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Category: innovation – Page 5
Sam Altman on Zero-Person AI Companies, Sora, AGI Breakthroughs, and more
OpenAI just unveiled HUGE developer updates at DevDay 2025 — Apps in ChatGPT, Agent Builder, Sora API, and Codex updates that can handle day-long tasks.
I sat down with Sam Altman for an exclusive interview about going viral on Sora, zero-person companies, and why he believes early AGI-like breakthroughs are starting to happen NOW.
In this conversation, we unpack:
Sam’s Sora AI deepfakes going viral.
Zero-person billion dollar companies run by agents.
AI starting to make scientific discoveries on Twitter.
ChatGPT’s 800M users and the new distribution platform.
Get 5-minute daily updates on the latest AI news: https://www.therundown.ai/subscribe.
Chapters:
First device based on ‘optical thermodynamics’ can route light without switches
A team of researchers at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has created a new breakthrough in photonics: the design of the first optical device that follows the emerging framework of optical thermodynamics.
The work, reported in Nature Photonics, introduces a fundamentally new way of routing light in nonlinear systems—meaning systems that do not require switches, external control, or digital addressing. Instead, light naturally finds its way through the device, guided by simple thermodynamic principles.
Dark matter detector succeeds in performing measurements with nearly no radioactive interference
In their search for dark matter, scientists from the XENON Collaboration are using one of the world’s most sensitive dark matter detectors, XENONnT at the Gran Sasso Laboratory of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics INFN in Italy, to detect extremely rare particle interactions. These could provide clues about the nature of dark matter. The problem, however, is that tiny amounts of natural radioactivity generate background events that can mask these weak signals.
The XENONnT experiment has made a breakthrough by significantly reducing one of the most problematic contaminants— radon, a radioactive gas. For the first time, the research team has succeeded in reducing the detector’s radon-induced radioactivity to a level a billion times lower than the very low natural radioactivity of the human body.
The underlying technology, which the XENONnT consortium reports in the current issue of the Physical Review X, was developed by a team led by particle physicist Prof Christian Weinheimer from the University of Münster.
Teams with budding researchers are more likely to drive scientific disruption, new study finds
Scientific research apparently has its own share of beginner’s luck. According to a study by Mahdee Mushfique Kamal and Raiyan Abdul Baten, teams with a larger number of newbies take the cake when it comes to transformative scientific research. Their study examined 28 million articles spanning five decades of scientific publications to understand how beginner authors drive scientific advancement.
The duo developed what they call a disruption score, ranging from-1 to +1. A score closer to-1 indicates that a paper mainly reinforces existing knowledge and builds directly on established work. On the other end of the spectrum lies +1, which signals a disruptive paper which has the ability to shift the direction of science by opening new paths and making previous work less central.
They observed a universal phenomenon known as the “beginner’s charm,” where teams with higher fractions of beginner authors systematically produced more disruptive and innovative scientific work. Teams with more senior members produce less disruptive work, and this negative correlation was strong.
HIV mystery uncovered: How the virus reprograms host cells to create perfect hiding places
For over three decades, HIV has played an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with researchers, making treating—and possibly even curing—the disease a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to achieve.
But scientists at Case Western Reserve University have made a breakthrough discovery that could fundamentally change strategies for treating HIV.
The team identified for the first time how HIV enters a dormant state in infected cells that allows the virus to “hide” from the immune system and current treatments.
