Modern LLM Agents can debug code, analyze spreadsheets, and book complex travel. Given those capabilities, it’s reasonable to assume that they could handle something simpler: waiting. Ask an agent to monitor your email for a colleague’s response or watch for a price drop over several days, and it will fail. Not because it can’t check email or scrape prices. It can do both. It fails because it doesn’t know when to check. Agents either give up after a few  

Now, let’s rewind two years. Almost to the day, Bruce and I uncovered a vulnerability. While preparing a case study for a workshop on AI and biosecurity, we discovered that open-source AI protein design tools could be used to redesign toxic proteins in ways that could bypass biosecurity screening systems, systems set up to identify incoming orders of concern.  Now in that work, we created an AI pipeline from open-source tools that could essentially “paraphrase” the amino acid sequences—reformulating them while working to preserve their structure and potentially their function.  These […]

Advances in AI are opening extraordinary frontiers in biology. AI-assisted protein engineering holds the promise of new medicines, materials, and breakthroughs in scientific understandings. Yet these same technologies also introduce biosecurity risks and may lower barriers to designing harmful toxins or pathogens. This “dual-use” potential, where the same knowledge can be harnessed for good or misuse to cause harm, poses a critical dilemma for modern science. Great Promise—and Potential Threat I’m excited about the potential for AI-assisted protein design to […]

In the promising and rapidly evolving field of genetic analysis, the ability to accurately interpret whole genome sequencing data is crucial for diagnosing and improving outcomes for people with rare genetic diseases. Yet despite technological advancements, genetic professionals face steep challenges in managing and synthesizing the vast amounts of data required for these analyses. Fewer than 50% of initial cases yield a diagnosis, and while reanalysis can lead  

This year we’ve seen remarkable advances in agentic AI, including systems that conduct deep research, operate computers, complete substantial software engineering tasks, and tackle a range of other complex, multi-step goals. In each case, the industry relied on careful vertical integration: tools and agents were  

Recently, we released a paper (Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI) that studied what occupations might find AI chatbots useful, and to what degree. The paper sparked significant discussion, which is no surprise since people care deeply about the future of AI and jobs–that’s part of why we think it’s important  

[THEME MUSIC FADES]  The book passage I read at the top is from the epilogue, and I think it’s a truly fitting closing sentiment for the conclusion of this podcast series—because it calls back to the very beginning. As I’ve mentioned before, Carey, Zak, and I wrote The AI Revolution in Medicine as a guide to help answer these big questions, particularly as they pertain to medicine. You know, we wrote the book to empower people to make a choice […]

A new research framework helps AI agents explore three-dimensional spaces they can’t directly detect. Called MindJourney, the approach addresses a key limitation in vision-language models (VLMs), which give AI agents their ability to interpret and describe visual scenes.   While VLMs are strong at identifying objects in static  

Training AI models requires choosing an optimizer and for nearly a decade, Adam( (opens in new tab)–W) (opens in new tab) has been the optimizer of choice. Given that durability and success, it was  

[THEME MUSIC FADES]  The book passage I read at the top is from Chapter 7, “The Ultimate Paperwork Shredder.” Public health officials and healthcare system leaders influence the well-being and health of people at the population level. They help shape people’s perceptions and responses to public health emergencies, as well as to chronic disease. They help determine the type, quality, and availability of treatment. All this is critical for maintaining good public health, as well as aligning better health and […]