An exclusive conversation with Kevin Weil, head of OpenAI for Science, a new in-house team that wants to make scientists more productive. In the three years since ChatGPT's explosive debut, OpenAI's technology has upended a remarkable range of everyday activities at home, at work, in schools--anywhere people have a browser open or a phone out, which is everywhere. Now OpenAI is making an explicit play for scientists. In October, the firm announced that it had launched a whole new team, called OpenAI for Science, dedicated to exploring how its large language models could help scientists and tweaking its tools to support them. The last couple of months have seen a slew of social media posts and academic publications in which mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and others have described how LLMs (and OpenAI's GPT-5 in particular) have helped them make a discovery or nudged them toward a solution they might otherwise have missed. In part, OpenAI for Science was set up to engage with this community.

The square-faced, three-legged alien shoves and jostles to get at the enormous plant taking over its tiny planet. But each bite just makes the forbidden fruit grow bigger. Suddenly the plant's weight flips the whole sphere upside down and all the little creatures drop into space. Reach in and catch one! Agence, a short interactive VR film from Toronto-based studio Transitional Forms and the National Film Board of Canada, won't be breaking any box office records.

Gagliano previously won the first ever Emmy for a VR experience in 2015. Now he and producer David Oppenheim, who works at the National Film Board of Canada, are experimenting with a kind of storytelling they call dynamic film. "We see Agence as a sort of silent-era dynamic film," says Oppenheim. Agence was debuted at the Venice International Film Festival last month and was released this week to watch/play via Steam, an online video game platform. The basic plot revolves around a group of creatures and their appetite for a mysterious plant that appears on their planet: can they control their desire or will they destabilize the planet and get tipped to their doom?

I watch as he toys with the small group of lifeforms named Agents that curiously ramble around a tiny planet. They're odd three-legged things that go from goldfishing their way from one side of their tennis ball-sized existence to another to staring at me in bemusement to accidentally – and then angrily – bumping into each other. When the call ends, Gagliano – perhaps unknowingly – leaves the stream going for another 10 or so minutes. I sit, slightly transfixed, continuing to observe the Agents that go on existing in the absence of their newfound virtual deity. Agence is a hard thing to pin down. Gagliano, the piece's director, and Oppenheim, the creative producer, label it as a'looping' and'dynamic film', something that starts right back up again the moment it ends.

None of those are proven cures for the coronavirus, but this kind of misinformation has been spreading online, in some places seemingly faster than the disease itself. Internet giants like Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok have all pledged to promote fact-based information on the epidemic. And the World Health Organization has pledged to partner with technology firms to push out authoritative data. It won't be easy, experts say. If you were online when the virus broke, you may have seen that … bat video.

To the delight of binge-watchers everywhere, it's no longer prohibitively expensive to purchase a giant television. And those devices are also getting smarter, with features like voice commands, personalized recommendations, and built-in apps for Netflix and other streaming services. It's almost impossible to buy a TV without them. The average consumer might ascribe the declining price to a variant of Moore's law. "Right now, you're paying with your data, but you don't know the price," says Casey Oppenheim, CEO of Disconnect, a privacy-focused software company.