They News Briefs

A diagnosis is where better care begins. For a family navigating a rare or genetic disease, a diagnosis can be life-changing. After months or even years of appointments, tests, referrals, and unanswered questions, finally understanding what is causing a child’s symptoms brings families an answer they have often been searching for too long. But an answer is not the end of the journey. It is the beginning of better care, and that distinction is fundamental to the promise of genomic medicine. The value of a diagnosis is what clinicians and families can do differently because they have.

It’s time to retire the ‘stochastic parrot’ definition of AI. Early generative AI models, circa 2017-2022, were “stochastic parrots.” That is, they generated language by choosing the statistically most likely next word based on patterns in their training data, rather than truly understanding what they were saying. Beginning in 2023, artificial intelligence labs began releasing large language models (LLMs) that had evolved beyond autoregressive next-token prediction, as researchers call it. For many people, the stochastic parrot definition stuck. And lately, the “they’re just stochastic parrots” argument has been used as a way of downplaying the potential risks of huge language.

‘These guys are in a pickle’: Some Republicans spurn Trump on the campaign trail. Republicans are counting on Trump to energize the voters they need in November, even as some candidates fear his unpopularity could alienate the persuadable voters they also need to win.