Mass General Brigham 用 4000 万张人脸训练模型，从自拍估算生物学年龄与癌症生存风险
What AI sees in your selfie | The Rundown AI
Mass General Brigham 的研究团队开发了基于面部照片的 AI 工具 FAHR-Face，用超过 4000 万张人脸图像训练，分别用于估算生物学年龄和预测癌症患者生存风险。在约 4000 名患者的测试组中，评分 0.9 至 1 的人有 53% 在 90 天内死亡，评分 0 至 0.1 的人该比例为 2%；在 3.8 万余名放疗患者中，看起来比实际年龄老 5 岁以上者，在约 4 年随访期内的死亡风险高 21%。生存模型主要关注眼下与鼻梁区域，年龄模型侧重面部褶皱、额头和太阳穴，研究团队表示下一步需要验证这些预测能否真正改善诊疗。
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TechWhat AI sees in your selfie
PLUS: Japan heads to Martian moon
Good morning, tech enthusiasts. How much of your medical future is written on your face?
Mass General Brigham researchers trained AI on 40M+ faces to estimate biological age and cancer survival risk from a single selfie. But the next test is whether it actually improves care.
Also: Apple tees up its next big reveal, and Japan sets out to bring a piece of a Martian moon back to Earth.
In today’s tech rundown:
A selfie could help predict cancer survival
Japan is chasing a Martian mystery
Apple sets date for touchscreen Mac
Meta pops the hood on Prometheus
🤳🏽 A selfie could help predict cancer survival
Image source: Mass General Brigham
The Rundown: A selfie could become oncology’s next medical clue: Mass General Brigham researchers just developed AI tools that estimate biological age and cancer survival risk from a single face photo.
The details:
Trained on more than 40M facial images, FAHR-Face powers separate models for estimating biological age and predicting survival directly.
In a test group of ~4K patients, 53% of those scored 0.9–1 died within 90 days. Among those scored 0–0.1, the figure was 2%.
Across 38K+ radiotherapy patients, looking 5+ years older than your actual age meant a 21% higher risk of death over around 4 years of follow-up.
The survival model focused on the area beneath the eyes and around the nose bridge; the age model emphasized facial folds, forehead, and temples.
Why it matters: Cancer treatment hinges partly on a difficult question: How much time does a patient have? A single photo could give doctors another clue, potentially helping guide how aggressively to treat. The next hurdle is proving that these predictions do more than forecast outcomes, and that they actually help improve care. SPACE TECH
🔴 Japan is chasing a Martian mystery
The Rundown: Japan launched a $578M, five-year mission to bring home a piece of Phobos — Mars’ largest moon — and understand whether it is actually a captured asteroid or the wreckage of an ancient planetary collision.
The details:
The MMX spacecraft launched aboard Japan’s H3 rocket on Oct. 20, local time, with arrival at Mars expected in Aug. 2027 and samples due home in 2031.
The French-German Idefix will scout Phobos for around 100 days, navigating gravity less than one-thousandth of Earth’s to help identify a safe landing site.
MMX will attempt up to two landings in 2029, using a coring device and a nitrogen-powered sampler to collect at least 10g of material.
China aims to deliver Mars samples in 2031, while NASA is still weighing how to retrieve the specimens its Perseverance rover has collected.
Why it matters: MMX could succeed where two Soviet probes launched in 1988 and Russia’s 2011 Phobos-Grunt mission fell short. Phobos’ surface is expected to contain its own material alongside impact debris, and fragments blasted off Mars, so even 10 grams could help unravel how the planet’s moons formed. APPLE
💻 Apple sets date for touchscreen Mac
Image source: Apple
The Rundown: Apple is set to hold its second launch event of the month on Oct. 28 in Los Angeles — tagline “Pro and tell”, and Bloomberg reports the headliner is the first touchscreen MacBook Pro.
The details:
The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with OLED touchscreens and, for the first time, a Dynamic Island, are expected to run M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman still expects the new models to be “significantly lighter,” though recent reporting has cooled hopes for a much slimmer design.
A refreshed iPad mini is expected to gain an OLED display and move its front-facing camera to the landscape edge.
The “Pro and tell” event starts at 10 a.m. Pacific, following Apple’s October 13 smart-home launch; the product lineup remains unconfirmed.
Why it matters: Steve Jobs called vertical touchscreens “ergonomically terrible” in 2010, and Craig Federighi was still describing the iPad as “the ultimate touch device” in June 2025. The rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro would reverse 16 years of resistance while delivering the laptop’s first major redesign since 2021. META
⚡ Meta pops the hood on Prometheus
Image source: Meta
The Rundown: Meta said the first phase of Prometheus, its gigawatt-scale AI supercluster in Ohio, is complete. Its engineering write-up reads like a survival guide for keeping hundreds of thousands of chips working together.
The details:
Prometheus links hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips across regular buildings and storm-proof tents, and Meta plans to grow the number to ~1M.
At its worst in mid-2025, the cluster stalled at about 1K interruptions per 8K GPUs per day. Meta and Nvidia spent a year cutting that by 99%.
Every rack of 72 chips runs only 64 and keeps 8 in reserve, so a failed chip gets swapped instead of halting training.
Pausing/resuming training can swing power draw by tens of MWs in seconds, so Meta caps GPU power with software and absorbs spikes with batteries.
Why it matters: Every interruption burns computing time Meta has already paid for. Cutting those losses gives it more room to train and experiment — and those lessons now feed into Hyperion. As the clusters get bigger, the engineers keeping them running could have an increasingly powerful hand in setting the pace of the AI race.
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