Technology

1. Final say on TikTok
2. The AI Office
3. Biosciences bet
4. AI safety
5. Behind Davos bars

AI enters a period of scientific acceleration, and researchers develop a method to reverse engineer molecules.

The first person I met with when I arrived in Davos over the weekend was Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer. (That is, unless you include the people I met on the slopes.)

Lehane was about to publish a blog post entitled “How to win as an AI populist.” It was a more concise version of a strategy Lehane had been sharing with political candidates seeking his advice on how to talk about AI leading up to the US midterms. Before he was a tech guy, Lehane was a political guy, serving former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats.

In his memo, Lehane urges politicians to find the popular middle that will allow candidates to support AI progress while also protecting people from its harmful effects.

As I thought more about his suggestions this week in Davos, it became clear to me that the changes underway, which will have deep effects on the economy and culture, are broader than AI. What’s really happening is that we’re entering a period of scientific acceleration.

It’s artificial intelligence, quantum computing, nuclear fusion, biology, space travel, and other fields, all conspiring to make everything feel off-kilter. Massive change, though, also tends to create unprecedented economic growth.

The question is whether everyday people will own a piece of that growth, or if the benefits will remain with the companies and investors behind the technology.

In the post-WWII economic boom, Americans, for the most part, got a piece of the pie. In the 1990s tech boom, too many were left out.

What Lehane is essentially saying, though he didn’t put it exactly this way, is that the AI backlash can be a useful tool to enact populist policies that would have been a good idea anyway.

In the US, that will depend on whether self-destructive politics will allow a bipartisan policy response to AI. It would require a pretty big pendulum swing away from this politically toxic era — but if this year’s Davos is any indication, pretty much everything is on the political table.

US, China sign off on TikTok US spinoff

The US and China finally signed off on a deal to sell TikTok’s US business to a consortium of mostly US investors led by Oracle and Silver Lake, the company said Thursday, shortly after Semafor’s Liz Hoffman and Reed Albergotti scooped that the parties finalized the agreement.

ByteDance CEO Shou Chew said in December that it had signed a binding agreement with investors, but regulators hadn’t yet indicated their approval and that “there was more work to be done.” The deal closing suggests an end to an on-again, off-again battle, removing a sticking point in US-China relations at a time when tensions are running high.

The new structure leaves ByteDance with just under 20% of the joint venture. It was unclear how much ByteDance received for the US business — Vice President JD Vance said in September the deal would value the unit at roughly $14 billion. TikTok said the joint venture will retrain the algorithm, which has been a main point of contention between the two governments, on US user data, and that it will update the engine for those users.

How to AI-proof your office

Imagine an office that’s buzzing with activity, but the workers aren’t talking to each other. Instead, the incessant chatter is employees briefing their agents — commanding personal AI assistants to handle their grunt work and execute tasks. A workplace from hell.

As business leaders confront the AI-enabled work revolution, they’re realizing that the physical spaces we command are also going to have to adapt to new technology. The pandemic already decimated the old-school office plan, and the rise of AI agents could upend corporate headquarters just the same.

To absorb sound and reduce overall office volume, Gensler, the architecture firm that helped design JPMorgan’s splashy new Manhattan headquarters, is creating spaces with felt panels that swallow the noise, Rachyl Jones reported. It’s also looking into updating meeting rooms with AI-enabled whiteboards, where agents automatically synthesize written ideas and offer visual diagrams on what employees discuss. Gensler is also experimenting with tech-free zones in its own offices — secluded areas reserved for private conversations where no agent can “inadvertently hear you talking about something,” Gensler co-CEO Elizabeth Brink said. “Technology could always be listening.”

Where is the smart money in AI bioscience?

One of the most exciting areas of the AI boom is the technology’s use in biosciences. But after speaking with experts in AI and biology this week in Davos, it’s clear the global elites in attendance were missing an important conversation about the potential to improve millions of lives.

The field of AI is rocketing ahead, but institutions are bottlenecking its progress. AI in drug discovery has advanced significantly, thanks to breakthroughs like AlphaFold. But the impact won’t be meaningful unless the accuracy of the models improves.

For one, it’s clear we need more regulatory reform to speed up progress and reduce costs.

We could also undergo a massive effort to gather more genomic and biological data from the population to increase the size of current training datasets, but we’d have to figure out a way to garner buy-in from a population that is understandably already skeptical about handing over their data.

Quantum computers could also help by simulating electron-level interactions of proteins as they move, instead of the static snapshots most AI models currently rely on. The massive processing power of quantum computers could eventually provide a breakthrough that would help AI models generate more accurate predictions.

Most of the pieces are in place to make a monumental leap in biology and medicine, and the world’s leaders don’t seem to be thinking big enough to meet the moment.

— Reed Albergotti

S. Korea poised to trump EU in AI safety laws

South Korea has enacted its own national AI laws targeting trust and safety, the second major government after the EU to impose sweeping measures. But with the EU now pausing some of those restrictions under pressure from the Trump administration, South Korea could emerge as the global leader in AI safety regulation. The country has also ramped up development of its domestic models as it vies with Europe and the Gulf countries for the third top spot of global AI power, behind the US and China.

Passed in December 2024, the laws require human oversight on “high impact” AI, including technology that touches nuclear materials, education, drinking water, and medical devices. Products and services that use such “high impact” AI must disclose it, and generated media must be labeled as such to prevent being mistaken as human-made. The policy also outlines investment areas for the country, including incentives to attract foreign talent.

Penalties aren’t as severe as those in the EU rules. Someone who fails to label AI content in South Korea could face fines of up to 30 million won ($20,000), while the EU can impose fines of up to €15 million ($17.6 million) or up to 3% of a company’s annual revenue for a similar offense.

Vibe-coding founder lands in Swiss jail

The case to know code: We’ve all heard about the pitfalls of vibe coding and the inability to fix things that break if you don’t know how they were built in the first place. In one extreme example, relying on vibe coding came back to bite one startup founder who ended up in Davos jail. Sebastian Heyneman, a 31-year-old entrepreneur and first-time World Economic Forum attendee, spent 13 hours in Davos jail after leaving the prototype he hoped to sell on a pillar unattended while looking for food, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman reports.

Police detained Heyneman, whose apparatus — a verification device to fraud-proof money transfers —“seemed suspicious,” according to his release ticket from the Davos police. Inside the jail, a technical expert, Chris, asked Heyneman to explain the code behind his device. Heyneman admitted he wasn’t actually a great engineer and relied mostly on Cursor.

“We open my machine,” Heyneman said. “Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don’t know the language that the code was written in because it was written in AI, so Chris actually explained the code to me. They come back and they say, ‘You’re free to go. You can take all your stuff with you, but you’re banned from Davos between now and 6 pm on Friday.’”

Researchers have developed a new method to reverse engineer molecules — groups of atoms that make up nearly every physical material, including medications and batteries — using generative AI, according to a new paper published in Nature.

Historically, many therapies have been discovered by trial-and-error or accident, with the most famous example being penicillin. As computational models improved, scientists increasingly tried reverse-engineering molecules: Rather than starting with different molecular structures and testing what they did, they began by specifying how they want molecules to behave — called “properties” — and asking technology to suggest potential structures to achieve that.

Now, the team led by researchers at New York University and the University of Florida says its neural network proposes potentially viable molecular structures at 10 times the speed of existing methods, without sacrificing accuracy. That lets scientists run experiments and develop real-world applications more quickly.