Summary as given in the post:
1. formal verification is about to become vastly cheaper;
2. AI-generated code needs formal verification so that we can skip human review and still be sure that it works;
3. the precision of formal verification counteracts the imprecise and probabilistic nature of LLMs.
These three things taken together mean formal verification is likely to go mainstream in the foreseeable future. I suspect that soon the limiting factor will not be the technology, but the culture change required for people to realise that formal methods have become viable in practice.
The initial varieties into which the researchers introduced the FTO gene do not appear to be modern high-performance crops though. They didn't have yields that were already optimized by breeding, so they were easier to get impressive performance gains from. What FTO can achieve in the performance-optimized varieties that farmers grow today remains to be seen in further experiments.
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