AI and machine learning are kicking synthetic biology up to new levels of innovation. Researchers see huge potential for novel drugs and other chemicals; some also see risks.

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create better methods for measuring machine cognition. The post Are We

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say. “Ther

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. How to encourage smarter AI use in the classroom Chatbots took

Humanoid robots are having a moment in China. The popular machines are part of the country’s strategy to bring artificial intelligence into daily life. Embedding the technology into physical systems—a

The findings represent the first genomes, or complete genetic instruction books, designed entirely with generative A.I. The resulting viruses attack only bacteria, which could one day help overcome th

People have been talking to each other for at least 100,000 years, as best we can tell. And in all that time, there has been only one thing in the world that could learn a human language to perfect fl

When the biotech company Insilico Medicine used its computer models to propose a promising drug for pulmonary fibrosis, it enthusiastically claimed in a press release that the molecule had been “disco

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. AI’s recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly afte

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. We still don’t know how people are really using AI AI companie

The AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic data for training, and optimiz

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120