Experts don’t think AI is ready to be a ‘co-scientist’

Last month, Google announced the “AI co-scientist,” an AI the company said was designed to aid scientists in creating hypotheses and research plans. Google pitched it as a way to uncover new knowledge, but experts think it — and tools like it — fall well short of PR promises. “This preliminary tool, while interesting, doesn’t seem likely to be seriously used,” Sarah Beery, a computer vision researcher at MIT, told TechCrunch. “I’m not sure that there is demand for this type of hypothesis-generation system from the scientific community.” Google is the latest tech giant to advance the notion that AI will dramatically speed up scientific research someday, particularly in literature-dense areas such as biomedicine. In an essay earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that “superintelligent” AI tools could “massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation.” Similarly, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has boldly predicted that AI could help formulate cures for most cancers. But man ... Read full article.