Sunday, November 30, 2025

The Obtain: the way forward for AlphaFold, and chatbot privateness considerations


In 2017, recent off a PhD on theoretical chemistry, John Jumper heard rumors that Google DeepMind had moved on from game-playing AI to a secret mission to foretell the buildings of proteins. He utilized for a job.

Simply three years later, Jumper and CEO Demis Hassabis had led the event of an AI system known as AlphaFold 2 that was in a position to predict the buildings of proteins to throughout the width of an atom, matching lab-level accuracy, and doing it many occasions quicker—returning ends in hours as a substitute of months.

Final yr, Jumper and Hassabis shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Now that the hype has died down, what influence has AlphaFold actually had? How are scientists utilizing it? And what’s subsequent? I talked to Jumper (in addition to a number of different scientists) to search out out. Learn the complete story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

The State of AI: Chatbot companions and the way forward for our privateness

—Eileen Guo & Melissa Heikkilä

Even in case you don’t have an AI pal your self, you in all probability know somebody who does. A latest examine discovered that one of many high makes use of of generative AI is companionship: On platforms like Character.AI, Replika, or Meta AI, folks can create personalised chatbots to pose as the best pal, romantic associate, mother or father, therapist, or every other persona they will dream up.

Some state governments are taking discover and beginning to regulate companion AI. However tellingly, one space the legal guidelines fail to handle is consumer privateness. Learn the complete story.

That is the fourth version of The State of AI, our subscriber-only collaboration between the Monetary Occasions and MIT Know-how Assessment. Join right here to obtain future editions each Monday.

Whereas subscribers to The Algorithm, our weekly AI publication, get entry to an prolonged excerpt, subscribers to the MIT Know-how Assessment are in a position to learn the entire thing on our web site.

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