What if scientists could uncover new clues about Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s in minutes instead of months? Working together, OpenAI, PerturbAI⁠(opens in a new window), and Scripps Research⁠(opens in a new window) used thousands of AI agents powered by GPT‑Rosalind⁠(opens in a new window) to analyze and interpret existing experimental data from millions of mouse brain cells⁠(opens in a new window) in just 32 minutes. The agents connected the effects of gene disruptions with findings from scientific literature, uncovering unexpected biological connections that can help scientists understand disease and identify research directions for new treatments. The work shows how AI can help researchers explore more of what large biological experiments reveal. — Read More

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Microsoft’s AI diagnostic system correctly diagnosed complex medical cases in a simulation more than twice as often as generalist physicians, according to a study published Thursday in Science. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI’s CEO, called the result a step toward “medical superintelligence.”

The system, dubbed MAI-DxO (DxO for short), coordinates several AI agents that act like a panel of doctors. They question a patient, order tests, and debate a diagnosis. — Read More

Scientists have long treated the brain as a single organ that grows from one pool of early cells. Stanford University neuroscientist Kyle Loh and colleagues challenge this view, arguing that the human brain is two distinct nervous systems that evolved separately and were joined together over hundreds of millions of years. The discovery could also help explain why researchers have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in a lab, and open new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the hindbrain, or brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). — Read More

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AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans.

If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century, that is how they must remain.

Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious.  — Read More

For AGI to benefit all of humanity, we believe it must be democratically governed. This can only happen through an informed public debate about the capabilities, risks and safeguards of highly capable AI systems. People everywhere need to understand the likely future trajectory of frontier AI, so they can have a meaningful voice in how it develops.

… We aim to safely build an automated AI researcher that can work under human supervision to further progress on deep learning and alignment, enabling iterative improvements. According to our measurements, we have now reached the goal, announced last fall, of having an automated research intern by September of this year. — Read More

For the first time, scientists have mapped every single neural connection in the brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly. In this years-long project by HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Google Research, and collaborators from the scientific community, this map of the male fruit fly brain includes a record-breaking more than 166,000 neurons. It’s a big step in advancing neuroscience experiments on this key model organism. — Read More

#human

I almost dropped my phone when I saw the news that chemogenetics was in human clinical trials. Chemogenetics is a powerful technique that modifies specific neurons so they can be controlled remotely by normally inert drugs. Bryan Roth, one of the technique’s inventors, told the BRAIN Initiative conference audience on August 13th1 that he had found seven ongoing clinical trials of chemogenetics in China. The disclosure set off a flurry of coverage in the trade media: We’re translating our sci-fi basic neuroscience tools to humans! We’re engineering new knobs for biology! We might have new ways of treating epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and pain! — Read More

#human

US researchers have for the first time successfully synthesised brand-new viruses not found in nature, based on designs generated by artificial intelligence.

The researchers’ paper, published in the journal Science on Thursday, details how scientists from Stanford University and the Arc Institute, a California-based non-profit dedicated to “high-risk, high-reward” research, were able to create the viruses using DNA sequences generated by two “genome language models” named Evo 1 and Evo 2. — Read More

Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models’ tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread. — Read More

#human

A study demonstrates that learning in neural networks is driven primarily by adjusting the strength of existing connections rather than by continuously expanding or reconfiguring underlying network architecture.

Published in Physica A, the study by Prof. Ido Kanter of Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Physics and the Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center explored this longstanding question using artificial neural networks trained on language-learning tasks.

As the amount of training data increased, the models became significantly better at learning. Surprisingly, however, the researchers found that the networks could still lose roughly the same proportion of connections (synapses) without any meaningful decline in performance. In other words, improved learning did not depend on building more complex networks. Instead, it resulted from more effective cooperation among the components that were already there. — Read More