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I received the new gene-editing drug for sickle cell disease. It changed my life.

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By Jimi Olagher -- MIT Review -- On a picturesque fall day a few years ago, I opened the mailbox and took out an envelope as thick as a Bible that would change my life. The package was from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and it contained a consent form to participate in a clinical trial for a new gene-editing drug to treat sickle cell disease. A week prior, my wife and I had talked on the phone with Haydar Frangoul, an oncologist and hematologist in Nashville, Tennessee, and the lead researcher of the trial.

He gave us an overview of what the trial entailed and how the early participants were faring. Before we knew it, my wife and I were flying to the study site in Nashville to enroll me and begin treatment. At the time, she was pregnant with our first child. I’d lived with sickle cell my whole life—experiencing chronic pain, organ damage, and hopelessness. To me, this opportunity meant finally taking control of my life and having the opportunity to be a present father. The drug I received, called exa-cel, could soon become the first CRISPR-based treatment to win approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, following the UK’s approval in mid-November. I’m one of only a few dozen patients who have ever taken it. In late October, I testified in favor of approval to the FDA’s advisory group as it met to evaluate the evidence. The agency will make its decision about exa-cel no later than December 8.

AstraZeneca bets $247m AI can create a cancer-fighting antibody

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by Katyanna Quach -- theregister.com -- Startup Absci will turn to its generative AI algorithms to design synthetic protein

Pharma giant AstraZeneca has signed a $247 million deal with Ai drug creation company Absci to develop an antibody designed to fight cancer. The collaboration was announced on Monday and will see Absci deliver an antibody for a "specified oncology target". AstraZeneca will cover its R&D efforts, while Absci will make a cut from royalty fees from any future sales if the drug makes it to market. "Absci's newest partnership with AstraZeneca is further validation of our first-of-its-kind zero-shot generative AI model designed to create new and improved antibody therapeutics, including for previously untreatable diseases," Absci CEO Sean McClain told The Register in a statement. "We're proud to work closely with AstraZeneca to leverage our AI to bring novel treatments to oncology patients," he added.

Can AI transformer models help design drugs and treat incurable diseases?

Chan Zuckerberg org to spin up 1,000+ H100 GPU cluster for AI medical research Former infosec COO pleads guilty to attacking hospitals to drum up business An Absci representative declined to detail which cancer the antibody will targeting, and when it expected to deliver a candidate to AstraZeneca. Absci's drug design platform uses computational techniques, including generative AI models, to create millions of potential synthetic antibodies. The most promising designs are grown from genetically engineered E coli bacteria cells. The synthetic antibodies designed by AI can be made by altering the DNA of the E coli cells, forcing them to create the desired protein structure. The resulting creations’ abilities to effectively bind to targets can then be tested in lab experiments, and the data used to further improve the model's future outputs. Joshua Meier, Absci's chief AI officer, previously told The Register that there are more possible antibody variants that can be simulated than there are atoms in the universe. To find the most promising candidates, the company trains AI algorithms to predict various traits that suggest they might be more effective at things like marking cancerous cells for the immune system to attack, or preventing tumors from growing.

‘The great wealth transfer’ is here: Billionaires set to give trillions to their kids

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Robert Frank -- cnbc.com -- In recent months, the world’s new billionaires made more of their fortunes from inheritance than from entrepreneurship, according to the UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report. It marked the first time in the nine-year history of the report that newly minted billionaires accumulated more wealth from inheritance than starting a business. Fifty-three heirs inherited a total of $150.8 billion in the 12 months ending in April, exceeding the total of $140.7 billion accumulated by 84 new self-made billionaires, according to the Swiss bank’s report. The shift is likely to continue: The report said more than 1,000 billionaires are expected to pass $5.2 trillion to their children over the next 20 or 30 years. “The great wealth transfer, which we’ve all been talking about for the last 10 years, is underway,” said John Mathews, head of UBS’ Private Wealth Management division. “The average age of the world’s billionaires is almost 69 right now. So this whole transition or wealth handover will start to accelerate.”

Many billionaires will leave the bulk of their wealth to charity. And some, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, continue spending their fortunes on real estate, yachts and flights to space. Yet today’s billionaires will still have plenty to leave to their families. According to the report, the number of billionaires rose by 7% globally over the 12 months ending in April. The population of billionaires in the world increased to 2,544 from 2,376. Their total wealth great by 9% -- from $11 trillion to $12 trillion. The great wealth transfer from billionaires and multi-millionaires will likely change the landscape in investing and wealth management, as well as spending and philanthropy. More than two thirds of the billionaires with inherited wealth in the UBS survey said that they plan to continue and grow what their parents or grandparents achieved – whether it’s in a business, a brand or assets. Yet their values and priorities may be different. The next generation of billionaire investors tend to be highly focused on climate change, technology and impact investing than older generations, according to studies.

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books 'Unfortunately or fortunately, this is going to be a trend'

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by Katyanna Quach - the register -- The council of Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil, has approved legislation drafted by ChatGPT. The ordinance is supposed to prevent the city from charging taxpayers to replace any water meters stolen by thieves. A vote from 36 members of the council unanimously passed the proposal, which came into effect in late November. But what most of them didn't know was that the text for the proposal had been generated by an AI chatbot, until councilman Ramiro Rosário admitted he had used ChatGPT to write it. "If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn't even have been taken to a vote," he told the Associated Press.

This is the first-ever legislation written by AI to be passed by lawmakers that us vultures know about; if you know of any other robo-written laws, contracts, or interesting stuff like that, do let us know. To be clear, ChatGPT was not asked to come up with the idea but was used as a tool to write up the fine print. Rosário said he used a 49-word prompt to instruct OpenAI's erratic chatbot to generate the complete draft of the proposal. At first, the city's council president Hamilton Sossmeier disapproved of his colleague's methods and thought Rosário had set a "dangerous precedent." He later changed his mind, however, and said: "I started to read more in depth and saw that, unfortunately or fortunately, this is going to be a trend." Sossmeier may be right. In the US, Massachusetts state Senator Barry Finegold and Representative Josh Cutler made headlines earlier this year for their bill titled: "An Act drafted with the help of ChatGPT to regulate generative artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT." The pair believe machine-learning engineers should include digital watermarks in any text generated by large language models to detect plagiarism (and presumably allow folks to know when stuff is computer-made); obtain explicit consent from people before collecting or using their data for training neural networks; and conduct regular risk assessments of their technology.

Using large language models like ChatGPT to write legal documents is controversial and risky right now, especially since the systems tend to fabricate information and hallucinate. In June, attorneys Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca representing Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, a law firm based in New York, came under fire for citing fake legal cases made up by ChatGPT in a lawsuit. They were suing a Colombian airline Avianca on behalf of a passenger who was injured aboard a 2019 flight, and prompted ChatGPT to recall similar cases to cite, which it did, but it also just straight up imagined some. At the time Schwartz and LoDuca blamed their mistake on not understanding the chatbot's limitations, and claimed they didn't know it could hallucinate information.

Judge Kevin Castel from the Southern District Court of New York realized the cases were bogus when lawyers from the opposing side failed to find the cited court documents, and asked Schwartz and LoDuca to cite their sources. Castel fined them both $5,000 and dismissed the lawsuit altogether. "The lesson here is that you can't delegate to a machine the things for which a lawyer is responsible," Stephen Wu, shareholder in Silicon Valley Law Group and chair of the American Bar Association's Artificial Intelligence and Robotics National Institute, previously told The Register.

Rosário, however, believes the technology can be used effectively. "I am convinced that ... humanity will experience a new technological revolution. All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good. That's why we have to show how it can be used for good," he said. ®

Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone carbon footprint AI

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MIT Technology Review by Melissa Heikkilä -- Each time you use AI to generate an image, write an email, or ask a chatbot a question, it comes at a cost to the planet. In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University. However, they found that using an AI model to generate text is significantly less energy-intensive. Creating text 1,000 times only uses as much energy as 16% of a full smartphone charge. Their work, which is yet to be peer reviewed, shows that while training massive AI models is incredibly energy intensive, it’s only one part of the puzzle. Most of their carbon footprint comes from their actual use.

