A startup's ads for controversial embryo tests hit the New York City subway. One day this fall, I watched an electronic sign outside the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in Manhattan switch seamlessly between an ad for makeup and one promoting the website Pickyourbaby.com, Inside the station, every surface was wrapped with more ads--babies on turnstiles, on staircases, on banners overhead. To his mind, one should be as accessible as the other. Nucleus is a young, attention-seeking genetic software company that says it can analyze genetic tests on IVF embryos to score them for 2,000 traits and disease risks, letting parents pick some and reject others. This is possible because of how our DNA shapes us, sometimes powerfully.

Jerome Pesenti has a few reasons to celebrate Meta's decision last week to release Llama 3, a powerful open source large language model that anyone can download, run, and build on. Pesenti used to be vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta and says he often pushed the company to consider releasing its technology for others to use and build on. But his main reason to rejoice is that his new startup will get access to an AI model that he says is very close in power to OpenAI's industry-leading text generator GPT-4, but considerably cheaper to run and more open to outside scrutiny and modification. "The release last Friday really feels like a game-changer," Pesenti says. His new company, Sizzle, an AI tutor, currently uses GPT-4 and other AI models, both closed and open, to craft problem sets and curricula for students.

Artificial intelligence research has a long history, but most of the investment community s views of AI are shaped by the media. The robot in Lost in Space, HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Skynet in The Terminator these media tropes subconsciously shape our perceptions of what AI is and what it could be capable of. We dream of (or maybe dread) a HAL 9000 computer sitting next to us as we trade. As we move our mouse to buy some shares, it will sonorously intone, I don t think you should do that, Dave, or maybe it will just lock us out of the trading room when we are about to make a mistake. Robert Harris s 2011 novel The Fear Index develops this theme near the dramatic conclusion.