The Download: fully artificial chicken eggs and why Musk lost

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology.

Colossal Biosciences is growing chickens in a 3D-printed artificial eggshell

The baby chicks were shifting and starting to pip—or trying to hatch. But not from an egg. Instead, these chickens were growing inside transparent 3D-printed plastic cups at the Dallas headquarters of Colossal Biosciences.

The biotech company yesterday claimed it has developed a “fully artificial egg” as part of its effort to resurrect extinct avian species, including birds like the dodo and the giant moa.

Some scientists think Colossal is overstating the breakthrough. But the technology may represent an early step toward artificial wombs.

Read the full story on the science and controversy behind the artificial eggshell.

—Antonio Regalado

Inside the Musk v. Altman Trial

Elon Musk has lost his landmark lawsuit against OpenAI, which centered on allegations that its cofounders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman misled him about the company’s nonprofit mission. But what really happened in the courtroom, and what does it mean for the AI race? 

AI reporter and attorney Michelle Kim, who covered the trial for MIT Technology Review, joined our editor in chief Mat Honan to unpack it all in an exclusive Roundtables discussion yesterday.

Subscribers can watch the full recording now.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: this scientist rewarmed and studied pieces of his friend’s cryopreserved brain

L. Stephen Coles’s brain sits in a vat at a storage facility in Arizona. It has been held there at a temperature of around −146 degrees °C for over a decade, largely undisturbed. Before he died in 2014, Coles had the brain frozen with an ambitious goal in mind: reanimation. 

His friend, cryobiologist Greg Fahy, believes it could be revived one day. But other experts are less optimistic.  

Still, Fahy’s research could lead to new ways to study the brain. And using cryopreservation for organ transplantation is becoming a viable reality. 

—Jessica Hamzelou

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

Can AI learn to understand the world?

The limitations of LLMs are pushing AI researchers towards new systems that understand the physical environment: world models. The likes of Google DeepMind, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and Meta’s former Chief AI Scientist, AI Yann LeCun, have brought this technology to the forefront of AI. 

To explore where this technology is heading next, MIT Technology Review is hosting an exclusive Roundtables discussion on Thursday, May 21, with editor in chief Mat Honan, senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven, and AI reporter Grace Huckins. Register here to join the session at 19:30 GMT / 2:30 PM ET / 11:30 AM PT.

World models are also one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, our list of what’s really worth your attention in the busy, buzzy world of AI.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

Quote of the day

“It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism—we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”

—Sigrid Rausing, publisher of literary magazine Granta, casts doubts on the authenticity of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winners, Wired reports.

One More Thing

Who gets to decide who receives experimental medical treatments?

Max was only a toddler when his parents noticed there was “something different” about the way he moved. He was slower than other kids his age, and he struggled to jump. He couldn’t run. A genetic test confirmed their fears: Max had Duchenne muscular dystrophy. 

Desperate to slow its progression, Max's parents enrolled him in an experimental gene therapy trial. The FDA had approved the medicine on weak evidence—a move that has become increasingly common. 

We urgently need to question how these decisions are made. Who should have access to experimental therapies? And who should get to decide?