The Download: a biological de-aging contest and why LLMs don’t reason

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. This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger.

I recently turned 40, and I don’t need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused on competitors’ biological ages, figures that are meant to provide a better way to measure the age-related health of our organs and bodies. Over six months, around 500 of us will try to reverse our biological age using a bunch of different measures.

There’s even a leaderboard! But is it even possible to measure whether someone is getting younger? Read the full story on the controversy around biological age measurements and how I’ll test them myself.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. . Ten years ago, I watched a program I helped build stun the world by beating Go champion Lee Sedol. AlphaGo won after making a move so strange that some commentators thought it was a programming glitch.

It was AlphaGo’s powers of reasoning that made this creative choice—and these are powers that today’s AI lacks. This is why I recently left my position at Google DeepMind. I believe we need a fresh approach to machine reasoning, one that draws on AlphaGo’s architecture.

Here’s why today’s AI doesn’t really reason—and what it would take to change that. Thore Graepel is chair of machine learning at University College London. He was a core member of the AlphaGo team at DeepMind.