51 pointsby belter19 hours ago4 comments
  • isuguitar12117 hours ago
    It seems like these "discoveries" are mostly "We provided a dataset and Kosmos found the same conclusion as the scientist." This is an advancement but those datasets are not random in any sense. They were created to support a specific hypothesis which lead to the shared conclusion of the scientists and Kosmos. Discovery 7 seems to be of a different flavor in that a novel conclusion was arrived at from existing data.

    I really think this is not "Autonomous Discovery". There is so much thought and science behind deriving the hypothesis and determining what experiments to do that is not captured in what Kosmos demonstrated here. It is exciting to see the reasoning capabilities and look forward to next steps but at this point a bit oversold in my opinion.

    • grantbel16 hours ago
      The challenge with comparing AI to humans is that the bar keeps shifting up.

      It’s pretty impressive that Kosmos can reproduce the conclusions that human scientists came to de novo. Especially when it does so much faster than a human.

      If the goal is to accelerate scientific discovery, this is what success looks like.

      • isuguitar12112 hours ago
        How did I say that? This is really cool and advancing but calling it "Autonomous Discovery" is very bold claim and needs strong evidence. I don't see it. They could have claimed it differently but they chose those words and that is what I am commenting on.

        You are changing what they claim from "Autonomous Discovery" to "Accelerating Scientific Discovery". I agree with the latter.

      • parodysbird11 hours ago
        > The challenge with comparing AI to humans is that the bar keeps shifting up.

        Exactly. There is no standard, humans will adapt and find how to use AI as a tool, and the bar will never and should never be fixed.

        The beauty of Turing's Test (which he strangely seemed to misunderstand) is that it is almost impossible to pass.

      • andrew_lettuce16 hours ago
        The GP says this is helpful but not autonomous discovery, you then reply we're holding AI to increasing expectation (both highly debatable and the fault of AI hypers) and say this is success. They are not mutually exclusive, and actually converge on what many have promoted with little reception: this is a useful tool but no silver bullet.
    • svnt15 hours ago
      The thing you are gatekeeping seems to have been cracked some months earlier by a different group:

      https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist-first-publication/

      • isuguitar12112 hours ago
        Okay well I am not commenting on what that group did so I don't see how I am gatekeeping anything.

        I am looking at this paper and saying I don't see the Autonomous Discovery claim but I do see novel AI contributions to science.

  • andy9916 hours ago
    Curious to see where these go. The world model, and other enhancements seem helpful but effectively become hard coded rules. We know that human specified rules generally underperform learned relationships (at least in previous ML work) so I wonder if we’ll get to a regime like I think we were in older AI booms where we bump up against the limitations of rules again.
  • adt17 hours ago
    Includes 4 novel discoveries:

    https://lifearchitect.ai/asi/

    • faeyanpiraat16 hours ago
      this site both looks legit and gives off "ufo believer" vibes
      • svnt16 hours ago
        It is unfortunate that accepting the existence of alien life, which it is hard to argue is not a statistical fact, gives off those vibes.
  • leptons15 hours ago
    How much slop will it discover?