Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
Mpox is one of the few diseases that have been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization. (Arlette Bashizi/Bloomberg via Getty)
Mpox no longer an emergency, says WHO
Earlier this month, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the spread of mpox in Africa is no longer an international health emergency. The disease was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern — the WHO’s highest level of alarm — in 2024, but no longer warrants such status after a sustained decline in cases, says WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have decided to maintain the disease’s status as a Public Health Emergency of Continental Security as countries such as Liberia and Ghana have emerged as virus hotspots.
Ousted CDC chief says integrity under threat
“I was fired for holding the line on scientific integrity,” said Susan Monarez, ex-director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), when testifying yesterday before the Senate. Monarez said that US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, told her that she would lose her job if she did not accept the recommendations of his hand-picked panel of advisers regarding childhood shots. Kennedy dismissed her just 29 days after she was confirmed as the head of the CDC. Debra Houry, who resigned as the agency’s chief medical officer when Monarez was fired, testified that Kennedy did not respond to her efforts to brief him on public-health matters and to correct false statements he’d been making in public.
The AI report
News
AI model predicts the risk of future disease
A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool can forecast a person’s risk of developing more than 1,000 diseases. The model, called Delphi-2M, uses a person’s health records and lifestyle factors to estimate their likelihood of developing diseases such as cancer and immune conditions up to 20 years ahead of time. For many diseases, Delphi-2M’s predictions matched or exceeded the accuracy of those of current models that estimate the risk of developing a single illness. “It worked astonishingly well,” says data scientist and study co-author Moritz Gerstung.
News
Secrets of DeepSeek revealed
DeepSeek-R1, a cheap and powerful artificial intelligence (AI) ‘reasoning’ model that sent the US stock market spiralling after it was released by a Chinese firm in January, cost just US$300,000 to train. That’s one of the revelations in a new paper from the DeepSeek team — making R1 the first major LLM to undergo the peer-review process.
The team behind DeepSeek-R1 showed that a large language model can be taught to ‘reason’ without ever seeing an example of human reasoning. To do so, they used a technique called reinforcement learning, in which the model was rewarded for the correct answer to mathematical questions, and penalized for incorrect answers. The model soon learnt that reasoning improved the likelihood of it finding the correct answer, and it developed an ability to self-reflect and correct itself before outputting a response. (Nature News & Views | 7 min read)
News
Can chatbots induce psychosis?
A recent preprint reported that at least 17 people have developed psychosis — which renders them unable to distinguish between what is and is not reality — after interacting with generative AI chatbots. Whether chatbot interactions can trigger psychosis is unclear, says psychiatrist Søren Østergaard, but people who already experience symptoms such as delusions or paranoia might be particularly susceptible. Some AI companies have added safeguards into their models to steer interactions away from sensitive or distressing topics, or those that aren’t grounded in reality.
Reference: PsyArXiv preprint (not peer reviewed)
Feature
Hello from the digital afterlife
By training a large language model (LLM) on a person’s text messages and voice recordings, several software firms are offering access to ‘griefbots’ — digital recreations of a person that allow their relatives to communicate ‘with them’ after their death. These AI models can help people navigate their grief, proponents say. Others think the subscription-based services are exploitative, and argue that they could complicate the normal grieving process. As yet, there’s little evidence to back up either viewpoint, which leaves the decision of whether to use griefbots in the hands of individual mourners.
This article is part of Nature Outlook: Robotics and artificial intelligence, an editorially independent supplement produced with financial support from FII Institute.
To get the latest news on artificial intelligence direct to your inbox every fortnight, sign up to Nature Briefing: AI & Robotics — 100% written by humans, of course.
Features & opinion
In pursuit of climate data
To build a model of something as complex as Earth’s climate requires data, and a whole lot of it. Not only that, but such data must represent every corner of the planet — from the heart of centuries-old glaciers to the 300 metres above the canopy of the Amazon rainforest. In a photo essay, Quanta showcases the daring, dedication and determination of climate scientists, and the volunteers that bolster their work, to ensure that Earth’s climate models are as complete as possible.
