Where Is All the A.I.-Driven Scientific Progress?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's your day to play.
It's your morning to make the most of.
It's your way to love.
It's your climate to consider.
It's your answer to what should I watch? It's your money to save.
It's your song to analyze line by line. It's your 10 ways to find a little calm. It's your world to understand. The New York Times. Find out more at nytimes.com slash your world. Cynthia Erivo is the best singer in the world. She's incredible. I don't know what it is about her voice, but it brings me to tears every single fucking time I hear it. She has the most incredibly emotional voice. I was trying to figure out what it was, but she's just the best.
Obviously, she has the power, but there's all these textures in there. Did you see the design to go viral clip of her visiting her old school?
I obviously lost my shit.
The absolute best is that the students start singing and they just sound like shit. No, it was so sweet. Just imagine you're one of these kids. It's just like after school class. You know, it's a little club. You're just doing it for a little bit of enrichment. And like, you're just kind of plodding along, trying to get through the day. And then fucking Cynthia Riva shows up and they're like, all right, kid, you're up next. What do you got? No, it was so sweet.
It was so sweet. I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.
I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, Future House CEO Sam Rodriguez joins us in the studio to separate the hype from the reality of AI science.
Well, Casey, it's time for some science. Yeah, give me a second, Kevin. I'm just going to put on my lab coat here, get out my Bunsen burner, and see what you've got cooking for us today.
So I have been obsessed with this question of what AI is and isn't doing for science and scientific discovery. Obviously, this is something we hear a lot about from the leaders of the big AI companies. People like Dario Amadei, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, they have all been saying things in recent months about how close they believe we are to solving new scientific problems and curing diseases and fixing the climate with all of these new AI tools that they're building. And some of that is obviously hype, or at least has the sort of markings of hype. But there's actually a lot of real stuff going on in AI and science that I just do not feel personally qualified to evaluate.
Yeah, and I would also say that science has become one of the main ways that the leaders of these tech companies want us to evaluate them because whenever one of their models does something horrible, the message we basically get back in response is, don't worry, we're about to cure cancer. Just hang on tight. I know that this chatbot might be driving you to madness, but if you could just give us a few more releases, we're gonna do some really good stuff.
Yes, and this is something that we're also hearing now from the U.S. government. The Genesis mission was announced by the White House just before Thanksgiving. That is what they're calling a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.
I thought the Genesis mission was just them trying to get Phil Collins to play the White House Christmas party. I guess not.
And so today we have brought in a bona fide scientist to help us understand which of the sort of scientific discoveries and possibilities out there are real and which are not. We need an expert with a broad focus, someone tracking the impact of AI, not just on biotech or drug discovery, but across the different sciences. And Casey, we have found the perfect person. Let's hear about him. Sam Rodriguez is the co-founder and CEO of Future House and Edison Scientific, which is a San Francisco-based, I guess it's both a nonprofit and a for-profit. Where have I heard that before? Yes, come back when he has his board coup. Future House is the nonprofit. Edison Scientific is the for-profit that spun out of it.
I've been to their office in Dogpatch.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:47
2
What question are the hosts asking about A.I.-driven scientific progress?
7:47–17:24
3
Who is Sam Rodriques and why does his work matter for A.I. in science?
17:24–32:34
4
How does Edison Scientific’s Kosmos claim to compress six months of research into 12 hours?
32:34–38:02
5
How did the Kosmos team validate their claims and what real discoveries did it make?
38:02–41:01
6
What architecture and data does Kosmos use to run long, coherent research runs?
41:01–41:41
Speakers
5 identifiedMore from Hard Fork
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Zuckerberg’s Anti-Doom Fantasy + Finally an A.I. Detector That Works + A.I. Math