Can a single AI model advance any field of science?

Download a print-friendly version of this article. I got the email on the Sunday after last Thanksgiving, just after returning home to Santa Fe from a family trip to Michigan. Jason Pruet, the director of the Lab’s National Security AI Office, had invited me to a meeting to discuss leadership for the Lab’s upcoming artificial intelligence investment. He didn’t directly state that he was going to ask me to do it, but I had a sense that my career was about to pivot. By the fall of 2023, AI’s potential had become too great to ignore. The latest iterations of industry-produced AI were performing tasks that were unthinkable just five years earlier. It wasn’t just that they were writing coherent text or generating images of people who have never existed; they were also doing things that we should be doing at the national labs. Microsoft had just released a new AI climate model that performed well in both weather and short-term climate prediction. Google had used deep learning to discover m ... Read full article.