Decoding AI: Past, Present, and Future
In 1994, a small group of protein scientists invented a competition nobody expected to matter. They called it CASP — Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction — and the premise was almost aggressively humble: every two years, labs around the world would try to predict the three-dimensional shape of proteins from their amino acid sequences alone,…
In 1992, a neural network sat down to play backgammon against itself. It had no opening book, no database of grandmaster games, no human demonstrations of strategy. It had a reward signal — win or lose — and time. Lots of time. Gerald Tesauro at IBM Research let it run, and what emerged from that…
There is a particular failure mode that anyone who has worked seriously with large language models knows intimately: the model that answers with equal fluency whether it is correct or catastrophically wrong. The prose is smooth, the tone is confident, and the fact is invented. For years, this was treated as a quirk of the…
For decades, the central frustration of genomics was not sequencing DNA — we got fast at that. The frustration was interpretation. A genome is three billion base pairs long, and for most of it, we had almost no idea what any given stretch was doing, when it was doing it, or why mutations in one…
A humanoid robot walks into an unfamiliar warehouse. No pre-loaded map. No GPS signal. No one has told it where the shelves are, where the exits are, or what the floor plan looks like. Within about thirty seconds, it has built a working spatial model of the space, located itself within it, and begun navigating…
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000’s most chilling quality isn’t that he thinks. It’s that he knows where everything is. He tracks the crew through corridors, monitors the pod bay with perfect spatial awareness, understands the geometry of Discovery One down to the centimeter. For decades, that kind of environmental mastery felt like the…
Every few minutes, somewhere in the observable universe, two neutron stars spiral into each other and vanish in a collision so violent it warps the fabric of spacetime itself. The ripple reaches Earth as a gravitational wave — a signal so faint that by the time it arrives, it stretches and compresses the four-kilometer arms…
There is a small village in rural Mozambique where the nearest cardiologist is six hours away by road. There is a factory floor in Slovakia where the single engineer who understood a legacy CNC system retired last year and took forty years of tacit knowledge with him. There is a courtroom in rural Montana where…
Somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, a hyperscale AI cluster is running at full tilt — hundreds of megawatts of GPU density, inference workloads streaming through at every second of every day — and not a single drop of water is being evaporated to keep it cool. That sentence would have been nearly impossible to write…
Somewhere in the atmosphere above the Pacific, a column of warm, moist air is doing something subtle — something that will, in ten days, become a typhoon. For most of the history of numerical weather prediction, that something has been nearly impossible to model faithfully at global scale. The physics are understood. The compute has…