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Reporting and discussion about Science & Medicine, with links to the original sources.
Leash Bio co-founder Ian Quigley says a model given only guesses of who made each molecule, plus the target protein's identity, predicted public ChEMBL activity data nearly as well as one using structure plus the same protein. His team's preprint adds that those guesses still carry chemistry.
Ian Quigley of Leash Bio says AI agents querying its premeasured binding screens can search for strong binders within 100 picks, and argues this resists memorization better than scaling its Hermes model. Leash released a version, Minos, October 14.
Eric Weinstein says AI should be free to challenge math and physics leaders he accuses of holding their fields back. He calls agent swarms on the internet dangerous. He believes a rigorously air-gapped, problem-solving AI would be safe to run, but he acknowledges that its research might give it new means of escape.
Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli said scientists need models with calibrated confidence and known limits more than human-readable inner workings. Biohub's Sal Candido said protein models hold knowledge not yet unlocked.
Biohub's Sal Candido and Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli argued on a panel that scaling laws in biology must be found, not assumed, and that the problem should decide whether to build better models or gather new data.
Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli said AlphaFold reproduces structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank, not proteins' shifting shapes. He sees raw cryo-EM images as one possible route to that motion, though his own attempt needs more work.
On Latent Space, Periodic Labs' Liam Fedus and Ekin Doğuş Çubuk discussed why experiments remain essential in materials discovery. The conversation covered how the standard simulation method, density functional theory, usually models perfect crystals and can't easily predict properties like superconducting temperature.
Periodic Labs' Liam Fedus says the startup puts AI on lab instruments to capture richer data and automates bottlenecks one at a time. He calls full autonomy a non-goal and says humanoid robots would be a slower path to its aims.
Periodic Labs' Liam Fedus says its records of failed experiments, and of the whole process behind each result, give its AI data that published research lacks. He argues even stronger future models will still need physical experiments.
After the 2026 medicine Nobel for optogenetics, Moonshots panelists argued the prizes lag AI-era science. Alexander Wissner-Gross said he once nudged Ed Boyden toward the field after reading Vernor Vinge.
Astro Teller, who leads Alphabet's moonshot lab X, said clean water, energy shifting and education remain unsolved there. He said X's water work pencils out at about 10 cents a liter, against the penny he says is needed.
Richard Socher, author of The Eureka Machine, argues AI can reconnect fragmented science and that biology gains most. He expects some single-gene diseases cured within 12 months, but says FDA delays mean five to 10 years for cures at scale.