A working catalogue of twelve open problems in biology — each a concrete, testable target for the field.
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Rather: Someone should make the millennium problems for human alignment so the top researchers will actually try to solve that problem. :-)
It's a good list, but "alignment" is much more targetted. I attended a workshop with researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic also present, where the objective was to hash out what the problems in alignment even are. This, it turned out, was extraordinarily difficult.
The problems with alignment are to do with how we define and search for this vague notion when it is mathematically ill-posed at present.
I guess to me the grandiosity here feels fake and unearned - like they vibe slopped it together without much input in the way of deep thought or expertise.
For example, synthesize arbitrary dna sequences > 3000 nt in length with error rate < 0.001 at > 95% purity. Easily verifiable, beyond the frontier, and generally useful.
SMEs please correct the record if I'm mistaken.
There’s also this study [0] I read recently, along a different path of using known growth factors and proteins to kick off regeneration.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.05.742898v1...
"Extracellular matrix particle treatment induces digit regeneration in soft-tissue preserved amputation (SPA) model of adult mice"
Also his work on algorithmic intelligence in cells and the mathematical foundation of intelligence will change many fields, including AI, if it can be empirically tested.
> Cryopreservation + Demonstrate the ability to cryopreserve and recover live wild-type mice with high viability. Specifically, demonstrate the reversible cryopreservation of live, intact, wild-type adult mice in a whole-body frozen or vitrified state. The mice must remain frozen or vitrified for at least 24 hours, must be recovered with >99% viability, and must not suffer any permanent organ damage or bodily harm. Somatic genetic engineering is discouraged but permitted. All experiments must be conducted with ethics approval.
This has been done in the 50ies, freezing and thawing mice with microwaves. IIRC the recovery rate was about 74% with no observed side effects. The research was given up on because in this specific case a mouse is a bad biological model. Thawing agents must scale cubically with size. The author says that at approximately the size of a cat you can’t quickly enough evaporate all the agent because the energy required will simply burn the tissue.
TLDR: it’s possible, it’s been done, it could be perfected if necessary, it does NOT scale beyond mice
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