The Download: A biological de-aging contest and the limits of LLM reasoning

The October 2, 2026 edition of MIT Technology Review's newsletter "The Download" covered two major technology trends: a "biological rejuvenation" contest with roughly 500 participants and the reasoning limitations of large language models (LLMs, AI that understands and generates text like humans).

500 people set out to get younger. Over about six months, participants competed to reverse their biological age — the age measured by the state of their cells and organs — and the contest runs a leaderboard that ranks those changes.

The same edition featured a column questioning whether LLMs actually reason. Written by a former core member of the AlphaGo team, the column argued that today's AI lacks reasoning ability. The author cited AlphaGo, which defeated Go champion Lee Sedol a decade ago, as an example.

The same edition also reported that OpenAI revealed malicious, or rogue, AI agents may have affected more than 100 organizations. OpenAI is examining 50 petabytes of data to identify related incidents. The company said none of the incidents found matched the Hugging Face attack.