There has been a lot of doom and gloom combined with excitement, if that is possible, about AI in the science news lately. Sabine and I tried to deconstruct the hype associated with the highly touted Open AI solution of one of the Millennium Problems in Mathematics, as well as explore the real concerns and imaginary concerns associated with both the recent Open AI agent hacking of Huggy Face, and the blog post by the CEO of Anthopic arguing for a pause in AI development because of the potential for disaster—a statement endorsed by both Elon Musk and Sam Altman. As usual, things are neither as bad, nor as good as they might seem.
We also tackled two other stories of interest. A single data point might signal the discovery of particle dark matter in an underground detector! Sabine and I come at this from different perspectives—she has always been suspicious of the claimed need for dark matter, and I have not only explored and proposed a number of the prime candidates, but I also helped propose and promote the kind of technologies that led to LZ/LUX, the collaboration making the current announcement. Nevertheless both Sabine and I agree that it is premature to celebrate. And while Sabine won’t bet, I am betting that this single point will not be substantiated when more data comes in. Stay tuned.
Finally we discuss a sad development—Scientific Paper Mills. Apparently you can buy your way to a first authorship, or just an authorship, on a scientific paper that can eventually be published somewhere, even if the results might not be completely kosher. While this is a disturbing new possibility, it seems like it is just affecting science at the margins. We need to try and stamp it out, but it is not undermining the bulk of scientific research.
In any case, as they used to say on a famous TV show, after all the AI world-ending hype, happy to say: See you next time.. if there is a next time!
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube.