Altman Makes Science Claims
OpenAI's CEO says science is up next. Not so fast . . .
Well, it was bound to happen — Sam Altman starting to claim his LLMs and GAIs can make scientific discoveries. Maybe he’s done this before, I don’t know, but now it’s front and center.
It’s not a plausible assertion.
Altman made the claims during a recent podcast interview with his brother. It’s a cringe-inducing interview from the jump, but what Altman says is what we need to pay attention to:
I think there will be incredible other products. There will be crazy new social experiences. There will be, like, Google Docs style AI workflows that are just way more productive. You’ll start to see, you’ll have these virtual employees, but the thing that I think will be most impactful on that 5-10-year timeframe is AI will actually discover new science.
First, I thought we invented science a long time ago. Now we’re going to “discover” a new kind? Altman barely makes sense here. it’s not atypical. We don’t generally accept AI as authors and now they’re going to make independent scientific claims? Again, please make sense.
The interview goes on, with the two having this exchange about the purported “reasoning” capabilities of “Large Reasoning Models (LRMs)”:
Jack Altman: So reasoning will lead to science going faster or just new stuff or both?
Sam Altman: I mean, you already hear scientists who say they’re faster with AI, like we don’t have AI maybe autonomously doing science, but if a human scientist is three times as productive using o3, that’s still a pretty big deal.
Jack Altman: Yeah.
Sam Altman: And then as that keeps going and the AI can autonomously do some science, figure out novel physics . . .
Jack Altman: Is it all that happening as a copilot right now? [sic]
Sam Altman: Yeah there’s definitely not . . . you definitely can’t go say like, “Hey ChatGPT, figure out new physics” and expect that to work. So I think it is currently copilot-like, but I’ve heard, like, anecdotal reports from biologists where it’s like, “Wow, it really did figure out an idea. I had to develop it, but it made a fundamental leap.”
Ed Zitron, a favorite critic of AI hype, had this to say about the interview: