“The rise in AI is straining the value chain for critical minerals. Think about all these data centers being built. They need copper wiring, rare earth elements, specific magnets, all kinds of minerals. Then there's the climate transition from fossil fuels to renewables. To facilitate that transition, we'll need a lot more minerals: copper, rare earth elements, even high-purity quartz is in short supply.

There are huge bottlenecks in the value chain that will be very challenging to alleviate. We need to unlock resources we can't find or develop right now. The easy deposits have been found. Future discoveries are hidden underground and much harder to find. By aggregating all this data in the right framework, we can query it in natural language ways to understand the geological evolution that leads to big deposits of critical minerals."

“For the first time, an artificial intelligence system has created a series of previously unknown viruses capable of infecting and eliminating certain types of bacteria. This breakthrough opens up new possibilities for combating bacterial resistance. However, it also raises concerns about the potential misuse of this technology to design biological weapons.

For several years now, scientists have been able to synthesize viruses from scratch; these are typically used to develop and evaluate antiviral drugs and vaccines, as well as to expand our understanding of how these microorganisms behave. However, the production of these viral genomes has primarily relied on replicating previously known pathogens or variants.

In contrast, a new study conducted by scientists at Stanford University and the Arc Institute succeeded in having an AI design simple, functional, and previously unseen viruses based on information contained in the genetic sequences of millions of animals, plants, microbes, bacteria, and viruses found in nature.”