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PerturbAI and OpenAI Unveil First-of-Its-Kind AI Reasoning Agents to Scale Biomedical Discovery

PerturbAI in cooperation with Open AI are doing amazing brain biology discovery work with 2,000 agents.

#ArtificialIntelligence #neuroscience

- Thousands of AI agents work in parallel to interpret experimental data, connect findings with scientific literature, and identify promising hypotheses for scientists to test

- Agents analyzed PerturbAI’s whole-brain genomic dataset and synthesized insights in just 32 minutes, compared with an estimated months to a year of serial human analysis and literature review

- The work builds on a year-long collaboration that is now expanding into joint drug-target discovery, leveraging PerturbAI’s proprietary causal biological data to accelerate science and medicine.

Consciousness research is ready for its Einstein moment

It remains a mystery about how consciousness relates to neural mechanisms. Now, with the advent of AI, some argue that consciousness could emerge in these systems. Here, philosopher and Lead for Responsible AI at Microsoft Ken Archer, and phenomenologist Harald Wiltsche, argue that the attempt to reduce consciousness to a mechanism won’t work and relies on a misunderstanding. Instead, using Einstein’s re-thinking of the ether as a guide, we can unlock the mystery of consciousness.

The strongest argument for believing that AI can become humanly intelligent, or even conscious, seems to come from science. Neuroscience, we are told, is steadily revealing—or will reveal, given enough time—that intelligence and consciousness are nothing more than what the brain’s neural mechanism does. Evolution appears to make the conclusion unavoidable. Matter existed for billions of years before intelligent and conscious beings appeared. Conscious intelligence emerged from that matter through natural processes. So intelligence and consciousness must ultimately be reducible to particular organizations of matter, which neuroscience tells us is a particular organization of neurons.

To resist the reducibility of intelligence and consciousness to some type of organization of matter can sound like resisting science itself. Perhaps consciousness seems irreducible only because we do not yet understand the mechanism. Give neuroscience another century and the mystery will disappear, just as so many earlier mysteries disappeared before it. With the ability to do neuroscience-like experiments on AI neural networks—known as mechanistic interpretability—perhaps the mystery will disappear even sooner.

Resolving the Abstract–Concrete Paradox in the Angular Gyrus: A Multimethod Investigation

Despite its well-established role in memory-guided cognition, whether and how the angular gyrus (AG) contributes to semantic processing remains unresolved. Connectomic work links the AG to abstract mentation, yet neuroimaging studies paradoxically show greater AG engagement for concrete than abstract semantics. To address this discrepancy, we conducted a multimethod investigation integrating neurostimulation, neuroimaging, and experience sampling across five studies (127 human participants; 53 males; 74 females). Using the contrast between concrete and abstract semantics as a diagnostic test case, we show that this apparent contradiction reflects multiple interacting neurocognitive factors shaping the AG’s functional repertoire.

Circulating memory-phenotype CD4+ T cells rapidly accumulate in the ischemic gut to exacerbate tissue injury in an innate manner

Naturally arising memory-phenotype (MP) CD4 T cells can exert innate immune function in infectious and autoimmune contexts; however, their functional significance in ischemia remains unknown. Sato et al. report that blood-circulating MP cells rapidly accumulate in the ischemic gut to exacerbate tissue injury in an innate manner via neutrophil orchestration.

Ultrasound creates a tube that guides matter through the air

A small stream of liquid flows quietly in midair, horizontally, as if inside an invisible tube. Nothing touches it. About 5 centimeters (2 inches) away, a cylinder lined with hundreds of tiny speakers surrounds the stream, yet there is no sound. The liquid simply keeps flowing.

“Of all the experimental setups I have seen, I would say this is the closest thing to magic,” says Ari Salmi, professor of electronics at the University of Helsinki, who led the development of the massless tube.

It is not magic, however, but ultrasound. The University of Helsinki’s Electronics Research Laboratory has a long tradition of ultrasound research. The stream of liquid is held in place by ultrasonic waves at a frequency of about 40 kilohertz. The waves are emitted by 256 small speakers surrounding the stream.

How to Be a Futurist [Without Predicting the Future]

In 2021, a client asked me for a virtual keynote on #futurism. Pandemic rules: no live audience, no room to feed off, just me and a camera in a studio I rented for the occasion.

I rewatched it this week. I cringed. The delivery, the pacing, the energy you can only get from real people in front of you. There are a million things I’d change today, and most of them I already have.

The argument, though, I’d give again tomorrow.

The first thing people ask when they learn I’m a #futurist is what comes next. I’ve come to think it’s the wrong question. The weather doesn’t care what the forecast says. The future does, and that changes everything about how we should approach it.

Five years on, most #AI labs, investors, and pundits are selling certainty about where we’re headed. That makes this rough little COVID-era talk feel more relevant now than when I recorded it.

Isaac Newton, quantum physics, Wayne Gretzky, a 100-foot wave and Frank Herbert all show up. So does the question I think we should be asking instead.

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