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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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

whoosh

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#172
post #168

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> 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.

Yeah that's not how anything works. Compounds are approved for use or not based on empirical evidence, thus the need for clinical trials. What's your level of exposure to the pharma industry?

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#173

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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.

If they solve tokenization, you'll be SHOCKED at how much it was holding back model capabilities. There's tons of works at NeurIPS about various tokenizer hacks or alternatives to bpe which massively improve various types of math that models are bad at (i.e. arithmatic performance)

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#174

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Exactly, they want to automate the most rewarding part that we don’t need help with… plus I don’t believe they’ve solved the problem of LLMs generating trite ideas.

Sounds like the message artists were giving when generative AI started blowing up.

This ludditism shit is the death drive externalized.

You'd forsake an amazing future based on copes like the precautionary principle or worse yet, a belief that work is good and people must be forced into it.

The tears of butthurt scientists, or artists who are automated out of existence because they refused to leverage or use AI systems to enhance themselves will be delicious.

The only reason that these companies aren't infinitely better than what Aaron Swartz tried to do was that they haven't open accessed everything. Deepseek is pretty close (sans the exact dataset), and so is Mistral and apparently Meta?

Y'all talked real big about loving "actual" communism until it came for your intellectual property, now you all act like copyright trolls. Fuck that!

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this may be the first time I've seen "thought leaders" used unironically. Is there any reason to believe they're right?

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#176
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah that's not how anything works. Compounds are approved for use or not based on empirical evidence, thus the need for clinical trials. What's your level of exposure to the pharma industry?

> Compounds are approved for use or not based on empirical evidence, thus the need for clinical trials.

But off-label use is legal, so it's ok to use a drug that's safe but not proven effective (to the FDA's high standards) for that ailment... but only if it's been proven effective for some other random ailment. That makes no sense.

> What's your level of exposure to the pharma industry?

Just an interested outsider who read e.g. the Omegaven story on https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab .

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#177

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> Today a computer read the whole internet, suggested a place to look at Or imagine this one - computer maps the whole world, suggests a route how to get to any destination?! You just described a basic search engine. LLM is kind of a search engine for language

But so are you and I. That's how you wrote this reply.

Preposterous- cavemen had no language but they could reason, think and learn.

A child learns how to eat solid food and how to walk. That a square peg fits into a square hole. This has nothing to do with language.

people who deaf and mute and cannot read can still reason and solve problems.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#178
Loosely connected: I read recently about an Austrian pilot project in Wien, where they analyze patients' tumors and let AI suggest treatment. They had some spectacular successes, where the AI would recommend drugs that aren't normally used for that type of cancer, but when deployed, worked well.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the message artists were giving when generative AI started blowing up.

This ludditism shit is the death drive externalized. You'd forsake an amazing future based on copes like the precautionary principle or worse yet, a belief that work is good and people must be forced into it . The tears of butthurt scientists, or artists who are automated out of existence because they refused to leverage or use AI systems to enhance themselves will be delicious. The only reason that these companies a…

You sure are argumentative for someone who believes they are so correct.

In any case, I don’t think I’m a Luddite. I use many ai tools in my research including for idea generation. So far i have not found it to be very useful. Moreover the things it could be useful for such as automated data pipeline generation it doesn’t do. I could imagine a series of agents where one designs pipelines and one fills in the codes, etc per node in the pipeline but so far I didn’t see anything like that. If you have some kind of constructive recommendations in that direction I’m happy to hear them.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#180
post #74
post #62

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Any idea why they're they so expensive?

I've built microscopes intended to be installed inside workcells similar to what companies like Transcriptic built ( https://www.transcriptic.com/ ). So my scope could be automated by the workcell automation components (robot arms, motors, conveyors, etc). When I demo'd my scope (which is similar to a 3d printer, using low-cost steppers and other hobbyist-grade components) the CEO gave me feedback which was very educ…

> They couldn't build a system that used my style of components because a failure due to a component would bring the whole system down and require an expensive service call

Could they not make the scope easily replaceable by the user and just supply a couple of spares?

Just thinking of how cars are complex machines but a huge variety of parts could be replaced by someone willing to spend a couple of hours learning how.

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