Discovery Loop

From Jeff's twitter post:

> Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen <at>NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise in machine learning as well as large-scale systems.

See also: https://www.nae.edu/20782/grand-challenges-project

Those 14 are:

NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering

1. Make Solar Energy Economical

2. Provide Energy from Fusion

3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods

4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle

5. Provide Access to Clean Water

6. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure

7. Advance Health Informatics

8. Engineer Better Medicines

9. Reverse Engineer the Brain

10. Prevent Nuclear Terror

11. Secure Cyberspace

12. Enhance Virtual Reality

13. Advance Personalized Learning

14. Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery

The problem is all these new labs don't have any competitive advanatge amongst each other, talent can only take one so far, though Jeff is a legend no doubt.

Models are commodities the applications eg. BaseTen, OpenRouter should capture the value.

https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/why-openrouter-can-be-the-n...

This is very cool. It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery. So often we find things that are "this could have been done 20 years ago" and with an indefatigable searcher perhaps we'll close all those things. Though it does remind me of that Ted Chiang (I think) story where humans and superhumans coexist and all the science of the former is meta-studies of the work of the latter.

A thought that keeps popping back into my head is how important the patent system is going to be in the AI age. Amongst domains, super intelligence is enabling all kinds of amazing things, but at the end of the day you still have to search a possibility space, and that's still fairly expensive. Exploiting that space once you found it, though, is easier than ever. That makes patents more important than ever. If search is expensive but execution is cheap, the big play would be to wait for people to find opportunities, and then use increased resources to execute faster.

This reminds me of Three body problem and how the scientist discovered the high strength wire was through quick physical experiments and use them as input to an AI model to determine if it works.

National Labs in the US have been doing this for a while now. I feel like the private sector will take the lead soon.

I’ve always felt that the idea that science is bottlenecked and therefore needs more automation only works for a very narrow definition of what science is, and entails a very specific view on what it should be.

Related:

Jeff Dean leaving Alphabet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184746

Oh wow, that's a blow to Google, what's with the talent scarcity in ML. Though if this goes anywhere Google will likely buy them back.

Computation is not the hard part of discovery.

For sure made with Claude code for front end, but I’m excited to see where they go

I am available for hire.

So Ralph Wiggum in a suit?

> we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on, including multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google News, Google Translate, Google File System, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, Pathways, TPUs, AlphaChip, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold, Gemini, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, sequence-to-sequence models, chain of thought reasoning, neural architecture search, and multiple generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) among others.

holy shit. I've known this, but...

I'm skeptical of any Engineering loop that doesn't include reality (as in touch grass) feedback. Pure logic and reasoning is the domain of Maths and Science (philosophy). Surely it will work, but it will not "be able to solve any learning loop".

Is this a joke? Site is not loading for me.