Brian Buntz

Will AI soon be able to build AI? Maybe not quite as soon as some pundits have expected, based on a recent preprint from researchers at Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, the University of Toronto, Georgetown and the UK AI Security Institute. One important driver of the current AI wave is the expectation that…

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, a program that offers 100,000 scientists, mathematicians and engineers free access to its frontier models. An initial cohort of 10,000 researchers will receive access this summer, with the program expanding through 2027. OpenAI says participant data will remain excluded from model training by default. The program joins ChatGPT…

A total of 149 Finalists for the 2026 R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World. Now in its 64th year, the global science and innovation competition drew entries from eight countries. A similarly global judging panel featured more than 50 industry professionals. Of the 149 Finalists, 76, or 51%, named at least one…

Whatever your take on the current AI wave, it is clear that the prospect of creating software has been transformed. “The most impressive edge of it is probably using [genAI models] to help speed code development. And that’s kind of working,” said the computer scientist Jaron Lanier recently. Frontier AI labs are now pushing for…

Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 is arguably the most influential LLM to launch in recent memory, marking the biggest leap in capabilities since Opus 4.5 debuted in November 2025. The publicly available counterpart to Claude Mythos Preview, which had a sizable jump in capabilities, most notably, in cybersecurity, Claude Fable featured stronger agentic performance and markedly…

Brookhaven National Laboratory says its GridSearch AI system could cut grid simulations from months to minutes as DOE targets 20–100× faster grid decision-making. Speaking at the recent Genesis Mission Annual Summit, an event dedicated to the U.S. government’s AI-focused initiative that aims to double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a…

Clinical trials are notoriously difficult to predict, and they have grown more so as protocols pile on endpoints, procedures and eligibility rules. As that complexity climbs, so do the odds of studies needing mid-course changes. The share of Phase 1 through 4 protocols requiring at least one amendment hit 76%, up from 57% in 2015,…

China has done it again. They have launched a new AI model that comes close to the frontier roughly a year and a half after Hangzhou, China–based Deepseek launched R1, a model that was roughly tied with OpenAI’s then frontier model o1. Now, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, released yesterday, follows a similar template while matching…

Tecan’s latest bet is on agents. The Swiss lab automation company has built agentic AI into Introspect, its cloud analytics platform, using NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, in an announcement on June 24 that opened early access to pharmaceutical, biotech and clinical labs. The agents watch instrument telemetry and environmental data, hunt for the patterns that…

Within roughly 18 months, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic have all launched or upgraded products aimed at scientific research, many of them built around AI agents that promise to compress the earliest, most expensive stages of discovery. That push builds on the explosive growth of AI coding tools. Even as many frontier…

When Becton, Dickinson and Company launched its Incada Connected Care Platform in October 2025 with the next-generation Pyxis Pro dispensing system, it framed the move as a way to turn data from nearly 3 million smart connected BD devices into actionable insights on medication inventory, waste and clinician workflows. Omar Ahmed, who joined BD as…

ViewsML, the Vancouver-based company developing what it calls the world’s first virtual biomarker library, closed an oversubscribed $4.9 million seed round earlier this year. Wittington Ventures, the Toronto venture arm of the Weston family holding company, led the round. New investors Mayo Clinic and Continuum Health Ventures participated alongside repeat backers including Debiopharm. In an…

The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) will hold its 2026 PharmSci 360 meeting October 25 to 28 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. The event is the association’s flagship annual gathering, drawing thousands of scientists from across academia, industry, and government. AAPS, which counts roughly 7,000 members, positions PharmSci 360…

2025 was supposed to be the year of the AI agent. But 2026 arguably deserves that title. Adoption is climbing fast. One vendor tracking agent-building across 20,000 organizations found multi-agent systems grew 327% in under four months. Everyone from startups to big tech is shipping agents and agentic frameworks, including for science. Elsevier’s LeapSpace, which…

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, says he doesn’t write prompts for Claude anymore. “My job is to write loops,” the head of Claude Code at Anthropic has said, describing a shift away from manual, turn-by-turn prompting toward building small systems that keep an agent working until a defined condition is met. Peter Steinberger,…

The space superconductor company Zenno Astronautics says its Z01 Supertorquer has made it the first company to operate a superconducting product in space. The Auckland-founded company is framing the milestone as the moment its core technology stopped being a science project and became a sellable product. Zenno flew a superconducting magnet once before, in late…

Waters has been expanding and repositioning its mass spectrometry portfolio around the growing analytical challenges of large, heterogeneous and structurally complex drug modalities, molecules that increasingly resist full characterization by any single platform. At ASMS 2026, the company presented three complementary systems that together address this reality: the Xevo MRT P10 high-throughput discovery platform, the…

Countable Labs, a Palo Alto company built around direct single-molecule counting, has raised $26 million in an oversubscribed round to push its Countable PCR platform toward the clinic and global commercialization. Countable Labs’ twist on standard PCR doesn’t rely on microfluidics, physically isolating single DNA or RNA targets into over 30 million picoliter-sized compartments within…

As Anthropic’s Fable 5 remains pulled from public access under a U.S. government export-control directive, OpenAI soft-launched GPT-5.6 Sol on June 26 to its own “trusted partners.” OpenAI boasted that 5.6 is its strongest model yet and led with a coding result, a new state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2.1, the benchmark that scores…

Many patients who receive cancer immunotherapy do not respond to it, and oncologists still have few dependable ways to know in advance who will. By one estimate, only about 13% of all U.S. cancer patients stand to benefit from checkpoint inhibitors, and drugmakers are increasingly betting on AI to improve those odds. Noetik, a South…

When Eli Lilly and NVIDIA unveiled what they called the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful supercomputer in October 2025, the story was mostly about scale. The Lilly-owned system, now branded LillyPod, brings more than 1,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs into a DGX SuperPOD designed to support drug discovery, manufacturing, medical imaging and enterprise AI agents. At January’s…

Since AlphaFold 2 cracked protein-structure prediction in 2020 and 2021, a growing ecosystem of biomolecular models has followed, including Boltz, Chai, OpenFold and Protenix. Yet commercial access remains uneven. AlphaFold 3, launched in 2024, broadened the field from protein folding to biomolecular interactions, while its public server remains off-limits for commercial use. DeepMind’s commercial engine…

NVIDIA has unveiled the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, an open, harness-agnostic platform that gives AI agents or software platforms the building blocks to specialize for science. Debuting with adoption from nearly 50 partners, including Eli Lilly, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Dassault Systèmes, the toolkit packages NVIDIA’s life-sciences software, models for tasks such as protein-structure prediction, molecular…

OpenAI and Molecule.one have announced a system that improved a reaction medicinal chemists rely on but have long struggled to run reliably. OpenAI billed the news as a “near-autonomous AI chemist.” The setup paired one of OpenAI’s frontier models, GPT-5.4, with Maria, Molecule.one’s agentic chemistry AI, and an automated high-throughput lab. The chemistry target was…

Over the past decade and a half, the Darmstadt-based Merck KGaA has assembled a supplier that touches nearly every bench in the lab. It bought Millipore in 2010, with the membrane filters and Milli-Q water systems that had been lab staples since the 1950s, and added Sigma-Aldrich and its ubiquitous reagents catalog in 2015 for…