At first glance, it looks a lot like the beginning of human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo burrows into the uterine lining and then takes hold, emerging as the first tendrils of the future placenta. This is implantation – the moment when pregnancy officially begins.
Just none of this is happening inside the body. These images were captured inside a microfluidic chip in a Beijing laboratory as scientists observed the scene.
In three papers recently published by Cell Press, scientists report the most accurate attempts yet to mimic the first moments of pregnancy in the laboratory. They have taken human embryos from IVF centers and merged them with “organoids” made from endometrial cells, which form the lining of the uterus. Read our story about his work, and what might be next.
-Antonio Regalado
LLM has a lot of parameters. But what is the parameter?
The parameters of a large language model are often called dials and levers that control how it behaves. Think of a planet-sized pinball machine that sends its balls from one end to the other through billions of paddles and bumpers. Make changes to those settings and the balls will behave differently.
OpenAI’s GPT-3, released in 2020, had 175 billion parameters. Google DeepMind’s latest LLM, Gemini 3, may be worth at least a trillion — some think it’s possibly more than 7 trillion — but the company isn’t saying. (Competition has now become fierce, AI companies no longer share information about how their models are built.)
