Despite the ever-growing trove of human knowledge on which they’re trained, systems like ChatGPT seldom surprise you. They dutifully answer questions, mock up bland emails, even churn out paint-by-numbers fiction. What they don’t often supply are original ideas or boundary-pushing creativity.

But as AI companies talk a big game about supercharging scientific discovery, a growing discussion has focused on how the new generation of AI can be taught to “think” in novel ways.

That’s one of the ambitious goals of a startup called Lila Sciences, born out of Flagship Pioneering, an investor in and incubator of biotech companies that also produced Moderna. With a stated mission to “build scientific superintelligence,” Lila has raised $200 million in seed funding. It has created autonomous labs—AI Science Factories, as it calls them—that use foundation models and robotics to train on the scientific process, from hypothesis to experimentation.

Headquartered in the biotech hub of Boston, Lila Sciences is set apart both philosophically and geographically from the “current paradigm” in the AI industry, according to the company’s CTO of AI research, Andy Beam. That is, Beam said, the prevailing belief that superintelligence might be reachable by scaling up models trained on massive amounts of online data. Even breakthrough reasoning models that have shifted the focus from pure scale in recent months are concentrated on “easy-to-verify domains like math and coding,” he said.

“There’s this palpable hope, specifically in the Bay Area, that if you keep doing more of that, you’re going to get these generalized AGI superintelligence capabilities that will then result in scientific breakthroughs,” Beam said. “And we just have a pretty firm belief that you actually have to learn to do science. You actually have to do experiments…We have this pretty core belief that internet data is only going to get you so far.”

Keep reading here.—PK

On a hot and muggy Manhattan evening last week, hundreds of people lined up outside Lincoln Center for a night of film with AI on the marquee.

With more than 1,000 attendees, the startup Runway’s splashy third annual AI Film Festival felt more extravagant than two prior iterations, when a smaller crowd of AI enthusiasts huddled into a small retro theater downtown. This was the first year the organizers opened the doors to the general public, and it was the first to be held uptown in the stately complex that also hosts the New York Film Festival.

This year, more than 6,000 filmmakers submitted shorts that incorporated generative AI techniques in some way—a far cry from the 300 entries the inaugural event garnered in 2023.

The event’s evolution has matched the rapid progress in the video generation technology underlying it. Gone are the days of crude distortions; AI video seems to have fully crossed the uncanny valley of late, with hyper-realistic imagery and even audio to match. Some previous trouble with rendering less-alien humans seems more or less solved. Hands now usually boast the correct number of fingers (though they do sometimes glitch).

Keep reading here.—PK

Where the Trump administration is declining to invest in green tech, Ireland and Denmark want to pick up the slack.

During a NY Tech Week panel last week, trade representatives from Denmark, Ireland, and Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain, discussed potential investment—and relocation—opportunities in each country for US startups. Representatives for both Denmark and Ireland shouted out their countries’ decarbonization goals and said they’re looking for US companies to bring climate tech to Europe.

“Maybe you’re working on a project that’s not so familiar [to] the current administration, especially if you’re working on climate. That project will be very well received [in Denmark],” Lisa Mallner, commercial policy advisor for Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the audience at NYC’s Impact Hub. “Denmark has had very aggressive energy goals to be carbon neutral. So there’s been a very open and willing market to purchase these types of products.”

Keep reading here.—TC