Unlocking the mysteries of complex biological systems with agentic AI

November 13, 2024
The complexity of biology has long been a double-edged sword for scientific and medical progress. On one hand, the intricacy of systems (like the human immune response) offers countless opportunities for breakthroughs in medicine and healthcare. On the other hand, that very complexity has often stymied researchers, leaving some of the most significant medical challenges—like…

The Download: the lab fighting exploitative AI, and plant engineering

November 13, 2024
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. The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could…

The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

November 13, 2024
Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas.  A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work that…