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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

#161

Post by kuhewa »

shpongled wrote: post #34
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…

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.

I'm sure the scientists involved had a wish list of dozens of drug candidates to repurpose to test based on various hypotheses. Ideas are cheap, time is not.

In this case they actually tested a drug probably because Google is paying for them to test whatever the AI came up with.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#162

Post by geewee »

BeetleB wrote: post #104
quinnjh wrote: 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…

The feeling of dissatisfaction is something I can relate to. My story: I only recently started using aider[1]. My experience with it can be described in 3 words. Wow! Oh wow! It was amazing. I was writing a throwaway script for one time use (not for work). It wrote it for me in under 15 minutes (this includes my time getting familiar with the tool!) No bugs. So I decided to see how far I could take it. I added comman…

I tried Aider recently to modify a quite small python + HTML project, and it consistently got "uv" commands wrong, ended up changing my entire build system because it didn't think the thing I wanted to do was supported in the current one (it was).

They're very effective at making changes for the most part, but boy you need to keep them on a leash if you care about what those changes are.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#163

Post by semi-extrinsic »

theptip wrote: post #120
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense, AI should be the most capable at doing this within math. Literally the entire domain in its entirety can be tokenized. There are no experiments required to verify anything, just theorem-lemma-proof ad nauseam. Doing this like in this test, it's very tricky to rule out the hypothesis that the AI is just combining statements from the Discussion / Future Outlook sections of some previous work in the field…

Math seems to me like the hardest thing for LLMs to do. It requires going deep with high IQ symbol manipulation. The case for LLMs is currently where new discoveries can be made from interpolation or perhaps extrapolation between existing data points in a broad corpus which is challenging for humans to absorb.

This line of reasoning implies "the stochastical parrot people are right, there is no intelligence in AI". Which is the opposite of what AI thought leaders are saying.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#164

Post by kuhewa »

webmaven wrote: post #140
coliveira wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I understand what's been published about this, it isn't just ideation, but also critiquing and ranking them, to select the few most worth pursuing. Choosing a hypothesis to test is actually a hard problem, and one that a lot of humans do poorly, with significant impact on their subsequent career. From what I have seen as an outsider to academia, many of the people who choose good hypotheses for their dissertation…

I bet all of these researchers involved had a long list of candidates they'd like to test and have a very good idea what the lowest hanging fruit are, sometimes for more interesting reasons than 'it was used successfully as an inhibitor for X and hasn't been tried yet in this context' — not that that isn't a perfectly good reason. I don't think ideas are the limiting factor. The reason attention was paid to this particular candidate is because google put money down.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#165

Post by forgetfreeman »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #122
kridsdale1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also seems to be a financial problem of getting VC funds to run trials to appease regulators. Even if you’ve already seen results in a lab or other country.

We could have an alternative system where VC don’t need to appease regulators but must place X billion in escrow for compensation of any harm the medicine does to customers. Regulator is not only there to protect the public, it also protects VC from responsibility

> VC don’t need to appease regulators

Regulations around clinical trials represent the floor of what's ethically permissible, not the ceiling. As in, these guidelines represent the absolute bare minimum required when performing drug trials to prevent gross ethical violations. Not sure what corners you think are ripe for cutting there.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#166

Post by forgetfreeman »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #94
baq wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple years ago even suggesting that a computer could propose anything at all was sci-fi. Today a computer read the whole internet, suggested a place to look at and experiments to perform and… ‘not impressive enough’. Oof.

People are facing existential dread that the knowledge they worked years for is possibly about to become worth a $20 monthly subscription. People will downplay it for years no matter what.

You just described a library card.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#167

Post by tho3i4j3242324 »

mmooss wrote: post #159
mupuff1234 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You simply can't take Google press at face value. I think that's true for virtually every company and also for most people (in the context of published work)

Do you think that of most published scientific research?

Seems to be true. 'Published' scientific research, by its sheer social-dynamics (verging on highly toxic), is the academic equivalent of a pouty-girl vis-a-vis Instagram.

(academic-burnout resembles creator-burnout for similar reasons)

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#168

Post by lmm »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #165
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could have an alternative system where VC don’t need to appease regulators but must place X billion in escrow for compensation of any harm the medicine does to customers. Regulator is not only there to protect the public, it also protects VC from responsibility

> VC don’t need to appease regulators Regulations around clinical trials represent the floor of what's ethically permissible, not the ceiling. As in, these guidelines represent the absolute bare minimum required when performing drug trials to prevent gross ethical violations. Not sure what corners you think are ripe for cutting there.

> Regulations around clinical trials represent the floor of what's ethically permissible, not the ceiling.

Disagree. The US FDA especially is overcautious to the point of doing more harm than good - they'd rather ban hundreds of lifesaving drugs than allow one thalidomide to slip through.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#169

Post by Der_Einzige »

confused_boner wrote: post #153
dekhn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am aware. I didn't find Jeff's argument particularly convincing. Please note: I've worked personally with Jeff before and shared many a coffee with him. He's done great work and messed up a lot of things, too.

From your perspective, which arguments were not convincing, are you able to share why not?

Unironically "just trust me bro" is actually fine here. They're objectively right and you'll find they are when you do your painstaking analysis to figure it out.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#170

Post by Der_Einzige »

ein0p wrote: post #106
dekhn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but google has a long history of being egregious, with the additional detail that their work is often irreproducible for technical reasons (rather than being irreproducible for missing methods). For example, we published an excellent paper but nobody could reproduce it because at the time, nobody else had a million spare cores to run MD simulations of proteins.

It's hardly Google's problem that nobody else has a million cores, wouldn't you agree? Should they not publish the result at all if it's using more than a handful of cores so that anyone in academia can reproduce it? That'd be rather limiting.

Actually it IS google's problem. They don't publish through traditional academic venues unless it suits them (much like OpenAI/Anthropic, often snubbing places like NeurIPS due to not wanting to MIT open source their code/models which peer reviewers demand) and them demanding so many GPUs chokes supply for the rest of the field - a field which they rely on the free labor of to make complimentary technologies to their models.
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