“We were shocked,” says Penadés. “I sent an email to Google saying, you have access to my computer. Is that right? Because otherwise I can’t believe what I’m reading here.”
However, the team did publish a paper in 2023 – which was fed to the system – about how this family of mobile genetic elements “steals bacteriophage tails to spread in nature”. At the time, the researchers thought the elements were limited to acquiring tails from phages infecting the same cell. Only later did they discover the elements can pick up tails floating around outside cells, too.
So one explanation for how the AI co-scientist came up with the right answer is that it missed the apparent limitation that stopped the humans getting it.
What is clear is that it was fed everything it needed to find the answer, rather than coming up with an entirely new idea. “Everything was already published, but in different bits,” says Penadés. “The system was able to put everything together.”
This is the what really matters here IMHO:
“It’s not just that the top hypothesis they provide was the right one,” he said.
"It’s that they provide another four, and all of them made sense.
“And for one of them, we never thought about it, and we’re now working on that.”
Plausible hypothesis generation is really helpful and if it hadn’t even occured to them it either means it came from someone else’s work that they had been unable to understand, distill or anticipate from their own knowledge of what others are doing in the field or that it is actually novel (in the way that all science is small progress building on the blocks of others).
Either way hypothesis generation saves a lot of time and gave their lab a new idea.
Non AMP link: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz6e9edy3o
Thanks for the non-AMP link. Though my understanding is that the past concerns about AMP have been resolved now that it has moved to an open-source project under the OpenJS Foundation. Is there still reason to avoid AMP?
Why introduce more dependencies when it’s unnecessary?
Are you talking about more dependencies from a developer’s point of view? I get that to a degree, but from a user’s point of view, isn’t AMP technically better, especially now that it’s open source?
“I wrote an email to Google to say, ‘you have access to my computer, is that right?’”, he added.
The tech giant confirmed it had not.
Either he emailed it or put it on his google drive. That or somebody else did.