We already have AI that suggests new chemicals as well as AlphaFold that predicts protein folding better than humans. And AI such as Kosmos that can simply be given a research question and it will spend hours designing experiments, writing programs to perform them and generate a paper presenting the method and results. It needs better accuracy, but this is how AI could replace human scientists. With a robot body physical experiments can also be performed. "Self-driving labs" are already using AI to design and perform experiments on physical materials.
I'm sure Kosmos can do some great bs-ing that looks correct. It sounds like all it will be is a tool to get some scaffolds going which a real scientist can fill in.
"Self-driving labs" are already using AI to design and perform experiments
It doesn't seem to really be designing the experiments. The entire system is human designed by real scientists / engineers. The computer is processing data and then saying which (likely predefined) experiment it should "conduct next". And most of the innovation there seems to be the dynamic flow approach speeding things up.
That's a useful pattern recognition tool (ML), but it's not doing the same work that went into designing the self-driving system itself.
We already have AI that suggests new chemicals as well as AlphaFold that predicts protein folding better than humans. And AI such as Kosmos that can simply be given a research question and it will spend hours designing experiments, writing programs to perform them and generate a paper presenting the method and results. It needs better accuracy, but this is how AI could replace human scientists. With a robot body physical experiments can also be performed. "Self-driving labs" are already using AI to design and perform experiments on physical materials.
I'm sure Kosmos can do some great bs-ing that looks correct. It sounds like all it will be is a tool to get some scaffolds going which a real scientist can fill in.
It doesn't seem to really be designing the experiments. The entire system is human designed by real scientists / engineers. The computer is processing data and then saying which (likely predefined) experiment it should "conduct next". And most of the innovation there seems to be the dynamic flow approach speeding things up.
That's a useful pattern recognition tool (ML), but it's not doing the same work that went into designing the self-driving system itself.