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The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

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Re: The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

#41

Post by eddiewithzato »

sampo wrote: post #39
ben_w wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's clear OpenAI is a hype company Every other industry: "My new invention is safe, I swear" Public reaction: "You're biased, it's dangerous!" Almost the entire AI industry, including people who resign to speak more openly about the risks: "This may kill literally everyone, none of us knows what we're doing or what 'safe' even means" Public reaction: "You're biased, it's safe, just saying that to look cool!"

20 to 30 years ago, activists firebombed university research labs (e.g. Michigan State University, University of Washington, Michigan Technological University [1]) because they believed genetically engineered plants are dangerous. Today, we don't have such serious activism against AI. So you are right, the public doesn't think AI is a danger. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front#Notable...

reminds me, I would’ve rather seen VCs fund more genetic engineering startups. Imagine the good it could do, from stem cells to nanobots to “hacking” human DNA itself. But I know the business model there can’t compete with software. So it will never reach the funding it needs.

Re: The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

#43

Post by pmayrgundter »

zipy124 wrote: post #40

As a scientist in academic research, I can only see this as a bad thing. The #1 valued thing in science is trust. At the end of the day (until things change in how we handle research data, code etc...) all papers are based on the reviewers trust in the authors that their data is what they say it is, and the code they submit does what it says it does. Allowing an AI agent to automate code, data or analysis, necessitat…

Maybe the #1 valued thing in "capital S Science" -- the institutional bureaucracy of academia -- is trust. Trust that the bureaucracy will be preserved, funded, defended.. so long as the dogma is followed. The politics of Science.

The #1 valued thing in science is the method of doing science: reason, insight, objectivity, evidence, reproducibility. If the method can be automated, then great!

Re: The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

#44

Post by VieEnCode »

ben_w wrote: post #36
unraveller wrote: post #7

But OpenAI said LLMs can't innovate until human-level reasoning and long-term agenthood is solved. [1] Referring to their precious 5 stages to classify AI before it reaches the scary "beyond" levels of intelligence... presumably at that point they get the feds involved to reg cap the field, so genuine is the fear of the pace they've set. It's clear OpenAI is a hype company knocking over glass bottle stacks at its own…

> It's clear OpenAI is a hype company Every other industry: "My new invention is safe, I swear" Public reaction: "You're biased, it's dangerous!" Almost the entire AI industry, including people who resign to speak more openly about the risks: "This may kill literally everyone, none of us knows what we're doing or what 'safe' even means" Public reaction: "You're biased, it's safe, just saying that to look cool!"

I found this guy's take on the AI safety scene to be quite insightful.

In summary, he feels the focus on sci-fi type existential risk to be a deliberate distraction from the AI industry's current and real legal and ethical harms: e.g. scraping copyrighted content for training without paying or attributing creators, not protecting those affected by the misuse of tools to create deepfake porn, the crashes and deaths attributed to Tesla's self-driving mode, AI resume screening bots messing up etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsLf4lAG0xQ

Re: The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

#45

Post by ergl »

This is the kind of theory-free science seems to permeate the entire field of ML lately.

I can only see this as a negative, what's the use of automatically generated papers if not to flood the already over-strained volunteers that review papers at conferences? (mostly already-overworked PhD students.) If I wanted a glorified chatbot to spam me with made-up improvements, I'd ask it myself.

Re: The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

#46

Post by ergl »

pmayrgundter wrote: post #43
zipy124 wrote: post #40

As a scientist in academic research, I can only see this as a bad thing. The #1 valued thing in science is trust. At the end of the day (until things change in how we handle research data, code etc...) all papers are based on the reviewers trust in the authors that their data is what they say it is, and the code they submit does what it says it does. Allowing an AI agent to automate code, data or analysis, necessitat…

Maybe the #1 valued thing in "capital S Science" -- the institutional bureaucracy of academia -- is trust. Trust that the bureaucracy will be preserved, funded, defended.. so long as the dogma is followed. The politics of Science. The #1 valued thing in science is the method of doing science: reason, insight, objectivity, evidence, reproducibility. If the method can be automated, then great!

