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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

#191

Post by ttpphd »

nazgul17 wrote: post #146
ttpphd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like scientists are doing something more than a random search over language.

This search is random in the same way that AlphaGo's move selection was random. In the Monte Carlo Tree Search part, the outcome distribution on leaves is informed by a neural network trained on data instead of a so-called playout. Sure, part of the algorithm does invoke a random() function, but by no means the result is akin to the flip of a coin. There is indeed randomness in the process, but making it sound like a…

Are you a scientist?

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#192

Post by ZeroGravitas »

I read the scientist quote in a newspaper article first and the surprise seemed to hinge on his entire team working on the problem for a decade and not publishing anything in a way that AI could gobble it up (which seemed strange to me) and no other human researcher working on the problem over that decade-ish timespan publishing anything suggesting the same idea.

Which seems a hard thing to disprove.

In which case, if some rival of his had done the same search a month earlier, could he have claimed the priority? And would the question of whether the idea had leaked then been a bit more salient to him. (Though it seems the decade of work might be the important bit, not the general idea).

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#193

Post by jjk166 »

This is in line with how I've been using AI in my workflow recently. I give it a summary of my findings thus far and ask it to suggest explanations and recommend further tests I should conduct. About 70% of its ideas are dumb and sometimes I need to give it a little extra prompting, but it does spit out ideas that hadn't occurred to me which make sense. Obviously it's not going to replace a knowledgeable human, but as a tool to assist that human it has outperformed some very expensive PhD level consultants.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#194

Post by ein0p »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #170
ein0p wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It doesn't choke anything. Anyone can go to GCP or other cloud providers and get as many GPUs as they need, within reason.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#195

Post by fhd2 »

ANewFormation wrote: post #138
fhd2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 evi…

It's not just about doing something better but about the balance between the pros and the cons. The problem with LLMs are hallucinations. If cars just somehow made you drive the wrong way with the frequency that LLMs send one down the wrong path with compelling sounding nonsense, then I suspect we'd still be riding horses nowadays.

I can get value out of them just fine. But I don't use LLMs to find answers, mostly to find questions. It's not really what they're being sold/hyped for, of course. But that's kinda my point.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#196

Post by fhd2 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #126
fhd2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 evi…

> It could do _one_ thing a horse could do better: Pull stuff on a straight surface I would say the doubters were right, and the results are terrible. We redesigned the world to suit the car, instead of fixing its shortcomings. Navigating a car centric neighbourhood on foot is anywhere between depressing and dangerous. I hope the same does not happen with AI. But I expect it will. Maybe in your daily life AI will cre…

Excellent point. Just because the invention of the automobile arguably introduced something valuable, how we ended up using them had a ton of negative side effects. I don't know enough about cars or horses to argue pros and cons. But I can certainly see how we _could_ have used them in a way that's just objectively better than what we could do without them. But you're right, I can't argue we did.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#197

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

It's cool, no doubt. But keep in mind this is 20 years late:

  As a prototype for a "robot scientist", Adam is able to perform independent
  experiments to test hypotheses and interpret findings without human guidance,
  removing some of the drudgery of laboratory experimentation.[11][12] Adam is
  capable of:
  
      * hypothesizing to explain observations
      * devising experiments to test these hypotheses
      * physically running the experiments using laboratory robotics
      * interpreting the results from the experiments
      * repeating the cycle as required[10][13][14][15][16]
  
  While researching yeast-based functional genomics, Adam became the first
  machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of
  its human creators.[5][17][18]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Scientist

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#198

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #174
trilobyte wrote: post #109

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…

All very valid criticism. My question is, when are you going to make it work?

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#199

Post by rtkwe »

baq wrote: post #188
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> cavemen had no language big if true

It's one of those things that's basically impossible to study because language leaves no signs until you get to writing.

Re: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

#200

Post by dekhn »

webmaven wrote: post #141
colingauvin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A med chemist can sit down with a known drug, and generate 50 analogs in LiveDesign in an afternoon. One of those analogs may have less CYP inhibition, or better blood brain barrier penetration, or slightly higher potency or something. Or maybe they use an enumeration method and generate 50k analogs in one afternoon. But no one is going to bring it to market because it costs millions and millions to synthesize, get t…

But doesn't that mean that ranking the ideas to find the ones most worth testing is a useful problem to solve?

The one model that would actually make a huge difference in pharma velocity is one that takes a target (protein that causes disease or whatever), a drug molecule (the putative treatment for the disease), and outputs the probability the drug will be approved by the FDA, how much it will cost to get approved, and the revenue for the next ten years.

If you could run that on a few thousand targets and a few million molecules in a month, you'd be able to make a compelling argument to the committee that approves molecules to go into development (probability of approval * revenue >> cost of approval)

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