatGPT bot that you can talk to
The voice mode is powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model, which combines voice, text, and vision capabilities. To gather feedback,...
The Download: rebuilding economic security, and solving math problems
—Edlyn V. Levine is CEO and co-founder of a stealth-mode technology start up and an affiliate at MIT Sloan School...
How the US and its allies can rebuild economic security
The missing middle of technology investment—insufficient funding for commercial production—is evident in each and every one of these failures, but...
How machines that can solve complex math problems might usher in more powerful AI
But the news item that really stood out to me was one that didn’t get as much attention as it...
The Download: the future of CRISPR babies, and investing in climate tech
He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist whose controversial 2018 experiment led to the birth of three gene-edited children, says he’s returned...
From Meta CTO to climate tech investor: Mike Schroepfer on his big pivot
We’re here to prove that if you pick the right climate tech companies with the right founders, that can be...
Controversial CRISPR scientist promises “no more gene-edited babies” until society comes around
The subject is genome editing. Of course, it’s a technology for changing the DNA inside of individual cells, including embryos....
The Download: AI’s math solutions, and brewing beer with sunlight
AI models can easily generate essays and other types of text. However, they’re nowhere near as good at solving math...
How our genome is like a generative AI model
But the recipe metaphor is too vague, says Mitchell. Instead, he and his colleague Nick Cheney at the University of...
Roundtables: CRISPR Babies—Six years later
CRISPR Babies: Six years laterSpeakers: He Jiankui, CRISPR Pioneer, Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine, and Mat Honan, editor in...
A new tool for copyright holders can show if their work is in AI training data
These AI copyright traps tap into one of the biggest fights in AI. A number of publishers and writers are...
Google DeepMind’s AI systems can now solve complex math problems
“It is often easier to train a model for mathematics if you have a way to check its answers (e.g.,...
Beer, hydrogen, and heat: Why the US is still trying to make mirror-magnified solar energy work
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, DOE continues to invest in the next-generation solar technologies we need to tackle the climate crisis...
The Download: US quantum computing, and AI garbage
But we know you don’t always have time to sit down and read everything you want to each day—life just...
AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage
“You can certainly imagine that the same happens with machine learning models,” he says. “So if the first model has...
The Download: Chinese LLMs, and transforming heavy-duty trucking
When police departments first started buying and deploying bodycams in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in...
Why Chinese companies are betting on open-source AI
Catch up with China 1. While a Windows system outage disrupted computers across the world on Friday, China was largely...