Author: kirklandc008@gmail.com

Developing a new drug can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and even then, most candidates ultimately fail. Now, researchers at Stanford have built a virtual biotech company with 37,000 AI agents that work together to analyze drug targets and design therapies.Roughly 90 percent of drugs that enter clinical trials never reach the market. That’s often because promising results in the lab don’t translate to patients, or the drug causes dangerous side-effects not caught earlier in the development process.Part of the problem is the evidence that could help catch these issues earlier in the process is scattered…

Many AI researchers seem to firmly believe that the technology they are developing could someday prove very dangerous. What’s less clear—even among AI’s technical elite—is precisely how to keep these mercurial algorithms in check.In recent years researchers have thrown around all sorts of ideas for preventing AI from turning nasty. They include less controversial plans such as tighter government regulations, new ways of measuring progress, and probing the inner workings of models, as well as more outlandish proposals like placing tracking devices inside GPUs, and even ceremonially destroying large numbers of AI chips.With political and public pressure now growing for…

— Will Douglas Heaven What steps can be taken now and in the near future to ensure that AI is controlled, monitored, and regulated effectively?  That’s the million-dollar question. Whether or not you think AI could kill us, you can’t deny that it could do some real damage, because it already has—by driving people toward psychosis and by hacking websites, for example. Preventing that damage, or at least mitigating it, is hard for two reasons.  The first is that we barely understand how AI works, and it’s quickly growing more powerful. There is lots of ongoing research about how to…

Transitioning from years of working in a senior technical or executive role to a leadership position is one of the most challenging phases of a STEM career. It requires moving away from making decisions on your own to mentoring others, making strategic decisions for the organization, and collaborating with coworkers from different generations.The shift in mindset is known as “legacy leadership,” a philosophy whereby success is no longer measured by personal achievements but by how effectively a senior leader empowers others.To help seasoned professionals and senior experts navigate the transition, the inaugural IEEE International Leadership Conference (ILC) will provide attendees…

Major super PACs associated with AI labs and investors have poured close to $1 million into incumbent Republican Mike Rounds’s South Dakota senate race, seeking to shape the outcome of a noncompetitive race amid a critical national debate over AI regulation.Rounds has been the beneficiary this cycle of around $600,000 in spending by outside groups, with the vast majority of that figure coming from the super PAC Defend American Jobs, which receives funding from a super PAC financed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.He has also received roughly $215,000 directly from the employees and super PACs affiliated with AI…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Could AI really kill us all? Your questions, answered On Wednesday, MIT Technology Review hosted a live Roundtables event that asked the question many seem to be asking right now: could AI really kill us all? But attendees had more questions than we had time to answer, so we asked senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven and AI reporter Grace Huckins to tackle some of the best ones. The questions they tried to answer include: am…

On September 10, two days after researcher Jacob Coxon, who had recently quit his job at Anthropic, sounded the alarm about the industry potentially bringing about the end of humanity, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America posted a carousel of images on Instagram. The first slide was a drawing of an ouroboros—a dragon eating its own tail—set against a hot pink background. “AI alarmism and AI hype are the same story: both keep your attention on a science-fiction future to distract you from the real harms experienced in the present,” the image reads.The post was authored by the…

“We’ve got a constant back and forth,” says Magnus. “We have to build better surveillance and screening tools, [but] AI is really good at figuring out ways around them.” We’ll probably need to use AI to find ways to restrict the use of AI, he says. I should add here that not all scientists agree on the level of risk. At a recent media briefing, some biologists at Imperial College London argued that AI tools just aren’t good enough to fully develop bioweapons, and that testing new pathogens requires difficult, time-consuming, human work. Some think the guardrails we have in…

Following multiple reports of AI agent swarms hacking websites and coordinating via secret message boards, along with a dire message for humanity from an outgoing Anthropic engineer, leading AI companies have called for a coordinated AI development “slowdown.” Alongside various versions of this specific phrase—slowdown—they’ve also expressed concerns that doing so would run afoul of antitrust laws.Antitrust experts say that while the companies’ charged language isn’t necessarily doing them any favors, the unrestrained development of a rogue killer AI probably isn’t in line with the spirit of the Sherman Act, a key US antitrust law that exists to promote a…

There is a temptation to divide the future of AI into two possibilities: utopia or catastrophe. Neither extreme is particularly helpful.The more interesting possibility is messier—and requires a step-shift in our thinking, from artificial intelligence to AI societies.When most people hear “AI,” they typically think of ChatGPT, Copilot, or another conversational system. You ask a question, that system generates an answer.But AI is rapidly moving beyond this. Systems can now monitor the world, make decisions, negotiate transactions, and carry out tasks over extended periods of time. AI is no longer just generating an answer—it is doing something about it.That points…