John Jumper: AI is revolutionizing scientific discovery [video]

youtube.com

121 points by sandslash 2 days ago


epolanski - 2 days ago

I'll share something as a former solar researcher.

Scientific progress is heavily influenced by how many bodies you can throw at a problem.

The more experiments you can run, with more variety and angles the more data you can get, the higher the likelihood of a breakthrough.

Several huge scientist are famous not because they are geniuses, but because they are great fundraisers and can have 20/30/50 bodies to throw at problems every year.

This is true in virtually any experimental field.

If LLMs can be de facto another body then scientific progress is going to sky rocket.

Robots also tend to be more precise than humans and could possibly lead to better replication.

But given that LLMs cannot interact with the real world I don't see that happening anytime soon.

the__alchemist - 2 days ago

I am reposting something along the lines of a flagged and dead comment: This would be lend more credibility to the premise AI is revolutionizing scientific discovery if it came from someone who's Nobel (or work in general) were in a non-AI-centered domain. This is not a critique of his speech or points, but I think the lead implied by the (especially Youtube) title would hit harder if it came from someone whose work wasn't AI-centered.

Jumper's work is the poster child of AI success in science; this isn't about a new domain being revolutionized by it.

I will throw out an idea I've been thinking about recently about a far less ambitious idea, but related: Amber (MD package) provides Force Field names and partial charges for a number of small organic molecules in their GeoStd set. I believe these come from its Antechamber program. Would it be possible to infer useful FF name and Partial charge for arbitrary organic molecules using AI instead, trained on the GeoStd set data?

NedF - 2 days ago

Awful title, great video.

Three points jumped out

1) "really when you look at these machine learning breakthroughs they're probably fewer people than you imagine"

In a world of idiots, few people can do great things.

2) External benchmarks forced people upstream to improve

We need more of these.

3) "the third of these ingredients research was worth a hundredfold of the first of these ingredients data."

Available data is 0 for most things.

some_guy_nobel - 2 days ago

NVIDIA published the Illustrated Evo2 a few days ago, walking through the architecture of their genetics foundation model:

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/blog/illustrated-evo2/

It's nice to see more and more labs using ai for drug discovery, something truly net positive for society.

hodgehog11 - 2 days ago

Something else to add is mathematical discovery. There is a team that is very close to solving the Navier-Stokes Millenium Prize problem: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/discovering-new-soluti...

The cynists will comment that I've just been sucked in by the PR. However, I know this team and have been using these techniques for other problems. I know they are so close to a computationally-assisted proof of counterexample that it is virtually inevitable at this point. If they don't do it, I'm pretty sure I could take a handful of people and a few years and do it myself. Mostly a lot of interval arithmetic with a final application of Schauder that remains; tedious and time-consuming, but not overly challenging compared to the parts already done.

jgalt212 - 2 days ago

I see this sort of work as a natural extension of Combinatorial Chemistry or bootstrapping and Monte Carlo methods in stats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_chemistry

Inviz - 2 days ago

I have a mildly psychotic friend who think that he uncovered the secrets to everything with AI. Quantum theory and Jungian archetypes, together with 4 dimensions - great mix

tim333 - 2 days ago

On the same topic of AI helping scientific discovery there was this tweet yesterday

https://x.com/DeryaTR_/status/1972115494787338484

>...noticed an email from one of my PhD students sent more than eight years ago, outlining a highly complex immune cell experiment that would run for several weeks and asking me to make corrections

>...Incredibly, GPT-5 Pro would have been as good as, if not better than, me at making these corrections, interpretations, analyses, and follow-up experiment suggestions! The experiment would also have yielded better results thanks to more precise planning...

Maybe the era of AI speeding things is upon us. Maybe not so long till AIs are helping make better AIs?

malux85 - 2 days ago

First jump that computers gave us : speed. With excess of speed came the ability to brute force many problems.

Next jump given by AI (not LLMs specifically, I mean “machine learned systems” in general) is navigation. Even with large amounts of speed some problems are still impractically large, we are using AI to better explore that space, by navigating it smarter, rather than just speeding through it combinatorially.

bgwalter - 2 days ago

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