The study is the first time researchers have calculated the carbon emissions caused by using an AI model for different tasks, says Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher at Hugging Face who led the work. She hopes understanding these emissions could help us make informed decisions about how to use AI in a more planet-friendly way. Luccioni and her team looked at the emissions associated with 10 popular AI tasks on the Hugging Face platform, such as question answering, text generation, image classification, captioning, and image generation. They ran the experiments on 88 different models. For each of the tasks, such as text generation, Luccioni ran 1,000 prompts, and measured the energy used with a tool she developed called Code Carbon. Code Carbon makes these calculations by looking at the en

How ChatGPT changed the world of tech in just one year

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by Daniel Howley· Yahoo Technology Editor -- It’s been quite a year for OpenAI. In the last few weeks alone, the company survived an attempted coup in which co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was fired and then rehired following pushback from employees and big-name investors like Microsoft (MSFT). And that’s not even the most interesting part of the story. Exactly one year ago tomorrow, OpenAI’s generative AI-powered ChatGPT hit the web, quickly becoming one of the fastest growing apps in history and setting off an AI gold rush that continues to reverberate across the technology industry and beyond. Companies ranging from Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft, an OpenAI investor, to Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and others are racing to build out their own generative AI-powered software platforms.

On the hardware front, the AI explosion has made Nvidia, the world’s leading AI chip developer, the hottest semiconductor company on Earth, again. Year to date, shares of Nvidia are up more than 200%. Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD), meanwhile, are up 67% and 90%, respectively. “We all understand ChatGPT was a critical inflection point in the history of AI, in spite of the fact that it's only a year out since its initial release,” Rishi Bommasani, the society lead at Stanford’s Center for Research on Foundation Models, told Yahoo Finance. But ChatGPT, and generative AI more generally, have raised questions about data usage rights and the potential to create and spread disinformation via images and videos. “While [generative AI] tools are empowering us in so many ways, with so many kinds of superpowers, it's interesting to consider that the same tools can also apply to what supervillains want to do,” explained Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. “And so we have to think about what guardrails we need to put in place before we deploy the tools so that we ensure that the use is a good one.”

Pope called Cardinal Burke his ‘enemy’ and threatened to strip him of privileges, reports claim

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By Thomas Colsy -- catholic Herald -- Pope Francis has referred to an outspoken American cardinal as his “enemy” and threatened to strip him of his privileges, according to reports from Italy. The New Daily Compass, which claims the rumour has been confirmed by multiple sources in the Vatican, reported that the Pope was overheard saying: “Cardinal Burke is my enemy, so I am taking away his flat and salary.” There has been no independent confirmation of the reports. Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, 75, is a former patron of the Order of Malta who also served on the Roman Curia until his removal in 2017. He has been a consistent critic of the papacy of Pope Francis.

Earlier this year, he was one of five cardinals to sign a dubia questioning aspects of the Synod on Synodality and in 2016 he also signed a dubia which raised doubts about the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia on family life, which critics say opened the door to the reception of Holy Communion by divorced and remarried Catholics. Journalist Riccardo Cascioli, who broke the story about the Pope’s remarks, claimed such punitive measures by Francis would not be without precedent in the present pontificate. German Archbishop Georg Gänswein, personal secretary to Pope Benedict XVI, for example, was dismissed from the prefecture of the papal household and ordered to leave Rome in 2023 after he revealed that Francis’s restrictions on the celebration of the Old Latin Mass left the Emeritus Pope heart-broken. US Bishop Joseph Strickland, who was fired by Pope Francis as Bishop of Tyler, Texas, earlier this month, said: “If this is accurate it is an atrocity that must be opposed. If it is false information it needs to be corrected immediately.”