More science stuff this month and there’s been a lot of buzz about humanity getting close to the Singularity. I’m going to maintain a more skeptical attitude and curate only the more plausible news announcements.

• Let’s start with an announcement that is very exciting and has made headlines around the world as Microsoft no doubt intended, but has also left many physicists being skeptical. They claim that they now have a path towards viable quantum computers that work based on topological qubits. The qubits are built out of superconducting nanowire with each end being able to host a different topological state called a Majorana quasiparticle. They’ve also shown off a chip that they claim has eight such qubits. Other experts however say that there’s no proof in their paper that it works as claimed especially since the company has made similar claims before that were retracted later.
• Developments in the LLM space are too numerous to cover in detail so I’ll only focus on the big picture stuff. If you understand how the technology works, it’s always been a little strange why LLMs can do math at all. Through experiments on mid-sized LLMs, the writers of this paper claim that they do so using algorithms that no human would naturally use. Specifically they argue that numbers are stored in the LLMs as a generalized helix that is then manipulated to produce an answer. They show that even for simple arithmetic operations, the LLMs perform trigonometry to arrive at the answer. As LLMs grow increasingly big and sophisticated in capability, how they actually reason internally becomes ever more obscure as well, making this type of research critical.
• Next we have two papers on genetics. The first one suggests that severe depression and suicide ideation can be detected from blood markers. The tests are not identical for men and women as different metabolites are involved but the common thread is that they test for mitochondrial dysfunction. The researchers hypothesize that stress at the cellular level could overwhelm the body and trigger suicidal thoughts. The utility of using a blood test to detect severe depression are massive and so too would be the implication that treatments aimed at repairing metabolic function, including the use of supplements like folate and carnitine, could reduce the risk of suicide.
• Finally the last paper covers the increasingly powerful predictive power of genetic data when applied to health outcomes. It notes that in many countries, insurers are banned from using genetic information to price their insurance products. Yet nothing prevents individuals themselves from making insurance-purchasing decisions based on their own genetic profiles. If such practices were scaled up enough, it would effectively break the entire health insurance market.