AI and science
Models used to do science rather than to write: rediscovering laws from data, compressing decades of biology, refereeing a proof.
FilterEveryone, all time90 from 42 people
- GR
Guillermo Rauch quoted
CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO
Their wordsI want AI in the service of understanding the universe and enhancing human cognition and creativity.
- 3 days earlier
- NS
Noah Smith quoted
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter
Their wordsRemember this when you hear people who tell you that AI can't create superviruses because it doesn't have enough real-world data
- 1 day earlier
- NL
Nathan Lambert quoted
Machine-learning researcher on open language models
Their wordsAnd my kind of statement is that I think the cycle from of having an idea and doing the experimentation to test it, I agree will be 10X faster very soon. But I don’t necessarily agree that I would say that AI researchers will be 10X more productive in net, which I would describe as the pace of the field’s complete understanding. And understanding is a different axis from just continuing to scale models. I think that’s one of my core confusions on the AI research side.
↗Debating RSI, the US-China Gap, and Jaggedness with JS Denain of Epoch AIinterconnects.ai
- 3 days earlier
- BC
Boris Cherny quoted
Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic
Our readingWhen there is new data, you have to update your priors, even when the resulting churn feels thrashy.
Their wordsWhen there’s new data, you have to update your priors.
- 3 days earlier
- KJ
Katelyn Jetelina quoted
Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March…
Their wordsThis physical work will remain necessary for the foreseeable future.
↗What AI can and cannot do in biosecurityyourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
- 3 days earlier
- ZM
Zvi Mowshowitz quoted
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase
Their wordsNo matter who is and is not at fault, it is rather alarming that the labs cannot cooperate on something like assigning credit for a mathematical proof. This is a very bad sign and also a wake-up call.
- 1 day earlier
- TC
Tyler Cowen quoted
Economist at George Mason University
Their wordsI expect the benefits to economic science from AI will be enormous, even if current practitioners cannot foresee most of those benefits today.
- 4 days earlier
- RH
Robin Hanson quoted
Associate professor of economics at George Mason University
Their wordsthere isn't a natural clear dividing line between AI and other kinds of software.
↗AI Pause Regs Look Riskyovercomingbias.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- 3 weeks earlier
- MH
Max Hodak quoted
Co-founder and chief executive of Science
Our readingThe most fertile way to study neuroscience today is to work on AI models rather than on brains.
Their wordsWell, I mean ironically it's probably working on AI.
↗From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodakyoutube.com 11th of 18 in this recording
- 2 days earlier
- MK
Michael Kratsios quoted
US science and technology adviser to the president
Their wordsIf you are working on material science, if you are working on pharmaceuticals, if you are working on chemistry, you in 2 3 years or even today are doing your role as a scientist dramatically different because of artificial intelligence.
↗Michael Kratsios: Inside the White House's AI Strategyyoutube.com 15th of 20 in this recording
- MK
Michael Kratsios quoted
Their wordsThe idea that you can have autonomous cloud labs running experiments on a loop without human intervention, testing hypotheses, running the experiments, seeing the results, creating a new hypothesis, testing it and running it, and ultimately getting to a conclusion, that is in our sights.
↗Michael Kratsios: Inside the White House's AI Strategyyoutube.com 16th of 20 in this recording
- 1 day earlier
- JC
Jack Clark quoted
Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic
benchmarksrecursive self-improvement
Their wordsMy guess is we'll reach human parity on DiG-bench by middle of 2027, at which point we should expect things like recursive self-improvement to seriously kick off.
↗Import AI 469: Science AI; RSI simulator; and Zuck’s technological pessimismjack-clark.net 1st of 3 in this piece
- JC
Jack Clark quoted
Their wordsThe better AI systems get at this, the more likelihood we can assign to the idea that AI systems will imminently become capable of building themselves.
↗Import AI 469: Science AI; RSI simulator; and Zuck’s technological pessimismjack-clark.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
- KK
Kevin Kelly quoted
Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What…
Our readingThe most fertile way to study neuroscience today is to work on AI models rather than on brains.
Their wordsI'd bet we learn more about our own brains from building a thousand AIs under a real theory of intelligence than we've learned from a century of neuroscience.
↗Without a theory of intelligencekk.org 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 5 days earlier
- NL
Nathan Lambert quoted
Their wordsModels being stagnant in long-form, non-fiction writing should be alarming to those reliant on models autonomously solving grand, open science problems in the near future.
↗I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?interconnects.ai 1st of 3 in this piece
- 2 days earlier
- JC
Jack Clark quoted
Our readingToday's AI systems are significantly under-elicited for their ability to automate AI R&D.
