Making AI Headlines · Page 3
Quantum Computing Gets an Assistant With a Very Large Homework Assignment
· New York time
PSI used an unreleased Anthropic model to answer a fundamental quantum computing question that scientists have pursued for nearly two decades. The effort is part of the company's attempt to build a business around AI-assisted scientific discovery. The distinction between producing an answer and establishing a discovery matters here. Scientific work depends on methods and results that other researchers can examine, not just on a system producing an impressive conclusion. A model may help explore a difficult problem, but the usefulness of its contribution rests on what people can verify and build upon. For a company trying to turn this kind of work into a business, the attraction is obvious: problems that occupy specialists for years are valuable precisely because they are hard. The challenge is showing that an AI system contributes more than an intriguing passage of text. Researchers need a path from a proposed result to an assessment of its substance. The commercial pitch also places an old scientific virtue in a new wrapper. Nobody gets to skip the checking simply because the assistant is unusually fast. If AI can help with hard questions, the next task is to make its work intelligible enough for experts to disagree with it productively. Even an automated breakthrough has to sit through scrutiny.
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