As the intense, decade-long struggle to govern the CRISPR technology – a powerful tool for editing DNA – has unfolded, legal professionals have frequently sought to nullify patent claims asserted by rival factions. Despite having earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their groundbreaking work on CRISPR, the researchers are now seeking to cancel two of their most significant patents, according to an investigation by MIT Technology Review.
Attorneys for Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna have submitted a request to withdraw their pair of European patents, in response to a harmful August opinion from the European technical appeals board. The board found that the duo’s initial patent application failed to adequately describe CRISPR technology for other scientists to use it effectively and does not constitute a genuine invention.
The decision may have far-reaching implications regarding which entity secures the lucrative rights to utilize the technology.
The Allen Institute for Synthetic Intelligence (Ai2) is releasing a suite of open-source multimodal language models, dubbed Molmo, which the organization claims rival top-performing proprietary models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
The group asserts that its most advanced Molmo mannequin outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 in evaluations of picture comprehension, chart analysis, and document understanding. Meanwhile, Ai2 claims a smaller Molmo model rivals OpenAI’s cutting-edge model in performance, attributing this feat to significantly more efficient data collection and training methods.