Their wordsPosts like this highlight how we are under-eliciting today's AI systems for their ability to automate AI R&D - especially striking is how the company can jump the performance of Opus 5 by 10 absolute percentage points with a better harness.
↗Import AI 468: 23 RSI ideas; PostTrainBench+; and how trust and transparency interplay with AI racingjack-clark.net 1st of 3 in this piece
- FL
Fei-Fei Li quoted
Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford
Their wordsMy current conjecture is hybrid is that humans working alongside AI would help us to solve these problems whose solutions have yet to be invented.
↗Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Liyoutube.com 7th of 21 in this recording
- FL
Fei-Fei Li quoted
Their wordsI think we're we're ready for complete re rewriting of how scientific discovery can be done because for ages, I don't even know how long, it relies on smart humans retaining what they have learned from other smart humans
↗Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Liyoutube.com 10th of 21 in this recording
- 7 days earlier
- JC
Jack Clark quoted
Their wordsResearch papers like this continue to show that there's a certain absence of valuable, intuitive creativity in today's AI systems, and though they're extraordinarily capable engineers they seem to have a certain property of rote, formulaic thinking that might prevent them being good researchers.
↗Import AI 467: Self-sustaining AI viruses; pacing AI progress; confusion about AI and creativityjack-clark.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 days earlier
- JD
Jeff Dean quoted
Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research
Their wordsAnd I think there's a lot of room in a lot of domains for much faster validation models, possibly learned valu validation models that can uh you know get you a a approximation to the true answer much much more rapidly. And that changes how those experimental loops can be thought of and how quickly you can go around those loops.
↗Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com 20th of 22 in this recording
- 3 days earlier
- AD
Andrew Dessler quoted
Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M
Their wordsIf you do not adjust the data for known biases, you're getting the wrong answer.
↗Raw Data, Wrong Answerstheclimatebrink.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
- PW
Peter Woit quoted
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics…
Their wordsin an intellectually dead field, AI will just produce worthless junk. If what you feed it is decades of complicated and meaningless computations, it will just produce even more complicated and meaningless ones.
↗Requiem for a Field?math.columbia.edu 2nd of 3 in this piece
- 5 days earlier
- RT
Ruxandra Teslo quoted
Geneticist by training and writer on science
Their wordsI told him what I believe: that in the age of AI, medicine will be bottlenecked more than ever by regulation and the grind of clinical trials, and that billions poured into faster pre-clinical research won’t touch that problem, unsexy as it is.
↗Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com 1st of 6 in this piece
- SW
Stephen Wolfram quoted
Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research
Their wordscomputational irreducibility is not just something that's in principle possible; it's something that (according to the Principle of Computational Equivalence) is at some level ubiquitous-and affects essentially any system whose behavior is not obviously simple.
↗Towards a Theory of Bugs: The Ruliology of the Unexpectedwritings.stephenwolfram.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
- 13 days earlier
- TT
Terence Tao quoted
Their wordsDespite these strides, we argue that current AI4Math systems still largely operate as solvers, excelling at isolated, well-defined proof generation rather than as researchers capable of expanding the boundaries of mathematical knowledge.
↗From Solvers to Research: Large Language Model-Driven Formal Mathematics at the Research Frontier (with 18 co-authors)arxiv.org All 4 from this paper
- 12 days earlier
- NB
Noam Brown quoted
Research scientist at OpenAI
Their wordsUm but it would be possible and it would have been possible for somebody to disprove the erdos unit distance conjecture before we did using a general purpose model. And nobody had explored sufficiently what happens if I put $100,000 worth of compute into 5.5 what could it do?
↗Really Big Test-Time Compute in AI Changes Benchmarks, Safety and Research with OpenAI's Noam Brownyoutube.com 10th of 18 in this recording
- 5 days earlier
- EH
Elliot Hershberg quoted
Genomics researcher and investor
Our readingAI is becoming the next major paradigm shift in biology, following genetics and genomics.
Their wordsIt's becoming more clear each day that the next chapter of this story is AI.
- EH
Elliot Hershberg quoted
Their wordsWe are very early in the development of agentic systems in biology.
- EH
Elliot Hershberg quoted
Their wordsIn other words, computer science has already revolutionized biological research.
- 11 days earlier
- MZ
Mark Zuckerberg quoted
Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms
Their wordsI think in a lot of ways the data is actually even more of a constraint and um because if you look at like the scale of these models compared to language models they're smaller but they're smaller because the amount of data is less
↗“Curing All Disease by next century is too conservative" - Mark Zuckerbergyoutube.com 3rd of 15 in this recording