AI Methods

Ask a large language model to write an algorithm for a scheduling problem and you will usually get something that looks right. The code is confident, the comments are tidy, and then it crashes, or it…

Cloudflare released two decision models on Oct. 1, Clef and the smaller Clef-flash, and published the weights for both on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license. Both also run as a hosted service…

A picture generator does not start with a picture. It starts with a small block of numbers, a kind of compressed sketch, and only at the last step unfolds that sketch into something a person can look…

Researchers reported Oct. 1 in Scientific Reports that the situation a group of elephants is in can be worked out from the sound of several of them rumbling over one another, not only from calls made…

A Google DeepMind team has hidden a mark inside proteins designed by artificial intelligence, so that the molecule itself shows a machine made it. The system, called SynthIDBio, appeared in Nature on…

Antarctica is very likely committed to losing ice over the rest of this century, meaning the loss is already locked in by warming that has happened, even if emissions fall sharply. Yucheng Lin of…

Samuel Sokota of Carnegie Mellon University, Gabriele Farina of MIT and colleagues report that their Stratego program, Ataraxos, won 15 of 20 games against Pim Niemeijer, the most decorated player in…

The word "the" is short. "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is not. Every listener registers word length without noticing, and that alone is enough to account for most of what one influential…

Microsoft Research introduced Quine, an experimental artificial intelligence system for biology, on Sept. 29, 2026, and opened applications for a first cohort of outside scientists to use it. What is…

Recording directly from the surface of the brain in nine patients undergoing awake surgery for brain tumors, a team at Huashan Hospital, Fudan University, identified which syllable a person was…

A team at the University of California, Davis fitted a model wing with air-pressure sensors, including one pair set where a bird's nostrils sit, and found that the pressure readings together with the…

A neutrino that interacts at tera-electronvolt energy does not leave a tidy trace. It leaves a bright, tightly packed bundle: a shower core, secondary tracks peeling away from it, several kinds of…