The earliest neural networks, which have later evolved into the large language models (LLMs) revolutionizing our society, were developed to study how information is processed in our brains. Ironically, as these models became more sophisticated, the information processing pathways within also became increasingly opaque, with some models today having trillions of tunable parameters.

But now, members of the Cognitive Neurorobotics Research Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created an embodied intelligence model with a novel architecture that allows researchers access to the various internal states of the neural network, and which appears to learn how to generalize in the same ways that children do.

Investigators from Mass General Brigham have found that a method originally designed for cancer detection can also identify and monitor even tiny amounts of SARS-CoV-2 intact viral particles in blood and other fluids from patients with acute COVID-19 infections, creating the potential for guiding future treatment of patients. The research is published in Science Advances.