Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This would be lend more credibility to the premise AI is revolutionizing scientific discovery if it came from someone who's Nobel (or work in general) were in a non-AI-centered domain. No it wouldn't. I've seen anti-AI people try to make this sort of argument repeatedly and it doesn't make any sense. It's an attempt to smuggle in an ad-hominem. It's relying on the fact that people who hate AI also hate people who w…
Hey! I think I misused words, or was otherwise unclear. Sorry about that. I'm not Anti-AI and don't hate AI or people who work on it. I don't mean to conflate my post with someone who is Anti-AI. No ad-hominem intended.
Before commenting I did check out your profile and saw that you weren't AI hater. My intention was the opposite -- I was trying to point out that some arguments don't survive on logic, but on emotional appeal. When enough smart people repeat something, it can slip past our skepticism. But of course my comment was terse and you had no way of knowing that.
In my view, among all people who make claims about what is on the forefront of science or knowledge, the most credible claims come from people whose research is on the forefront of science or knowledge. That's why the claims of experts are considered more credible in their fields than non-experts, even when the non-experts are experts in nearby fields.
So, applying that general rule to this particular case, we would expect the people to most credibly talk about the application of AI to science to be people who know the most about the application of AI to science.
There are other scientists whom I really respect but whose opinions on this particular topic I would find less weighty. For example, Terry Tao is a brilliant mathematician and has consulted on using AI to do research level math. But he was just a few months ago figuring out how to set up ChatGPT with VS Code, so I wouldn't expect him to be the most up to date on how AI is impacting science.
On the other hand, a Nobel laureate who has shown an aptitude for making important scientific discoveries is exactly the sort of person I believe would be able to talk knowledgeably about how to carve up science problems and about how to apply the current generation of AI to solve them. Especially if they've seen the internal world of a company that has a top tier foundational model and a track record for making scientific discoveries. Because in that case they see how science is being done if you have unlimited funds and access to some of the smartest scientists on the planet.
In contrast, I would be much more skeptical of a similar claim made by a company like OpenAI or Microsoft that doesn't have the same track record of producing new science.
For those reasons I don't think it's true that the claim would be more credible from someone with more distance (and hence less expertise). And I think similar claims made in other contexts would strike most people as bizarre. For example, if I said that claims about medicine are more credible if they come from people who aren't medical doctors.