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Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

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Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#51

Post by eamag »

coliveira wrote: post #46
eamag wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In science, having ideas is not the limiting factor. They're just automating the wrong thing. I want to have ideas and ask the machine to test for me, not the other way around.

The difference is the complexity of ideas. There are straightforward ideas anyone can test and improve, and there are ideas where only PhDs in CERN can test

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#52

Post by thomastjeffery »

klipt wrote: post #37
shpongled wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a UPR inhibitor would inhibit viability of AML cell lines is not exactly a novel scientific hypothesis. They took a previously published inhibitor known to be active in other cell lines and tried it in a new one. It's a cool, undergrad-level experiment. I would be impressed if a sophomore in high school proposed it, but not a sophomore in college.

Only two years since chatGPT was released and AI at the level of "impressive high school sophomore" is already blasé.

Sure, but is it more impressive than books?

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#53

Post by directevolve »

klipt wrote: post #37
shpongled wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a UPR inhibitor would inhibit viability of AML cell lines is not exactly a novel scientific hypothesis. They took a previously published inhibitor known to be active in other cell lines and tried it in a new one. It's a cool, undergrad-level experiment. I would be impressed if a sophomore in high school proposed it, but not a sophomore in college.

Only two years since chatGPT was released and AI at the level of "impressive high school sophomore" is already blasé.

Most people here know little to nothing of biomedical research. Explaining clearly why this isn’t a scientifically interesting result is helpful.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#54

Post by rtkwe »

klipt wrote: post #37
shpongled wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a UPR inhibitor would inhibit viability of AML cell lines is not exactly a novel scientific hypothesis. They took a previously published inhibitor known to be active in other cell lines and tried it in a new one. It's a cool, undergrad-level experiment. I would be impressed if a sophomore in high school proposed it, but not a sophomore in college.

Only two years since chatGPT was released and AI at the level of "impressive high school sophomore" is already blasé.

Suggesting "maybe try this known inhibitor in other cell lines" isn't exactly novel information though. It'd be more impressive and useful if it hadn't had any published information about working as a cancer inhibitor before. People are blasé about it because it's not really beating the allegations that it's just a very fancy parrot when the highlight of it's achievements is to say try this known inhibitor with these other cell lines, decent odds that the future work sections of papers on the drug already suggested trying on other lines too...

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#55

Post by Nevermark »

klipt wrote: post #37
shpongled wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a UPR inhibitor would inhibit viability of AML cell lines is not exactly a novel scientific hypothesis. They took a previously published inhibitor known to be active in other cell lines and tried it in a new one. It's a cool, undergrad-level experiment. I would be impressed if a sophomore in high school proposed it, but not a sophomore in college.

Only two years since chatGPT was released and AI at the level of "impressive high school sophomore" is already blasé.

Especially when you consider the artificial impressive high school sophomore is capable of having impressive high school sophomore ideas across and between an incredibly broad spectrum of domains.

And that their generation of impressive high school sophomore ideas is faster, more reliable, communicated better, and can continue 24/7 (given matching collaboration), relative to their bio high school sophomore counterparts.

I don’t believe any natural high school sophomore as impressive on those terms, has ever existed. Not close.

We humans (I include myself) are awful at judging things or people accurately (in even a loose sense) across more than one or two dimensions.

This is especially true when the mix of ability across several dimensions is novel.

(I also think people under estimate the degree that we, as users and “commanders” of AI, bottleneck their potential. I don’t suggest they are ready to operate without us. But that our relative lack of energy, persistence & focus all limit what we get from them in those dimensions, hiding significant value.

We famously do this with each other, so not surprising. But worth keeping in mind when judging limits: whose limits are we really seeing.)

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#56

Post by shpongled »

Teever wrote: post #45
shpongled wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need an army of high school sophomores, unless they are in the lab pipetting. The expensive part of drug discovery is not the ideation phase, it is the time and labor spent running experiments and synthesizing analogues.

It sounds like you're suggesting that we need machines that mass produce things like automated pipetting machines and the robots that glue those sorts of machines together.

They already exist, and we use them. They are not cheap though!

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#57

Post by fhd2 »

xbmcuser wrote: post #36
crypto420 wrote: post #11

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…

Similar stuff is being done for material sciences where AI suggest different combinations to find different properties. So when people say AI(machine learning, LLM) are just for show I am a bit shocked as AI's today have accelerated discoveries in many different fields of science and this is just the start. Anna archive probably will play a huge role in this as no human or even a group of humans will have all the kno…

It's a matter of perspective and expectations.

The automobile was a useful invention. I don't know if back then there was a lot of hype around how it can do anything a horse can do, but better. People might have complained about how it can't come to you when called, can't traverse stairs, or whatever.

It could do _one_ thing a horse could do better: Pull stuff on a straight surface. Doing just one thing better is evidently valuable.

I think AI is valuable from that perspective, you provide a good example there. I might well be disappointed if I would expect it to be better than humans at anything humans can do. It doesn't have to. But with wording like "co-scientist", I see where that comes from.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#58

Post by bjarlsson »

xbmcuser wrote: post #36
crypto420 wrote: post #11

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…

Similar stuff is being done for material sciences where AI suggest different combinations to find different properties. So when people say AI(machine learning, LLM) are just for show I am a bit shocked as AI's today have accelerated discoveries in many different fields of science and this is just the start. Anna archive probably will play a huge role in this as no human or even a group of humans will have all the kno…

What does this cited article have to do with AI? Unless I’m missing something the researchers devised a novel method to create a material that was known since 1967.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#59

Post by the_snooze »

coliveira wrote: post #48
parineum wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This feels like hubris to me. No, any scientist has hundreds of ideas they would like to test. It's just part of the job. The hard thing is to do the rigorous testing itself.

>The hard thing is to do the rigorous testing itself.

This. Rigorous testing is hard and it requires a high degree of intuition and intellectual humility. When I'm evaluating something as part of my resaerch, I'm constantly asking: "Am I asking the right questions?" "Am I looking at the right metrics?" "Are the results noisy, to what extent, and how much does it matter?" and "Am I introducing confounding effects?" It's really hard to do this at scale and quickly. It necessarily requires slow measured thought, which computers really can't help with.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#60

Post by akomtu »

waynenilsen wrote: post #21

it seems that humans may become the hands of the AI before the robots are ready mechanical turk, but for biology

That's the Quake version of the machine civilization: machines make the decisions, but use chunks of humans to improve their unholy machinery. The alternative Doom version is the opposite: humans make the decisions, but they are blended in an unholy way into the machines.
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