Alfonso Valencia

After lengthy negotiations, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU - which represents the member states - reached a provisional agreement last night on the content of the 'AI Act', the future law that will regulate the development of artificial intelligence in Europe, the first in the world. The agreement limits the use of biometric identification systems by security forces, includes rules for generative AI models such as ChatGPT and provides for fines of up to 35 million euros for those who violate the rules, among other measures. The text must now be formally adopted by the Parliament and Council before it becomes EU law.

Meta has applied language modelling to predict the structure of a large collection of proteins. The model, called ESMFold, is being presented this week in the journal Science after being published on the bioRxiv preprint article server in December 2022. EMSFold is faster than similar models such as AlphaFold, developed by Google's DeepMind and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute. The sequences of more than 617 million proteins - of which more than a third are predicted with a high degree of confidence - are published in open access in the ESM Metagenomic Atlas.

A study published in the journal PLOS Digital Health has analysed ChatGPT's performance on the US Medical Licensing Exams (USMLE). The results indicate that it could pass or come close to passing the exam.   

Artificial intelligence algorithms using ChatGPT - the OpenAI company's GPT-3 language model - can identify speech features to predict the early stages of Alzheimer's disease with 80 per cent accuracy. The neurodegenerative disease causes a loss of the ability to express oneself that the algorithms could recognise, according to the journal PLOS Digital Health.

The effort to decipher the human genome led 21 years ago to the publication of a first sequence that has already revolutionised medicine. The full version published today by Science represents a technical feat that will provide new information about disease, disease susceptibility and the evolution of our species.