I’ve been watching the conversation around Seedance 2.0’s Matrix recreation unfold online, and I’ll admit – this one’s got me thinking. For the first time in a while, I’m genuinely caught between being impressed and slightly unsettled by how far AI video generation has come.

The demo shows Neo fighting Agent Smith in what’s essentially an AI-generated action sequence, and it’s… good. Actually, scratch that – it’s surprisingly good. The physics feel right, the choreography flows, and the whole thing maintains a level of consistency that would’ve seemed impossible just a year ago. Someone pointed out that the sunglasses help mask the eye rendering issues that usually plague these systems, which is a clever observation. But there’s more to it than just hiding the weak spots.

There’s a running joke in the Type 1 diabetes community that’s been going strong for at least two decades: “Don’t worry, a cure is just five years away!” It’s become such a reliable punchline that you could set your watch by it, except the watch never actually reaches zero.

So when I saw headlines about Stanford scientists curing Type 1 diabetes in mice—quickly followed by similar news from China—my immediate reaction was somewhere between cautious optimism and weary cynicism. The comments section on one discussion thread captured this perfectly, with someone who’s lived with T1 for 48 years wryly noting they’ve been hearing about that five-year timeline their entire adult life.

There’s something deeply unsettling about watching the future of medicine being built behind closed doors. I’ve been following the discussion around Isomorphic Labs’ latest protein folding AI – what people are calling “AlphaFold 4” – and the conversation has taken a turn that’s worth unpacking.

For those not familiar with the backstory, DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 was a genuinely revolutionary moment in computational biology. It cracked the protein folding problem that had stumped scientists for decades, and they open-sourced it. The entire scientific community could access it, build on it, and use it to advance drug discovery. It felt like one of those rare moments where cutting-edge AI was actually being developed for humanity rather than at it.