Artificial intelligence chatbots are everywhere these days, from smartphone apps and customer service portals to online search engines. But what happens when these handy tools overestimate their own abilities? 

Researchers asked both human participants and four large language models (LLMs) how confident they felt in their ability to answer trivia questions, predict the outcomes of NFL games or Academy Award ceremonies, or play a Pictionary-like image identification game. Both the people and the LLMs tended to be overconfident about how they would hypothetically perform. Interestingly, they also answered questions or identified images with relatively similar success rates.

A University of Michigan study finds that plants growing in nutrient-rich soil may be more likely to defend themselves against insects.

Researchers at the Broad Institute and The Jackson Laboratory have used prime editing, a precise and versatile form of gene editing, to correct the root cause of alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC), a debilitating genetic condition, in mice. The team used a scalable approach to develop prime editing treatments that directly repaired five different AHC-causing genetic mutations. Mice that received the treatment had far fewer and less severe symptoms of AHC, and survived more than twice as long as untreated mice.