Artificial intelligence entered our lives with a bang. It helps not only scientists in analyzing large amounts of data, but also companies in making decisions and ordinary users, the most clear example of which is the delight over GPT Chat. The media were filled with catchy headlines indicating professions that will be replaced by AI in the near future. At least hundreds of advertisements have appeared on the Internet by “experts” arguing that if we just learn to use artificial intelligence, we won’t be able to count the millions of zlotys that will flow to our accounts each month while lying in Hawaii. Some people began to point out the threats posed by such rapid development of technology.
Of course, many threats are very real, but representatives of many industries indicate that the development of artificial intelligence can actually help in everyday work by relieving some of the responsibilities from humans, or at least making them easier. But will AI ever be perfect enough to conduct Nobel Prize-level research on its own?
In 2021, Japanese scientist Hiroaki Kitano proposed the “Nobel Turing Challenge”, inviting researchers to create an AI scientist who, by 2050, will be able to independently conduct research worthy of the famous award.
Indeed, according to Ross King, professor of machine intelligence at Chalmers University in Sweden There are already about 100 “robot scientists” in the world. Back in 2009, the Swedish scientist published an article in which he and his team presented the “Scientist Adam’s Robot”. It was the first machine capable of making scientific discoveries.
The robot was configured so that it could independently formulate hypotheses and then design experiments to test them. “Adam” was tasked with investigating the inner workings of yeast and discovered “gene functions” that were previously unknown to the organism. The robot’s creators noted that although these discoveries were “modest,” they were “not trivial.” Judging by the biblical name, one robot was not finished with its work. Indeed, the second in line was “Ewa”. Its task was to research potential drugs for tropical diseases, including (or perhaps primarily) malaria.
Although the use of technological scientists is cheaper, after all, they work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as Prof. admitted. King artificial intelligence is far from the level of a scientist worthy of a Nobel Prize. Inga Strumke, assistant professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, admits that artificial intelligence has and will have an impact on the way scientific research is conducted. As an example, he gives AlphaFold – an artificial intelligence model developed by Google DeepMind. It is used to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins.
“We knew there was some relationship between amino acids and the final three-dimensional shape of proteins… and then we could use machine learning to find it,” Strumke said, admitting that the complexity of such calculations was too great for humans. Although current models are extremely adept at performing calculations, they cannot explain their results well enough.
As Inga Strumke said, although the more than 200 million protein structures predicted by AlphaFold are “extremely useful,” they “don’t teach us anything about microbiology.” However, the groundbreaking work done by the model has led many people to point to its creators as favorites in the fight for this year’s Nobel Prize. Google DeepMind CEO John Jumper and CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis have already been honored with the prestigious 2023 Lasker Award.
In turn, the Clarivate think tank, which monitors potential winners of the prestigious science prize, has listed the pair among the leading candidates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which will be announced on October 9. However, David Pendlebury, the head of the research group, admits that the article by Jumper and Hassabis has been cited thousands of times and was published in 2021. And the previous awards clearly show that most of the awarded discoveries date back to much earlier years. At the same time, he is convinced that The first Nobel Prizes for discoveries supported by artificial intelligence will soon appear.
Source: phys.org/AFP
Source: geekweek.interia.pl
