Aventine

09/18/2026

Early in the 19th century, the scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined an entity — an “intelligence,” he called it — so vast and aware of past and present that it would be able to predict future events with incredible accuracy. “Nothing would be uncertain for it,” he wrote. “The future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.”

More than two hundred years later, that idea is becoming reality: Over the last twelve months, AI has become uncannily good at predicting future events.

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Early in the 19th century, the scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined an entity — an “intelligence,” he called it — so vast and aware of past and present that it would be able to predict future events with incredible accuracy.

09/15/2026

Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos in January, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney issued a stark warning to the world’s middle-power nations. “If we’re not at the table,” he said, “we’re on the menu.”

He was talking broadly, about energy, food, critical minerals and supply chains. But for Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer of machine learning, a professor at the University of Montreal and — not incidentally — a Canadian, the comment captured a central problem in the development of artificial intelligence: The US and China dominate the AI race while other nations watch from the sidelines. Carney’s speech was a rallying call, Bengio said. Other countries must take action to ensure that power over AI “is not concentrated in a few hands.”

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Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos in January, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney issued a stark warning to the world’s middle-power nations.

09/10/2026

“I’m afraid my memory isn’t as sharp as it once was,” said a woman named Viv, speaking from a computer screen and offering her guest a cup of tea. “Sometimes I forget things or get a bit confused. It can be frustrating, but I try my best to navigate through it.”

A nice invitation, but Viv isn’t real. She is an AI companion for people with dementia, built by researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia. Powered by a large language model trained on the language of dementia patients, Viv talks to people experiencing various degrees and forms of the condition. With the aim of making the experience of coping with dementia feel less solitary, she recounts her own hallucinations, confabulations and interactions with caregivers.

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Dear Aventine Readers,

09/04/2026

The ability to treat cardiac disease is one of the great successes of modern medicine. Medications like statins, which control cholesterol, the use of stents to increase blood flow and public health campaigns to reduce smoking have all helped to control heart disease; deaths from heart attacks dropped by almost 90 percent between 1970 and 2022.

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The ability to treat cardiac disease is one of the great successes of modern medicine.

08/26/2026

“It doesn’t matter what the size of the screen is — if it’s a phone, a laptop, a desktop. It doesn’t matter who bought it. Is it school-sanctioned? ... It doesn’t matter,” Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist, told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation earlier this year. “These things will hurt learning which will in turn hurt our kids’ cognitive development.”

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“It doesn’t matter what the size of the screen is — if it’s a phone, a laptop, a desktop.

08/20/2026

How cheap can it get to both produce and pay for the newest forms of artificial intelligence? If the labs that build AI models can’t cut the cost of delivering their services and are forced to compete aggressively on price, the resulting razor-thin margins could put trillions of dollars of investments at risk.

To understand the dynamics of this question and the technologies in play, Aventine spoke with AI researchers who are exploring the cost savings that could make or break the business model for frontier AI.

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Dear Aventine Readers,

08/18/2026

You can imagine that Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, was pleasantly surprised when his daughter, Panacea, turned out to possess the ability to heal all diseases. Pharmaceutical companies might feel something similar about GLP-1 drugs. First developed for diabetes, these drugs have proved remarkably effective for weight loss. More recently, studies suggest that they can be beneficial for conditions as disparate as cardiovascular disease and drug addiction.

Panacea was a myth, of course, too good to be true. The medical community is now grappling with whether the same is true of GLP-1 medications. First developed in the 1990s as treatments for diabetes, these drugs are based on a hormone called GLP-1, short for a glucagon-like peptide-1, which is produced in the gut and helps regulate appetite and blood sugar. Drugs like semaglutide, sold as Ozempic and Wegovy, and liraglutide, sold as Saxenda and Victoza, mimic it, stimulating GLP-1 receptors that control insulin release. In turn, they slow gastric emptying and signal the brain to increase satiety, metabolic effects that reduce calorie intake, which is how they became potent tools for weight loss.

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You can imagine that Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, was pleasantly surprised when his daughter, Panacea, turned out to possess the ability to heal all diseases.

08/15/2026

Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, talks about economic uncertainty, what it is and how it affects companies, countries, investors and consumers.

Jack Nitschke, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, discusses uncertainty’s effect on our brains and why it makes us less prepared for the future.

George W. Casey, a retired four-star US Army general, discusses leadership under uncertainty and the lessons he learned taking over the multinational forces in Iraq in 2004.

Kate Sweeny, a research psychologist, studies how uncertain outcomes affect our behavior and sometimes prompt poor decision-making.

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https://aventineresearchinstitute.substack.com/p/the-uncertainty-boom

08/13/2026

AI is upending the financial markets, disrupting education and remaking our lives. Add to that political polarization, economic turmoil and international conflict, and the result is a world in which no person or institution has any confidence in what comes next.

To understand these times better, we interviewed five experts — historian Jill Lepore, neuroscientist Jack Nitschke, economist Nicholas Bloom, retired US Army general George W. Casey and research psychologist Kate Sweeny — on the subject of uncertainty itself, how it affects our thinking, our actions, the economy and how we might thrive under such chaotic circumstances.

We begin with Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian and staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” published this month, examines the growing influence of technology on liberal democracy. Her previous book, “We the People: A History of the US Constitution,” won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2026. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Dear Aventine Readers,

08/06/2026

Meredith Whittaker has been warning us about what she calls the surveillance-driven business models of Big Tech since long before lawmakers were sounding the alarm. Now, with the demands of advanced and agentic AI, she thinks we could be heading into a world in which privacy is essentially over.

After joining Google back in 2006, she rose to fame in 2018 when she helped lead the employee effort to prevent the company’s involvement with Project Maven, the Pentagon’s flagship artificial intelligence initiative to integrate machine learning and computer vision into military workflows. The company walked away from the project. Around the same time, she founded the AI Now Institute at New York University with the researcher Kate Crawford, to produce interdisciplinary research on the social implications of AI and the concentration of power in the tech industry. In 2019, she left Google, citing retaliation for her internal organizing, to focus on AI Now.

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Dear Aventine Readers,