AI’s Frenzy: Billion-Dollar Bets, Breakthroughs & Backlash – Global AI News Roundup (Aug 5–6, 2025)
MIT and Duke University researchers used AI to design tougher plastics, identifying iron-based ferrocene additives and mechanophores that make polymer networks absorb stress, with results published in ACS Central Science. Profluent Bio used generative AI to create OpenCRISPR-1, the first AI-designed CRISPR enzyme, which edited human genome cells and was trained on 500 million sequences, with the work published in Nature and open-sourced. OpenAI unveiled two open-weight LLMs with 120 billion and 20 billion parameters that can run on a single GPU or a laptop, with open weights for fine-tuning and availability on AWS Bedrock. Thomson Reuters launched CoCounsel Legal,
