AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years
20 comments
·February 20, 2025nurumaik
>He gave "co-scientist" - a tool made by Google - a short prompt asking it about the core problem he had been investigating and it reached the same conclusion in 48 hours.
Could it be the case when asking the right question is the key? When you know the solution already it's actually very easy to accidentally include some hints in your phrasing of question that will make task 10x easier
patcon
A thought occurred to me, as someone involved in some projects trying to recalibrate invectives for science funding: Good grad students are usually more intersectional across fields (compared to supervisors) and just more receptive to outsider ideas. They unofficially provide a lot of this same value that AI is about to provide established researchers.
I wonder how AI is going to mess with the calculus of employing grad studies, and if this will affect the pipeline of future senior researchers...
root_axis
> Critically, this hypothesis was unique to the research team and had not been published anywhere else. Nobody in the team had shared their findings
This seems like the most important detail, but it also seems impossible to verify if this was actually the case. What are the chances that this AI spat out a totally unique hypothesis that has absolutely no corollaries in the training data, that also happens to be the pet hypothesis of this particular research team?
I'm open to being convinced, but I'm skeptical.
bArray
Google openly train stuff based on your email, they used is specifically to train Smart Compose, but maybe other stuff too. He likely uses multiple Google products. Draft papers in Google Drive perhaps?
These LLM models are essentially trying to produce material that sounds correct, perhaps the hypothesis was a relatively obvious question with the right domain knowledge.
Additionally, he may not have been the first to ask the question. It's entirely possible that the AI chewed up and spat out some domain knowledge from a foreign research group outside of his wheelhouse. This kind of stuff happens all the time.
I personally have accidentally reinvented things without prior knowledge of them. Many years ago in University I remember deriving a PID controller without being aware of what one was. I probably got enough clues from other people/media that were aware of them, that bridging that final gap was made easier.
TrackerFF
Could some of the scientists have saved their data in the google cloud, say using google drive? And then some internal google crawler went through, and indexed those files?
I don't know that their policy says about that, or if it is even something they do...at least not publicly.
miyuru
> "I wrote an email to Google to say, 'you have access to my computer, is that right?'", he added.
sounds extra fishy, since google does not provide email support normally.
Jimmc414
"Scientists who are part of our Trusted Tester Program will have early access to AI co-scientist"
bArray
Exactly my thought, probably the least likely part of the whole thing. He emailed Google and they replied. Not only that, he asked a question they would really rather not answer.
card_zero
I wonder about a "clever Hans" effect, where they unwittingly suggest their discovery in their prompt. Also whether they got paid.
cwillu
“
"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."”graeme
May well be but in this case it would be a two way clever Hans which is very promising.
mtrovo
Define "totally unique hypothesis" in this context. If the training data contains studies with paths like A -> B and C -> D -> E, and the AI independently generates a proof linking B -> C, effectively creating a path from A -> E, is that original enough? At some point, I think we're going to run out of definitions for what makes human intelligence unique.
> It also seems impossible to verify if this was actually the case.
If this is a thinking model, you could always debug the raw output of the model's internal reasoning when it was generating an answer. If the agent took 48 hours to respond and we had no idea what it was doing that whole time, that would be the real surprise to me, especially since Google is only releasing this in a closed beta for now.
programmertote
When I read "cracks superbug problem", I thought AI solved how to kill superbugs. From reading the article, it seems like AI suggested a few hypotheses and one of which is similar to what the researcher thought of. So in a way, it hasn't cracked the problem although it helped in forming ONE of the hypotheses, which needs to be tested in experiments(?)
Just want to make sure I'm understanding what's written in the article accurately.
kachapopopow
this might be a dupe and the title is completely misleading, it (the AI) simply provided one of the hypothesis (which took two years to confirm) as the top result. A group of humans can come up with these in seconds given expertise in the subject.
didntknowyou
why did it take 48 hours? did he give the AI data to process or was it just a prompt. did it spit back out a conclusion or a list of possible scenarios it had scraped? seems like a PR stunt.
Over3Chars
AI cracks super-profit problem. Fire staff and claim AI efficiency has made them redundant. Give executives bonuses for "efficiency".
monkeydust
Using this, launched yesterday:
Today Google is launching an AI co-scientist, a new AI system built on Gemini 2.0 designed to aid scientists in creating novel hypotheses and research plans. Researchers can specify a research goal — for example, to better understand the spread of a disease-causing microbe — using natural language, and the AI co-scientist will propose testable hypotheses, along with a summary of relevant published literature and a possible experimental approach.
fatbird
So the AI didn't prove anything, it offered a hypothesis that wasn't in the published literature, which happened to match what they'd spent years trying to verify. I can see how that would look impressive, and he says that if he'd had this hypothesis to start with, it would have saved those years.
Without those years spent working the problem, would he have recognized that hypothesis as a valuable road to go down? And wouldn't the years of verifying it still remain?
null
It says it took them a decade, but they obviously published loads of intermediate results, as did anyone else working in the space.
I get that they asked it about a new result they hadn't published yet, but the idea that it did it in two days when it took them a decade -- even though it's been trained on everything published in that decade, including whatever intermediate results they published -- probably makes this claim just as absurd as it sounds.