The CRISPR Patent Battle Takes a Surprising Turn
In the ongoing saga to control CRISPR, the revolutionary tool for DNA modification, legal battles have been common as rival parties seek to overturn each other’s patents. However, in a surprising twist, the team that was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on CRISPR is now asking to retract two of their own groundbreaking patents.
Recent developments have seen lawyers representing Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna requesting the cancellation of two European patents. This unexpected move follows a ruling from a European technical appeals board in August, which deemed the initial patent filing by the duo inadequate in explaining CRISPR for other scientists to utilize, thus questioning its status as a true invention.
This decision could have significant implications for the distribution of lucrative licensing fees associated with the technology.
— Antonio Regalado
A Breakthrough in AI: A New Open-Source Model Rivals Industry Giants
What’s the buzz: The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a renowned research nonprofit, has unveiled Molmo, a series of open-source multimodal language models that claim to rival the performance of leading proprietary models from tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
How it works: Ai2 asserts that its largest Molmo model surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-4o in various tests measuring comprehension of images, charts, and documents. Additionally, a smaller Molmo model developed by the organization comes close to matching the capabilities of OpenAI’s cutting-edge model, a feat attributed to Ai2’s more efficient data collection and training methods.