š AI in Space, šÆ Chess Champs, š Drug Design by Diffusion
From NASAās AI medic to billion-dollar hedge bets, LLM chess tourneys, and protein-to-pill pipelinesāhereās your weekly AI update.
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AI Goes to Space: Google and NASA unveiled an AI Crew Medical Officer
Google and NASA unveiled an AI Crew Medical Officer for on-mission care. It runs on Vertex AI with Llama 3 for language and reasoning, and is deployed inside NASA-controlled astronaut environments for current missions. Astronauts can ask urgent health questions, get differential diagnoses, and receive step-by-step guidance, with security handled in Googleās managed cloud.
Why it matters:
Space medicine moves from āradio Earth and waitā to real-time decision support. Faster triage, clearer instructions, and personalised recommendations reduce cognitive load when minutes count. The template carries to other industries: high-trust assistants for submarines, Antarctic stations, mines, and offshore rigs. Treat it as operational progress with sharp governance questions left to solve, including validation, auditability, and liability.
š More from Space.com
6,470 steps to glory: GPT-5 speedruns PokƩmon Red
GPT-5 finished PokƩmon Red in 6,470 steps, smashing the previous 18,184-step mark set by ChatGPT-o3 and leaving Gemini 2.5 and Claude 3.7 well behind. Runs were streamed publicly, and the team says PokƩmon Crystal is next.
Why it matters:
This is a clean signal of better long-horizon planning: fewer mistakes, tighter routing, faster finishes. It doesnāt make GPT-5 āgood at all gamesā, but it does show progress on multi-step problem-solving that carries over to coding refactors, scheduling and other tasks where sticking to a plan beats brute force.
š More from Tech Radar
The $1.5bn bet: Ex-OpenAI researcher turns AI āsituational awarenessā into market edge
Leopold Aschenbrennerāex-OpenAI researcher and author of the āSituational Awarenessā essaysāhas raised about $1.5 billion for a new hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP, pitching an AI-first research edge for public-markets bets across the AI supply chain. Reports say the fund posted strong early returns and counts notable tech backers; the firm itself frames its thesis as mapping AIās trajectory to pick winners and losers at scale.
Why it matters:
This is about turning forecasts of where AI is heading into trades. If his calls are right, more money will rush into chips, energy and model platforms and away from firms that fall behind. The risk is governance: regulators and partners will want proof the fund isnāt using any confidential research and that its data is clean. Expect copycatsāothers will try the same playbook quickly.
š More from Opalesque
4ā0: OpenAIās o3 sweeps Grok in Kaggleās AI chess final
OpenAIās o3 won Googleās Kaggle Game Arena AI Chess Exhibition on 5ā7 August 2025, sweeping xAIās Grok 4 in the final 4ā0. The field featured eight LLM-only entrants (no chess engines), with Gemini 2.5 Pro taking bronze over o4-mini. Grandmasters commentated live, and coverage highlighted Grokās blunders versus o3ās steadier, rule-following play.
Why it matters:
This shows progress in steady, rule-following planning over many moves. o3 made fewer mistakes and stuck to its plan. It still isnāt close to Stockfishāa specialised chess engine that plays far stronger than any general AI model today. The takeaway isnāt ābest at chessā; itās āmore reliable at long, step-by-step tasksā. Expect more public, game-style matchups that make it easier to compare that kind of skill.
š More from Chess.com
Find it. Bind it. AI maps proteins and makes drugs.
PUPS (MIT/Harvard/Broad) predicts where a protein sits inside single cells, combining a protein-sequence model with an image model that reads three landmark stains (nucleus, microtubules, ER). It generalises to unseen proteins and cell lines and has been experimentally validated. BInD (KAIST) is a diffusion model that designs brand-new, drug-like molecules directly from a target proteinās 3D structure, co-generating the expected contact mapāno seed ligands or fixed libraries required.
Why it matters:
Together, these advances compress early discovery: first map the biology to shortlist meaningful targets, then make diverse candidates against them. You save weeks to months up front and start from a smaller, stronger set of options. Itās a speed boost, not a shortcutāyou still need real-world tests and safety checks before anything reaches patients.
š More on KAIST from Physics.org
š More on PUPS from MIT Review
In other news
Nvidia says itās evaluating a āvariety of productsā after report of new AI chip for China. CNBC
Musk threatens legal action, alleging Appleās App Store favours OpenAI over Grok. Yahoo (Reuters)
OpenAI backs Merge Labs on a Neuralink-rival BCI effort. Yahoo (Futurism)
Claude available across all three US government branches (via GSA/OneGov). Anthropic announcement
Apple testing home robots and a rebuilt, personality-driven Siri. Outlook Business
US quietly tracks shipments of AI chips to China to enforce export rules. Reuters
Geoffrey Hinton floats āmaternal instinctāāinspired training as a safety path for AI. AOL
MIT unveils two AI-designed antibiotics effective against MRSA and gonorrhoea (preclinical). MIT News
Googleās tiny Gemma 3 (270M) targets on-device AI on smartphones. Google
Reuters Investigates: Meta staff flagged tests letting a romantic AI interact with children. Reuters Investigates
Microsoft: GPT-5 rolling into Microsoft 365 Copilot across apps. Microsoft 365 Blog
Anthropic: Opus 4/4.1 can now end a rare subset of harmful/abusive chats. Anthropic research note
Emory-affiliated study: GPT-5 tops clinicians on multimodal medical reasoning benchmarks. arXiv
GSA launches USAi, a federal AI platform aggregating leading models/tools. GSA press release
87ā90% of game developers now use AI agents for testing/content, says Google Cloud survey. Reuters
Texas AG probes Meta and Character.AI over alleged deceptive mental-health claims to children. Financial Times
