In the decade-long fight to control CRISPR, the super tool for modifying DNA, it has been common for lawyers to try to revoke patents held by competitors. But now, in a surprise twist, the team that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing CRISPR is asking to cancel two of its own fundamental patents, as MIT Technology Review has learned.
The request to withdraw the pair of European patents, filed by lawyers for Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, comes after a damaging August opinion by a European technical appeals board, which ruled that the duo’s first patent application did not explain CRISPR well enough for other scientists. to use it and does not count as an invention itself.
The decision could have major ramifications for who will collect lucrative licensing fees for use of the technology.Read the full story.
—Antonio Regalado
A new, small open source AI model works as well as the big, powerful ones
What’s new: The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a nonprofit research organization, is launching a family of open-source multimodal language models, called Molmo, that it says performs as well as the best proprietary OpenAI models. , Google and Anthropic.
What are you doing: The organization claims that its larger Molmo model outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o in tests that measure things like understanding images, graphics, and documents. Meanwhile, Ai2 says a smaller Molmo model is approaching OpenAI’s next-generation model in performance, an achievement it attributes to much more efficient training and data collection methods.
