The Download: Mimicking pregnancy’s first moments in a lab, and AI parameters explained

At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses into the lining of the uterus then grips tight, burrowing in as the first tendrils of a future placenta appear. This is implantation—the moment that pregnancy officially begins.

Only none of it is happening inside a body. These images were captured in a Beijing laboratory, inside a microfluidic chip, as scientists watched the scene unfold.

In three recent papers published by Cell Press, scientists report what they call the most accurate efforts yet to mimic the first moments of pregnancy in the lab. They’ve taken human embryos from IVF centers and let these merge with “organoids” made of endometrial cells, which form the lining of the uterus. Read our story about their work, and what might come next.

—Antonio Regalado

LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. But what’s a parameter?

A large language model’s parameters are often said to be the dials and levers that control how it behaves. Think of a planet-size pinball machine that sends its balls pinging from one end to the other via billions of paddles and bumpers set just so. Tweak those settings and the balls will behave in a different way.  

OpenAI’s GPT-3, released in 2020, had 175 billion parameters. Google DeepMind’s latest LLM, Gemini 3, may have at least a trillion—some think it’s probably more like 7 trillion—but the company isn’t saying. (With competition now fierce, AI firms no longer share information about how their models are built.)