Live data from Hacker News

Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

research.google

21–30 of 202 posts

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#22

Tbh I don’t see why I would use this. I don’t need an ai to connect across ideas or come up with new hypothesis. I need it to write lots of data pipeline code to take data that is organized by project, each in a unique way, each with its own set of multimodal data plus metadata all stored in long form documents with no regular formatting, and normalize it all into a giant database. I need it to write and test a data…

I think you're just not the target audience. If AI can come up with some good ideas and then split it into tasks some of them an undergrad can do - it can speed up the global research speed by involving more people in useful science

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#23

I'm not sure if people here even read the entirety of the article. From the article: > We applied the AI co-scientist to assist with the prediction of drug repurposing opportunities and, with our partners, validated predictions through computational biology, expert clinician feedback, and in vitro experiments. > Notably, the AI co-scientist proposed novel repurposing candidates for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Subse…

I expect it's going to be reasonably useful with the "stamp collecting" part of science and not so much with the rest.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#24

It seems in general we’re heading toward’s Minsky’s society of minds concept. I know OpenAI is wanting to collapse all their models into a single omni model that can do it all, but I wonder if under the hood it’d just be about routing. It’d make sense to me for agents to specialize in certain tool calls, ways of thinking, etc that as a conceptual framework/scaffolding provides a useful direction.

Isn't that kinda the idea of Mixture of Experts?

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#25
post #6

Tbh I don’t see why I would use this. I don’t need an ai to connect across ideas or come up with new hypothesis. I need it to write lots of data pipeline code to take data that is organized by project, each in a unique way, each with its own set of multimodal data plus metadata all stored in long form documents with no regular formatting, and normalize it all into a giant database. I need it to write and test a data…

> I don’t need an ai to connect across ideas or come up with new hypothesis. This feels like hubris to me. The idea here isn't to assist you with menial tasks, the idea is to give you an AI generalist that might ne able to alert you to things outside of your field that may be related to your work. It's not going to reduce your workload, in fact, it'll probably increase it but the result should be better science. I ha…

> the idea is to give you an AI generalist that might ne able to alert you to things outside of your field that may be related to your work

That might be a good goal. It doesn't seem to be the goal of this project.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#26
The market seems excited to charge in whatever direction the weathervane has last been pointing, regardless of the real outcomes of running in that direction. Hopefully I’m wrong, but it reminds me very much of this study (I’ll quote a paraphrase)

“A groundbreaking new study of over 1,000 scientists at a major U.S. materials science firm reveals a disturbing paradox: When paired with AI systems, top researchers become extraordinarily more productive – and extraordinarily less satisfied with their work. The numbers tell a stark story: AI assistance helped scientists discover 44% more materials and increased patent filings by 39%. But here's the twist: 82% of these same scientists reported feeling less fulfilled in their jobs.”

Quote from https://futureofbeinghuman.com/p/is-ai-poised-to-suck-the-so...

Referencing this study https://aidantr.github.io/files/AI_innovation.pdf

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#27

“Drug repurposing for AML” lol As a person who is literally doing his PhD on AML by implementing molecular subtyping, and ex-vivo drug predictions. I find this super random. I would truly suggest our pipeline instead of random drug repurposing :) https://celvox.co/solutions/seAMLess edit: Btw we’re looking for ways to fund/commercialize our pipeline. You could contact us through the site if you’re interested!

Can you explain what you mean by subtyping and if/how it negates the usefulness of repurposing (if that’s what you meant to say). Wouldn’t subtyping complement a drug repurposing screen by allowing the scientist to test compounds against a subset of a disease?

And drug repurposing is also used for conditions with no known molecular basis like autism. You’re not suggesting its usefulness is limited in those cases right?

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#30
post #26

The market seems excited to charge in whatever direction the weathervane has last been pointing, regardless of the real outcomes of running in that direction. Hopefully I’m wrong, but it reminds me very much of this study (I’ll quote a paraphrase) “A groundbreaking new study of over 1,000 scientists at a major U.S. materials science firm reveals a disturbing paradox: When paired with AI systems, top researchers becom…

As a dev, I have the same experience.

AI chat is a massive productivity enhancer, but, when coding via prompts, I'm not able to hit the super satisfying developer flow state that I get into via normal coding.

Copilot is less of a productivity boost, but also less of a flow state blocker.

Post reply on HN