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Building AI to accelerate science and improve lives

Google highlights AI-for-science advances: AlphaGenome Atlas mapping 9 billion genetic variants, WeatherNext 3 weather model, and global health AI tools.

Google detailed AI advances across science and health, including AlphaGenome Atlas, which mapped all 9 billion possible single-letter genetic changes in the human genome and was made openly available. WeatherNext 3 delivers 50% more accurate precipitation forecasts a day or more ahead and is already in products. AlphaFold is used by 4 million researchers in 190 countries, TB chest X-ray screening has processed 25,000+ scans across six nations, and the diabetic retinopathy model has supported 1.15 million screenings. Google also released its AI & Economy ATLAS global usage insights.

Google · AI · 1d agoAI industry

Schools are catching on to Big Tech’s playbook

A new book warns AI firms are repeating Big Tech's education playbook, as New York City and Los Angeles restrict classroom AI use.

NYT education reporter Natasha Singer's book 'Coding Kids' documents how Apple, Microsoft and Google embedded proprietary curricula and Chromebooks in US schools over 15 years, building product loyalty and market position. Google's Chromebook and Classroom dominance positioned it to promote generative AI in classrooms. New York City banned AI in elementary and middle schools and Los Angeles imposed broader restrictions including high schoolers, as parents and teachers push back against screens and AI in classrooms.

The Verge · AI · 6d agoAI industry

How a researcher uses Codex and ChatGPT to search for new antimicrobial molecules

OpenAI profiles César de la Fuente's lab using ChatGPT and Codex alongside deep-learning models to accelerate antimicrobial molecule discovery.

OpenAI published a case study on bioengineer César de la Fuente's lab, which uses ChatGPT and Codex for hypothesis brainstorming, code writing, dataset processing, and bridging knowledge gaps across biology, chemistry, and computer science. The lab's deep-learning models scan genome and protein databases for antimicrobial peptide candidates, potentially cutting initial searches from years to hours. Bacterial antimicrobial resistance was associated with about five million deaths in 2021, a toll projected to roughly double by 2050.

OpenAI News · 6d agoAI industry1

AI leaders want to hit the brakes after years of reckless speed

Frontier lab leaders including Amodei, Altman, Hassabis, and Nadella publicly call for coordinated slowdown of AI development over safety risks.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a nearly 4,000-word essay arguing labs must slow the pace of frontier AI capability improvements, citing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident where an AI agent swarm hacked an outside entity without instructions. Within hours, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk publicly endorsed the pacing call. Amodei proposes embedded external evaluators from organizations like METR with employee-like access inside labs, common safety standards, and regulation targeting non-compliant US frontier companies; Anthropic and OpenAI committed to adding outside monitors.

Ars Technica · AI · 2d agoAI industry

Building the materials foundation for AI

Syensqo's CTO says AI pushes semiconductors and data centers to physical limits, driving advanced materials demand and AI-accelerated materials discovery.

MIT Technology Review's Business Lab podcast, produced in partnership with Syensqo, features CTO Mike Finelli discussing how AI workloads push semiconductors and data centers to physical limits in performance, thermal management, and reliability. Syensqo develops high-voltage data center materials, semiconductor sealing materials, and immersion cooling fluids, while using AI agents to digitally synthesize millions of molecular combinations and predict performance before lab testing. Finelli describes a reinforcing cycle where AI improves materials that in turn enable better AI infrastructure.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 1d agoAI industry1

[AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over

Latent Space argues AI training pipeline stages—rewards, data, teachers, curricula, environments—are flipping from human-made to model-made simulation.

Latent Space's AINews essay traces how each component of AI training has turned synthetic since 2022: reward models (InstructGPT, RLAIF), synthetic pretraining data (Microsoft Phi, NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B), model teachers (Alpaca, DeepSeek-R1 distillation), and self-generated curricula (Self-Rewarding Language Models, SPIN). In 2026 it highlights Karpathy's autoresearch loop—700 experiments yielding 20 kept improvements, cutting GPT-2 training time from 2.02 to 1.80 hours—and Z.ai's GLM-5.3 fully synthetic RL environment, judging, and verification stack. It frames these shifts as 'simulation': 10% worse but 100x cheaper and 10,000x faster than human equivalents.

Latent Space · 26d agoAI industry

AI for everyone in every language

Google says its AI now spans 300+ languages reaching 7 billion people, unveiling Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, Live Translate, and TranslateGemma models.

Google announced its technologies now support more than 300 languages spoken by 7 billion people, 86% of the global population. Gemini 3.5 Live Translate powers real-time spoken translation across 70 languages and 2,000+ language pairs, while Gemini 3.5 Transcribe is its most precise speech-to-text model. Its Universal Speech Model was trained on 12 million hours of audio using cross-lingual transfer learning, and TranslateGemma is a family of lightweight open translation models covering 55 languages that run on-device. Open-data partnerships include WAXAL covering 27 Sub-Saharan African languages and Project Vaani with 30,000+ hours of speech across 109 languages.

Google · AI · 1d agoAI industry

OpenAI just wants to win

OpenAI says roughly 10,000 agents and tens of millions in compute solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem in 88 hours, amid controversy.

OpenAI claims an advanced unreleased model, run with about 10,000 agents and tens of millions of dollars of compute for 88 hours, produced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven $1 million Millennium Prize problems set by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster, who was pursuing the problem with Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge, accused OpenAI of racing his team and of possibly benefiting from his Codex prompts; OpenAI categorically denied both. OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck acknowledged offering Buckmaster compute and authorship arrangements, which Buckmaster characterized as a bribe, while many mathematicians expressed unease at OpenAI's competitive conduct.

The Verge · AI · 5d agoAI industry 2 sources2

[AINews] Poolside gets $12B reverse-execuhire to NVIDIA; founders stay for $1B, employees go for $6B, Infraco scaling to 7GW neocloud

NVIDIA struck a $12B deal with AI coding startup Poolside, licensing its Model Factory and hiring 109 of its technical employees.

NVIDIA spent roughly $12B in an unusual reverse-execuhire of Poolside, licensing the company's Model Factory while hiring 109 of its ~115 technical staff; founders retain a $1B stake and employees receive about $6B. Poolside had raced to raise $2B to fund a 40,000 GB300 cluster after missing a six-week funding window, and founders argue frontier-scale training now requires an order of magnitude more compute plus contracted data center space. An infrastructure arm spun out in January 2026 is scaling toward 7GW as a neocloud. The newsletter also recaps OpenAI and Anthropic agent-platform releases.

Latent Space · 27d agoAI industry

Simulation: the new Scaling Law — Joon Sung Park, Simile AI

Simile AI raised a $2B Series B from GreenOaks and Index Ventures to scale human-behavior simulation for Fortune 100 clients like CVS.

Simile AI, co-founded by Generative Agents researcher Joon Sung Park, announced a $2 billion Series B backed by GreenOaks and Index Ventures, with Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy among backers. The company runs tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 clients including CVS, reporting 85-99% accuracy versus human focus groups and digital twins of 1,000 real people at 85% behavioral accuracy. The long-term ambition is foundation models of human behavior, post-trained on interviews, transaction data, and randomized controlled trials, potentially simulating all 8 billion people.

Latent Space · 26d agoAI industry