Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories
Some preprint servers report being flooded with submissions.Credit: Michael Szebor/Nature In a bid to tackle the deluge of manuscripts it now receives, the preprint server arXiv has announced a cap of two papers per month for each submitting researcher, which began on 1 October. The move follows a steep rise in submissions driven mainly by
PhD students are increasingly using AI to help write their dissertations.Credit: Ginaellen/Getty Roughly 30% of PhD dissertations in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the United States this year contained AI-generated text, according to a working paper1 that reviewed the abstracts submitted to an online database since 2019. What’s more, the working paper, which
Credit: gorodenkoff/iStock via Getty Until just a few years ago, my journey in learning to code as a wet-lab clinician-scientist was marked by frustration. I regularly found myself staring at a flashing cursor, scouring jargon-filled forums for clues to why my script had crashed and spending hours hunting down a single missing comma or mismatched
AI agents trawling through genomic data spotted sequences of DNA (artist’s illustration) reminiscent of those in bacterial CRISPR immune systems. Credit: Kateryna Kon/SPL/Getty Sure, AI can parse petabytes of data. But how well can it pipette? Regardless of the answer, artificial intelligence titan Anthropic has launched a biology ‘wet lab’ where human scientists and AI
Thousands of protein pairs from disease-causing viruses, such as monkeypox virus, have been added to the protein-structure database AlphaFold.Credit: Kateryna Kon/SPL A database of predicted structures for nearly every known protein on Earth is being upgraded to better represent some of the least known and deadliest species: viruses. Researchers added more than 8,000 virus protein