> The #1 valued thing in science is [...] reproducibility.

If only. Papers rarely describe their methods properly, and reproduction papers have a hard time being published, making it hard to justify the time it takes. If reproducibility was valued, things like retractionwatch wouldn't need to exist.

Re: The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

#47

Post by vouaobrasil »

As someone who truly loves science, the idea of automating the creative parts strikes me at the core as a horrible mistake. Yes, even before AI, we've already tried some automations -- actually some of those I even believe is a bad thing, such as the internet. Most people would disagree no doubt, but I feel like automating science, especially with regard to the more "creative parts" makes it more like an industry, ripping it away from the minds of people. And AI automation is a new level that goes beyond all automations.

I truly hate AI and what it is doing to the world and to me at least, as someone who has loved mathematics and science since my grandma started showing me chemistry experiments when I was about 5 years old, this new level of automation is stealing the magic from human curiosity.

Re: The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

#48

Post by staunton »

uniqueuid wrote: post #34
foolfoolz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we already have a wave of papers that no human has the capacity to verify

Maybe, maybe not. It's a tiered system - you get the deluge at the unfiltered bottom and a narrower selection the more prestigious and selective the outlets / conferences / journals are. Problem is, of course, that selection criteria are in large parts proxies, not measures of quality. With AI, those proxies become tainted and then you get an explosion of effort. If anyone has a good recommendation for scalable crite…

If we had scalable criteria for quality of papers, that would be the end of science. The rest would be engineering...

Re: The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

#49

Post by pmayrgundter »

ergl wrote: post #46
pmayrgundter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the #1 valued thing in "capital S Science" -- the institutional bureaucracy of academia -- is trust. Trust that the bureaucracy will be preserved, funded, defended.. so long as the dogma is followed. The politics of Science. The #1 valued thing in science is the method of doing science: reason, insight, objectivity, evidence, reproducibility. If the method can be automated, then great!

> The #1 valued thing in science is [...] reproducibility. If only. Papers rarely describe their methods properly, and reproduction papers have a hard time being published, making it hard to justify the time it takes. If reproducibility was valued, things like retractionwatch wouldn't need to exist.

Well, agreed! I'd say that's good evidence the political bureaucracy of big-Science has substantially corrupted that (your?) culture.

It's not the only way though. There's a bright light coming from open source. Stay close to the people in AI saying "code, weights and methods or it didn't happen"

The code that runs most of the net ships with lengthy howto guides that are kept up to date, thorough automated testing in support of changes/experimentation, etc. Experienced programmers who run across a project without this downgrade their valuation accordingly

It doesn't solve all problems, but it does show there's a way that's being actively cultivated by a culture that is changing the world

Re: The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

#50

Post by gwervc »

ben_w wrote: post #36
unraveller wrote: post #7

But OpenAI said LLMs can't innovate until human-level reasoning and long-term agenthood is solved. [1] Referring to their precious 5 stages to classify AI before it reaches the scary "beyond" levels of intelligence... presumably at that point they get the feds involved to reg cap the field, so genuine is the fear of the pace they've set. It's clear OpenAI is a hype company knocking over glass bottle stacks at its own…

> It's clear OpenAI is a hype company Every other industry: "My new invention is safe, I swear" Public reaction: "You're biased, it's dangerous!" Almost the entire AI industry, including people who resign to speak more openly about the risks: "This may kill literally everyone, none of us knows what we're doing or what 'safe' even means" Public reaction: "You're biased, it's safe, just saying that to look cool!"

> This may kill literally everyone

It's indeed hard to take seriously such gross exaggeration. Even the deadliest plagues didn't kill everyone, so advocating this is a likely outcome of creating spam generators is laughable.

This is more likely a strategy, common in academia, of aggrandizing results (here risks) so that more eyeballs, attention and money is diverted towards the field and its proponents.

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