Note: For some reason some of the excerpts got dropped from my email today. Here are all that I meant to send. GR
Excerpts from "How Hallucinatory A.I. Helps Science Dream Up Big Breakthroughs" by William J. Broad https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/23/science/ai-hallucinations-science.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20241224&instance_id=143081&nl=today%27s-headlines®i_id=68716072&segment_id=186526&user_id=b1422b225dd9c2c469ac06c116c9fb08 A.I. hallucinations are reinvigorating the creative side of science. They speed the process by which scientists and inventors dream up new ideas and test them to see if reality concurs. It’s the scientific method — only supercharged. What once took years can now be done in days, hours and minutes. In some cases, the accelerated cycles of inquiry help scientists open new frontiers. “We’re exploring,” said James J. Collins, an M.I.T. professor who recently praised hallucinations for speeding his research into novel antibiotics. “We’re asking the models to come up with completely new molecules.” The A.I. hallucinations arise when scientists teach generative computer models about a particular subject and then let the machines rework that information. The results can range from subtle and wrongheaded to surreal. At times, they lead to major discoveries. In October, David Baker of the University of Washington shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering research on proteins — the knotty molecules that empower life. The Nobel committee praised him for discovering how to rapidly build completely new kinds of proteins not found in nature, calling his feat “almost impossible.” In an interview before the prize announcement, Dr. Baker cited bursts of A.I. imaginings as central to “making proteins from scratch.” The new technology, he added, has helped his lab obtain roughly 100 patents, many for medical care. One is for a new way to treat cancer. Another seeks to aid the global war on viral infections. Dr. Baker has also founded or helped start more than 20 biotech companies. “Things are moving fast,” he said. “Even scientists who do proteins for a living don’t know how far things have come.” How many proteins has his lab designed? “Ten million — all brand-new,” he replied. “They don’t occur in nature.” The word [hallucinations] also gets frowned on because it can evoke the bad old days of hallucinations from LSD and other psychedelic drugs, which scared off reputable scientists for decades. A final downside is that scientific and medical communications generated by A.I. can, like chatbot replies, get clouded by false information. ***** Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have also embraced the term. “Learning from Hallucination,” read the title of their paper on improving robot navigation. And the head of the science division at DeepMind, a Google company in London that develops A.I. applications, praised hallucinations as promoting discovery, doing so shortly after two of his colleagues shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Dr. Baker. “We have this amazing tool which can exhibit creativity,” the DeepMind official, Pushmeet Kohli, said in an interview. Despite the allure of A.I. hallucinations for discovery, some scientists find the word itself misleading. They see the imaginings of generative A.I. models not as illusory but prospective — as having some chance of coming true, not unlike the conjectures made in the early stages of the scientific method. They see the term hallucination as inaccurate, and thus avoid using it.
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