AI could make scientific discovery its biggest impact

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:18

   I'm curious what's next, like on the next sort of what's the next set of things right after that that will come? Well, I think there will be incredible, like other products, like there will be a crazy new social experiences. There will be like Google Docs style AI workflows that are just way more productive. You'll start to see like you'll have these like virtual employees. But the thing that I think will be the most impactful on that five to 10 year time frame is AI will actually discover new science.

2. 1:45

   And this is a crazy claim to make, but I think it is true. And if it is correct, then over time, I think that will dwarf everything else. Why do you think it'll discover new science? Well, I think we've cracked reasoning in the models. We have a long way to go. I think we know what to do. And, you know, O3 is already like pretty smart. You hear people say like, wow, this is like a good PhD. What does it mean to crack reasoning?

3. 2:08

   The models can now do the kind of reasoning in a particular domain you'd expect a PhD in that field to be able to do. In some sense, we're like, oh, OK, the AIs are like a top competitive programmer in the world now or AIs can get like a top score on the world's hardest math competitions or AIs can like you know do problems that I'd expect an expert PhD on my PhD in my field to do and we're like not that impressed it's crazy but it is sort of a crazy thing yeah you know this reasoning ability of the models over the last year are you surprised yes yeah you thought that it was just going to be like the next token I thought it was going to take a little bit longer to get where we are now the last the last year of progress has been faster than I did the way reasoning happen happen the way you thought would happen? Like often has happened in the history of OpenAI, sometime, pretty often,

4. 2:54

   the dumbest first approach turns out to work. So I don't think I should be surprised by that anymore. And yet it's like a little surprising each time. So reasoning will lead to science going faster or just new stuff or both? Both. I mean, you already hear scientists who say they're faster with AI. Like we don't have AI maybe anonymously doing science, but if a human scientist is three times as productive using o3 that's still a pretty big deal yeah and then as that keeps going and the ai can like autonomously do some science figure out novel physics is it all that happening as a co-pilot right now yeah there's there's definitely not like you definitely can't go say like hey chat gbt figure out new physics and expect that to work so it is i think it is currently co-pilot like but i've heard like anecdotal reports from biologists where it's like

5. 3:40

   Like, wow, it really did figure out an idea. I had to develop it a little bit more, but it made like a fundamental leap. Yeah. Will it be easier to get AI to build you a whole business, like build you a whole e-commerce business or like do like a hard piece of science or medium? I wonder about this. If you could like build. a hundred billion dollar particle accelerator yeah and say you'd make the decisions you look at the data you tell us like uh you know what experiments to run and we'll go like find the stuff and do it so you spend a hundred billion dollars doing that or you spend a hundred billion dollars like building a infrastructure to like connect into the economy which of those will it have an easier time doing something remarkable with yeah and i think the physics is a cleaner problem you know i think if you could get like new high energy physics data and then ai the

6. 4:31

   ability to like run experiments i think that's like a cleaner problem um i've heard people say that they expect the first area of science this is like i don't know if this is accurate or not i've heard people say that they expect the first area of science where ai makes autonomous new discoveries to be astrophysics because there's just mountains of data and we don't have phds to look at it and maybe it's not that hard to figure out new stuff but i don't really know okay so science gets better the coding and chat will just keep getting better does that lead on the business side do you also then have the ability to just can you prompt a whole business like could you