Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Hugging Face, Thomas Wolf, speaks at the opening ceremony of the Web Summit, in Lisbon, Portugal, November 11, 2024.
Pedro Nunes | ReutersCurrent artificial intelligence models from labs OpenAI are unly to lead to major scientific breakthroughs, a co-founder said, pouring cold water on some of the hype around the nology and claims by major figures in the field.The s by Thomas Wolf, co-founder of $4.5 billion AI startup Hugging Face, are in stake contrast to those by major names in AI including OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.When Wolf talks scientific breakthroughs, he means novel ideas those at a Nobel Prize level.
Examples including Nicolaus Copernicus who theorized the sun was at the center of the universe and other planets move round it.Wolf explained a couple of issues with chatbots right now.
The first is that these ducts ChatGPT and others often agree or align with the person mpting it.
Think back to if you've asked a chatbot a mpt and it will tell you how interesting or great that question is.The second is that the models underpinning these chatbots are designed to "predict the most ly next token" or "word" in a sentence.However, he noted two key traits of scientists.
The first is that scientists who make major breakthroughs are often contrarian and question what others are saying."The scientist is not trying to predict the most ly next word.
He's trying to predict this very novel thing that's actually surprisingly unly, but actually is true," Wolf said.The Hugging Face co-founder has been thinking this topic for the last few months.
His interest was sparked after he read an essay penned by Anthropic's Amodei, who posited that "AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the gress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years."That got Wolf thinking the state of AI and how this won't be possible, in his view, with the current crop of models.Wolf said that these chatbots and tools will ly be used as a of "co-pilot for a scientist" where they are used for re to help the human generate new ideas.To some extent, this has been happening already.
Google DeepMind's AlphaFold duct has helped to analyze tein structures which the company has mised could aid scientists in discovering new drugs.But there are some new startups that are hoping to take AI one step further into being able to make scientific breakthroughs, including Lila Sciences and FutureHouse.