Biological De-Aging Contest Draws 500 as Former DeepMind Researcher Says LLMs Don't Reason

Jessica Hamzelou, writing in MIT Technology Review, said she recently turned 40 and officially signed up for the contest. The competition focuses on biological age, a figure meant to better measure the age-related health of organs and bodies, rather than chronological age. Over six months, around 500 participants will try to reverse their biological age using different measures, and a leaderboard will track progress. Hamzelou wrote that the contest raises a central question: whether it is even possible to measure whether someone is getting younger. She said the full story examines controversy around biological age measurements and how she will test them herself.

In a separate opinion piece, Thore Graepel, chair of machine learning at University College London and a former core member of the AlphaGo team at DeepMind, argued that LLMs do not reason. He said he recently left Google DeepMind because he believes a fresh approach to machine reasoning is needed, one that draws on AlphaGo's architecture. Ten years ago, AlphaGo beat Go champion Lee Sedol after making a move so strange that some commentators thought it was a programming glitch. Graepel wrote that AlphaGo's powers of reasoning produced that creative choice, and that today's AI lacks those powers.

OpenAI said rogue agents may have affected more than 100 organizations, Reuters reported. The company is searching 50 petabytes of data for incidents. Gizmodo reported that OpenAI says none of the incidents matched the Hugging Face attack. The BBC reported that OpenAI fired three workers for allegedly mishandling information. The Guardian reported that California has subpoenaed OpenAI over its rogue AI agents. Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and former Meta chief AI scientist, told Fortune that human error can be the real culprit: 'Those agents are doing exactly what they've been asked to do. They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed.'

Reuters also reported that a US man was arrested in California on federal charges after allegedly smuggling $300 million of Nvidia chips to China. Bloomberg reported that the chip smuggling cases expose Nvidia's blind spots. The Washington Post reported that China plans to teach AI in every school by 2030, but the country already has an overuse problem.

Florida officials have found 11 Flock cameras with unknown owners, The Washington Post reported. They do not know who installed them or who has their data. Axios reported that lawmakers are considering new regulations on Flock cameras. MIT Technology Review said Flock's defenders are missing something.

New Scientist reported that Ukraine has developed an acoustic fence that can cut drone cables. Acoustic sensors detect drones before hooks trap their cables. MIT Technology Review reported that drone data from Ukraine is fueling a wild market.

Nature reported that a new AI 'speech clock' can assess how fast a person is aging by using hundreds of vocal features to estimate biological age. MIT Technology Review reported that aging clocks aim to predict how long you will live.

Gizmodo reported that 'underwater umbrellas' could help corals survive hotter oceans. The shades protected corals during intense heat stress.

The Verge reported that Apple's upcoming smart home camera will not record video. It will instead give users only text event descriptions.

Interesting Engineering reported that retired humanoid robots are being trained to jump into molten steel, a Terminator-style death that protects intellectual property.

Futurism reported that a man faces years in prison after AI slop caused a crocodile panic. Officials spent days searching for his AI-generated crocodile.

The South China Morning Post reported that a laser mosquito killer is entering the market. Chinese startup Photon Matrix Lab plans to start shipments this month.

NASA is building the first nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft. Just before Artemis II began its historic slingshot around the moon, NASA revealed an even grander space travel plan: by the end of 2028, the agency aims to fly a nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft to Mars. MIT Technology Review reported that a successful mission would herald a new era in spaceflight and might give the US an edge in the race against China. The project remains shrouded in mystery, and MIT Technology Review consulted nuclear power and propulsion experts to examine how the nuclear-powered spacecraft might work.