With a big assist from artificial intelligence and a heavy dose of human touch, Tim Cernak’s lab at the University of Michigan has made a discovery that dramatically speeds up the time-consuming chemical process of building molecules that will be tomorrow’s medicines, agrichemicals or materials.
The discovery, published in the Feb. 3 issue of Science, is the culmination of years of chemical synthesis and data science research by the Cernak Lab in the College of Pharmacy and Department of Chemistry.
The goal of the research was to identify key reactions in the synthesis of a molecule, ultimately reducing the process to as few steps as possible. In the end, Cernak and his team achieved the synthesis of a complex alkaloid found in nature in just three steps. Previous syntheses had taken between seven and 26 steps.
Foresight Biotech & Health Extension Meeting sponsored by 100 Plus Capital.
Michael Levin, Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Bioelectric Networks: Taming the Collective Intelligence of Cells for Regenerative Medicine.
Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor in the Biology department and Vannevar Bush Chair, serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Recent honors include the Scientist of Vision award and the Distinguished Scholar Award. His group’s focus is on understanding the biophysical mechanisms that implement decision-making during complex pattern regulation, and harnessing endogenous bioelectric dynamics toward rational control of growth and form. The lab’s current main directions are:
• Understanding how somatic cells form bioelectrical networks for storing and recalling pattern memories that guide morphogenesis; • Creating next-generation AI tools for helping scientists understand top-down control of pattern regulation (a new bioinformatics of shape); and. • Using these insights to enable new capabilities in regenerative medicine and engineering.
Prior to college, Michael Levin worked as a software engineer and independent contractor in the field of scientific computing. He attended Tufts University, interested in artificial intelligence and unconventional computation. To explore the algorithms by which the biological world implemented complex adaptive behavior, he got dual B.S. degrees, in CS and in Biology and then received a PhD from Harvard University. He did post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School (1996−2000), where he began to uncover a new bioelectric language by which cells coordinate their activity during embryogenesis. His independent laboratory (2000−2007 at Forsyth Institute, Harvard; 2008-present at Tufts University) develops new molecular-genetic and conceptual tools to probe large-scale information processing in regeneration, embryogenesis, and cancer suppression.
However, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth named Vitaly Vanchurin attempted to reframe reality in a particularly eye-opening way in a preprint published on arXiv, arguing that we’re living inside a huge neural network that governs everything around us.
A team of researchers have come up with a machine learning-assisted way to detect the position of shapes including the poses of humans to an astonishing degree — using only WiFi signals.
In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, first spotted by Vice, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University came up with a deep learning method of mapping the position of multiple human subjects by analyzing the phase and amplitude of WiFi signals, and processing them using computer vision algorithms.
“The results of the study reveal that our model can estimate the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only input,” the team concluded in their paper.
Is there any strategy or alliance too complex for its ruthless intelligence? Meta AI made a groundbreaking announcement with the launch of CICERO — the first-ever AI (artificial intelligence) capable of winning at Diplomacy, a multiplayer strategy game that calls for mutual trust, compromise, and teamwork. This marks a significant milestone in AI evolution.
South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol has retired after being beat by DeepMind’s AlphaGo software. He told Yonhap news agency his decision was influenced by the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) “cannot be defeated.”
An entity that cannot be defeated
“With the debut of AI in Go games, I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts,” Se-dol told Yonhap. “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”
In case you haven’t heard, artificial intelligence is the hot new thing.
If anything, this breakneck pace is only accelerating. Five years from now, the field of AI will look very different than it does today. Methods that are currently considered cutting-edge will have become outdated; methods that today are nascent or on the fringes will be mainstream.
What will the next generation of artificial intelligence look like? Which novel AI approaches will unlock currently unimaginable possibilities in technology and business?
My previous column covered three emerging areas within AI that are poised to redefine the field—and society—in the years ahead. This article will cover three more.
“This is just the first step on the AI front…as [the] AI arms race takes place among Big Tech.”
Right on the heels of Google announcing Artificial Intelligence chatbot Bard, Microsoft has beefed up its search engine Bing with the latest AI sensation, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“Search has remained the same since the last major inflection,” Microsoft corporate VP Yusuf Mehdi said at the event on Tuesday announcing the update, adding that “the user experience is the same as 20 years ago.”
For almost two decades, Google’s search engine market has had a highly successful run, facing almost zero competition from rivals. That could all change with the new upgraded Bing and Edge browser that has integrated the same technology created by the developers of ChatGPT.
Unlike Bard, which is currently used only by trusted testers\.
Microsoft has launched an all new, AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser, available to all in preview now at Bing.com.
Introducing Bard. It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people. That’s the journey we’ve been on with large language models. Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short).
We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.
It turns out that it is now pretty standard to have no external stitches for spaying, and in fact, if I had to do it over again, I would have picked one port keyhole surgery which would have been even easier to heal from. (That would have required switching vets.) So for only $400, Kaia not only had advanced surgery with no outside stitches, but she was made into a cyborg with a microchip being implanted. Pretty impressive!
This is just one example of us rushing headlong into a science fiction-type future. The biggest such example being ChatGPT which feels way more intelligent than previous chatbots. It used to be that Ray Kurzweil would say that we would have AGI in 2029 and everyone else predicted dates such as 2070 or never. Now many people pick 2029 and I could definitely see the tech behind ChatGPT being part of the recipe for AGI. For me, the first example that AGI was coming, was Content-Aware Fill being added to Photoshop. That feature allows you to erase a person from a beach scene in one quick step. Very impressive!
One more example of tech advancing is that a few years ago my right eye’s retina partially detached. My doctor did surgery with cryotherapy in his office, and inserted a sulfur hexafluoride bubble to stabilize everything. He followed up the next day with laser therapy, again in his office. No hospital needed. Eye fixed!
Video is of our killer guard dog Kaia on patrol. Watch out world!
Professors complain that some students are turning in papers written by ChatGPT and other AI’s. This means the whole paradigm of how we teach students has got to change. And fast.
The potential of our brains is being wasted by the old paradigm of education and how we’ve been mechanized by The Industrial Age.
The qualia it takes to do what tradesmen like welders and mechanics and plummer’s do cannot be easily automated or coded and will soon be at a premium. Professionals like doctors and attorneys and professors, for that matter can easily be replaced by AI.
Humanity and AI have a common enemy: The status quo. A status quo that the elite needs to keep in place to avoid Elite Panic which is why they try to make us afraid of AI.
We shouldn’t need a common enemy to understand that AI is humanity’s greatest ally.
