The Download: A CRISPR patent battle, and the promise of tiny AI

In the decade-long fight to control CRISPR, the super-tool for modifying DNA, it’s been common for lawyers to try to overturn patents held by competitors. But now, in a surprise twist, the team that earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing CRISPR is asking to cancel two of their own seminal patents, MIT Technology Review has learned.

­­The request to withdraw the pair of European patents, by lawyers for Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, comes after a damaging August opinion from a European technical appeals board, which ruled that the duo’s earliest patent filing didn’t explain CRISPR well enough for other scientists to use it and doesn’t count as a proper invention. 

The decision could have major ramifications regarding who gets to collect the lucrative licensing fees on using the technology.Read the full story.

— Antonio Regalado

A tiny new open-source AI model performs as well as powerful big ones

What’s new: The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a research nonprofit, is releasing a family of open-source multimodal language models, called Molmo, that it says perform as well as top proprietary models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. 

What it does: The organization claims that its biggest Molmo model outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o in tests that measure things like understanding images, charts, and documents.  Meanwhile, Ai2 says a smaller Molmo model comes close to OpenAI’s state-of-the-art model in performance, an achievement it ascribes to vastly more efficient data collection and training methods.