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The Frontier

Microsoft's MAI-DxO scores 83% on NEJM cases; doctors 36%

Microsoft's diagnostic system cleared peer review today. The interesting part is not the multiple in the headline — it is which doctors you compare it to, and how much of the win belongs to the model underneath rather than to Microsoft's orchestration. Microsoft's MAI-DxO answered 83% of 304 complex case records from the New England Journal of Medicine correctly, against 36% for primary care doctors who had textbooks and the internet, according to results published in Science on Thursday.

The Frontier

Science Corporation implants PRIMA in its first Stargardt patient

An implant company just showed the far edge of what neural engineering can do today, and OpenAI went shopping for the firm that hacks open-source software for a living. Science Corporation has put its PRIMA vision chip into the first patient with Stargardt disease, CEO Max Hodak said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday.

The Stack

Coding agents as a hospital: Cockroach's five-month results

The agentic-coding debate keeps being framed as speed versus trust. Cockroach Labs just published the most detailed trust-first ledger yet — five months of numbers, including the parts that didn't work. Cockroach Labs ran its codebase like a teaching hospital for five months and says the pipeline merged well over a million lines of code with seven total reverts.

The Guardrails

Stuart Russell: current training may make AI alignment impossible

A safety-obsessed week just found its second heavyweight: after Hinton asked for an FDA of AI, the man who gave the field the word "alignment" says the current road may not get there at all — while memory markets show exactly where the AI money is going. Stuart Russell says he regrets coining the word "alignment," because the field read it as an engineering target — and he now thinks the way models are trained today may make avoiding misalignment impossible.

The Guardrails

The Take — An AI FDA would approve the demo, not the deployment

I think Geoffrey Hinton has the diagnosis right and the prescription backwards. Self-policing genuinely has no burden of proof — nobody outside a lab must be shown anything before a frontier model ships — and that has to change. But an FDA-style pre-market gate would certify the wrong object: a frozen snapshot presented on approval day, when every failure we have actually watched arrive did so afterward, through permissions, updates and tool access. Our morning brief laid out the ask from…

The Guardrails

Hinton wants an FDA-style approval gate for AI models

A safety proposal with the field's most famous name behind it, a first hard look at who actually pays for consumer AI, and a new bet on squeezing more compute out of data centers that already exist. Geoffrey Hinton wants AI models to clear a regulator the way drugs clear the FDA. The Nobel laureate made the case on Tuesday's "Smart Girl Dumb Questions" podcast: "You're not allowed to just make a new drug and release it on the market. You have to convince the FDA.

The Guardrails

Epic pauses product development after AI finds MyChart flaws

An AI security model found silent-access flaws in the software behind 320 million patient records — and the company froze its roadmap. Meanwhile the data-center backlash just forced a first-party concession from Amazon, and the memory squeeze reached Nvidia's desktop. Epic pauses most product development after an AI model finds MyChart flaws.

The Guardrails

OpenAI pins its reasoning-theft campaign on Moonshot AI accounts

Two labs shipped defenses against how AI gets copied today — one against stealing a model's reasoning, one against misusing AI-designed proteins — while Reddit slammed the door on the bots doing the copying. OpenAI says a cluster of accounts tied to Moonshot AI spent July pulling protected reasoning out of its models at scale.

The Guardrails

RFK Jr. says AI gives a better second opinion than any doctor

Two stories worth your time before the wire fills up with DevDay follow-ups: the US health secretary's new position on who Americans should trust for medical advice, and China's biggest assistant turning into a travel agent the day before Golden Week. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a MAHA summit audience that AI can give patients "a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country," and claimed it has the power to "free us from medical tyranny." Kennedy…

The Frontier

Kyunghyun Cho launches Ortet, a frontier AI health lab, with $500M

A co-author of the attention mechanism spent five years building AI for drug discovery inside Genentech. Today he launched his own lab — with a half-billion dollars behind it, one disclosed backer, and no priced round. Ortet launched on September 29 as a frontier AI lab for health, with a $500 million commitment from Thoreau and a founding team led by Kyunghyun Cho.

The Frontier

Insilico's AI-designed drug enters Phase III — a first for the field

A drug whose target was found by AI and whose molecule was designed by AI is now in a late-stage trial — and the registry, not the press release, is what makes it a milestone. The same day brought a machine-checked maths result from a team of agents, and a brain-implant round with an unusual lead investor. Insilico Medicine has begun dosing patients in a 320-person Phase III trial of rentosertib, an oral treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis — the first drug with both an AI-identified…

The Guardrails

The Take — Medicare's denial pilot has the burden of proof backwards

Medicare's AI prior-authorization pilot is being argued about as if the scandal were the algorithm or the bounty. I think the real defect is smaller, plainer, and more fixable than either: the program never has to prove a denial was correct, and the only party who can force the question is the patient.

See all

Microsoft's MAI-DxO scores 83% on NEJM cases; doctors 36%

Science Corporation implants PRIMA in its first Stargardt patient

Coding agents as a hospital: Cockroach's five-month results

Stuart Russell: current training may make AI alignment impossible

The Take — An AI FDA would approve the demo, not the deployment

Hinton wants an FDA-style approval gate for AI models

Epic pauses product development after AI finds MyChart flaws

OpenAI pins its reasoning-theft campaign on Moonshot AI accounts

RFK Jr. says AI gives a better second opinion than any doctor

Kyunghyun Cho launches Ortet, a frontier AI health lab, with $500M

Insilico's AI-designed drug enters Phase III — a first for the field

The Take — Medicare's denial pilot has the burden of proof backwards

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