Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery

5 hours ago (arxiv.org)

It seems like these "discoveries" are mostly "We provided a dataset and Kosmos found the same conclusion as the scientist." This is an advancement but those datasets are not random in any sense. They were created to support a specific hypothesis which lead to the shared conclusion of the scientists and Kosmos. Discovery 7 seems to be of a different flavor in that a novel conclusion was arrived at from existing data.

I really think this is not "Autonomous Discovery". There is so much thought and science behind deriving the hypothesis and determining what experiments to do that is not captured in what Kosmos demonstrated here. It is exciting to see the reasoning capabilities and look forward to next steps but at this point a bit oversold in my opinion.

  • The challenge with comparing AI to humans is that the bar keeps shifting up.

    It’s pretty impressive that Kosmos can reproduce the conclusions that human scientists came to de novo. Especially when it does so much faster than a human.

    If the goal is to accelerate scientific discovery, this is what success looks like.

    • The GP says this is helpful but not autonomous discovery, you then reply we're holding AI to increasing expectation (both highly debatable and the fault of AI hypers) and say this is success. They are not mutually exclusive, and actually converge on what many have promoted with little reception: this is a useful tool but no silver bullet.

Curious to see where these go. The world model, and other enhancements seem helpful but effectively become hard coded rules. We know that human specified rules generally underperform learned relationships (at least in previous ML work) so I wonder if we’ll get to a regime like I think we were in older AI booms where we bump up against the limitations of rules again.