Let a mouse nose around a house, and it will rapidly find food and form a strategy to return to it without getting caught. Given the same task, an AI would require millions of training examples and ...

Our bodies are constantly breaking down. Over time, their built-in repair mechanisms also fail. Knee cartilage grinds away. Hip joints no longer support weight. Treatments for breast cancer and other ...

I admit, since middle school, I’ve spent most of my downtime immersed in video games. There are the quintessential epics: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, and Fortnite. And then there ...

If you’re not familiar with the concept of “world models” just yet, a storm of activity at the start of 2025 gives every indication it may soon become a well-known term. What large language models are ...

Like DNA hard drives, the approach could lock the world's data down for the long haul—if researchers can make it practical. We have a data storage problem. This year, the world’s storage needs will ...

Generative AI is a data hog. The algorithms behind chatbots like ChatGPT learn to create human-like content by scraping terabytes of online articles, Reddit posts, TikTok captions, or YouTube comments ...

My nephew couldn’t stop playing Minecraft when he was seven years old. One of the most popular games ever, Minecraft is an open world in which players build terrain and craft various items and tools.

Before the pandemic started (ah, those glorious days…) a collective panic was mounting over automation and robots gradually replacing workers in various fields, or “stealing our jobs,” as the common ...

All life on Earth is written with four DNA "letters." An AI just used those letters to dream up a completely new genome from scratch. Called Evo, the AI was inspired by the large language models, or ...

CRISPR is revolutionary. It’s also a total brute. The classic version of the gene editing wunderkind literally slices a gene to bits just to turn it off. It’s effective, yes. But it’s like putting an ...

This year gave rise to an incredible mix of brain implants that can record, decode, and alter brain activity. It sounds like déjà vu—brain-machine interfaces also lived rent free in my head in last ...

Crisis. A situation where danger and opportunity intersect. In the last several weeks, we’ve heard and learned a lot about the danger and suffering caused by Covid-19. But opportunities are here too, ...