Article by Elie Dolgin: “This kind of AI-assisted brainstorming is becoming increasingly common. Researchers have already used Co-Scientist, developed by Google in Mountain View, California, to find a drug combination that kills leukaemia cells in a dish and identify a treatment that, in the lab, regenerates liver tissue damaged by disease.
And Co-Scientist isn’t the only game in town. Frontier AI labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI, and start-ups such as FutureHouse and Phylo (all four based in or around San Francisco, California) are rolling out systems that can tackle tasks once reserved for human scientists, freeing researchers to focus on the most consequential questions and decisions. “We imagine it to be like a collaborator — a partner with you,” says Vivek Natarajan, an AI researcher at Google, who helped to develop Co-Scientist.
That could change not just how scientists work, but also how they are valued. For generations, scientific progress has depended on researchers who could pose difficult questions, devise ways to answer them and make sense of the results. As machines take over more of that work, the scarce resource could end up being human scientific judgement: knowing which questions are worth asking and which lines of enquiry worth pursuing. “The most valuable part now is actually asking the question,” says Ajay Agrawal, an economist at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management in Canada, who studies AI’s effects on innovation and entrepreneurship…(More)”
