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The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

sakana.ai

121–130 of 144 posts

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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is looking at it wrong. If AI can do boring science it frees us up to do imaginative and fun science without the constraints of capitalism. You don’t have to worry about your science being valuable enough

> AI can do boring science it frees us up to do imaginative and fun science without the constraints of capitalism. That is senseless. Capitalism will always control science by its very nature: through science, people create value and trade it for other things.

If AI has gotten to the point of doing nearly all science for humanity, we are probably close to, if not already at, a post-capitalist state. The implication being there's no real resource scarcity at that point.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't we?

We shouldn't because it isn't science. It's junk epistemology, relatively speaking. We should because it's a cheap way of managing knowledge in our society. So there's a tradeoff there.

IMHO authority has no place in knowledge preserving institutions. Generally authority instills more ruin than good.

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

#124
I guess if C3P0 wants to help me do science I'll let him. But I'm not really satisfied by someone telling me something. I like finding the answer myself. That's one of the reasons I'm a scientist. I enjoy being a scientist. Even assuming that this system, or any science bot, has none of the problems associated with llms, why would I want it to do my job for me?

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

#125
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM have unleashed the dreamer in each and every young coder. Now, there is all sorts of speculation on what these machines can or cannot do. This is a natural process of any mania. These folks must all do courses in epistemology to realize that all knowledge is built up of symbolic components and not spit out by a probabilistic machine. Gradually, reality will sync (intentional misspelling) in, and such imaginations…

my guy you're so confident yet you forget AlphaFold, it designs protein structures that don't exist. Who's to say that a model can't eventually be trained to work within certain parameters the real word operates in and make new novel ideas and inventions much like a human does in a larger scope.

If you go and look at the list of authors on those papers you will see that most of the authors have PhD doing something protein folding related. It's not that some computer scientists figured it out. It's that someone built the infrastructure then gave it to the subject matter experts to use.

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

#126
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…

Also, there's quite a lot of value in figuring out what doesn't work. A colleague of mine says that his entire PhD could have been completed in about 4 months of work if only he knew what to do to begin with. Perhaps some ai system can try a bunch of different pathways and explain why they went wrong. Perhaps that's educational for human scientists. I dunno.

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

#127
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Literally every AI discussion on HN has the same format > AI is awesome, regulation is stupid > I wouldnt want to see AI flooding the market with X we can’t verify > We already have (copy whatever was just said) For what it’s worth, when it comes to SCIENCE, I an actually in favor of AI, even giving it to everyone. Except possibly AI that would help engineer designer viruses. Because in science, people literally ARE…

This is nitpicky but I don't believe you need 24729 variables to reproduce Kepler's laws which very accurately predict the position of the planets. You basically only need what you need for newtons law of gravity which is masses and locations. Of course the n body problem is more complicated but you still only need masses and locations for all the bodies, plus a computer. What ai could be useful for is finding more efficient and accurate solutions to the many body problem. But tbf, I'm not a many body physicist. So what do I know.

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

#128

I guess if C3P0 wants to help me do science I'll let him. But I'm not really satisfied by someone telling me something. I like finding the answer myself. That's one of the reasons I'm a scientist. I enjoy being a scientist. Even assuming that this system, or any science bot, has none of the problems associated with llms, why would I want it to do my job for me?

Being a scientist is cool and all, but you have to do things the exact same way except for changing one variable at a time for a proper science experiment. Having a robot helper to run the experiment the exact same way modulo the variable would be great for science and especially for reproducing experiments. There's a reproduction crisis and a robot that could run reproductions would move science itself forwards.

The other part of the question is, for you, merely just being a scientist is the most rewarding thing ever and there's absolutely no boring parts whatsoever? Your favorite part of the job is everything, and there's none of it that you'd trade for a bit of the other? I mean, I suppose that's possible, but that beggars belief.

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

#129

I guess if C3P0 wants to help me do science I'll let him. But I'm not really satisfied by someone telling me something. I like finding the answer myself. That's one of the reasons I'm a scientist. I enjoy being a scientist. Even assuming that this system, or any science bot, has none of the problems associated with llms, why would I want it to do my job for me?

Being a scientist is cool and all, but you have to do things the exact same way except for changing one variable at a time for a proper science experiment. Having a robot helper to run the experiment the exact same way modulo the variable would be great for science and especially for reproducing experiments. There's a reproduction crisis and a robot that could run reproductions would move science itself forwards. The…

I'm a computational scientist so I already spend most of my time writing codes to automate my science. If C3P0 wants to help out then I'm happy to have him.

The reproduction crisis is predominately in social sciences. This is for several reasons but the main one is that social science is much newer than the physical sciences. There's a great book about rasch modelling which equates social science to physics before thermodynamics. That at the very best, you can measure the temperature but there was a time when we had a poor understanding of what it meant when the temperature changes. That's clearly where social science is right now and the reproduction crisis is a good thing. It's challenging the status quo to come up with better theory to motivate observation and experiment.

To answer your final question, yes, the parts of my job that I find annoying, unrewarding, and time wasting that I would happily trade to another are itemized but not complete below:

* Planning my own travel, purchasing all my own tickets and lodging and having no help to do any of that

* Sitting in meetings with colleagues who are explaining to me why it's ok that the interns aren't getting paid because they are going to give them visa gift cards instead

* Editorialmanager.com website

* Having no itemized or explicit way to examine the expenditure in my grants so that when I ask admin staff how much money there is for X they reply with "you have enough money" instead of the actual amount

* Researchgate website

* Colleagues who are rude and condescending instead of going to therapy to wonder why they are insecure

* Expense reimbursement instead of having a purchase card attached to my grants

* Convincing older colleagues to use "new" technology like slack or GitHub

If C3P0 can solve any one of those problems for me I'll get one in a heartbeat.

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

#130
post #82
post #61

As someone 'in academia', I worry that tools like this fundamentally discard significant fractions of both the scientific process and why the process is structured that way. The reason that we do research is not simply so that we can produce papers and hence amass knowledge in an abstract sense. A huge part of the academic world is training and building up hands-on institutional knowledge within the population so tha…

Fully agreed on point A, but I've heard the "but then humans won't be trained" argument before and don't buy it. It's already the case that humans can cheat or get buy without fully understanding the math or ideas they're working with. This is what PhD defences are for, and what paper reviews are for. Yes, likely we need to do something to improve peer review, but that is already true without AI. From a more philosop…

Scientific advancement IS the change in the understanding of humans.

Your fallacy lies in pretending science can progress in an objectively defined space where saying 'progress twice as fast' even makes sense.

But it does not. It progresses as people refine and improve their understanding of the universe. Books or LLMs don't contain understanding, only data. If less people grow a deep understanding of mathematics and the universe, science progress will slow down, even as metrics like numbers of graduates or papers published go up.

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