1. It took humans 134 years to discover Norn cells. Last summer, computers in California discovered them on their own in just six weeks. The discovery came about when researchers at Stanford programmed the computers to teach themselves biology. The computers ran an artificial intelligence program similar to ChatGPT, the popular bot that became fluent with language after training on billions of pieces of text from the internet. But the Stanford researchers trained their computers on raw data about millions of real cells and their chemical and genetic makeup. The researchers did not tell the computers what these measurements meant. They did not explain that different kinds of cells have different biochemical profiles. They did not define which cells catch light in our eyes, for example, or which ones make antibodies. The computers crunched the data on their own, creating a model of all the cells based on their similarity to each other in a vast, multidimensional space. When the machines were done, they had learned an astonishing amount. They could classify a cell they had never seen before as one of over 1,000 different types. One of those was the Norn cell. (Source: nytimes.com)
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