Sergio Charles
666 posts

Sergio Charles
@eigentopology
co-founder @thesis_labs | accelerating ai r&d | prev. @google, @nvidia, @stanford

Reaching scientific goals: expectation vs. reality, v/Florian Aigner.










I’ve been at a small conference this week, one where the AI people have been presenting early in the week and the domain science people will be presenting later in the week. At the end of the talks last night, the conversation turned very doomer with all the AI people talking about how well Claude Code or Codex can do hill-climbing AI research and how we (the AI people) are maybe all about to lose our jobs! The domain science people expressed their shock at this attitude because, though Claude Code can be let loose to complete lots of banal hill-climbing AI research projects, basically no experimental science is hill-climbing or even metric driven. Most scientific fields are about much more taste-driven exploration that is incredibly difficult to make metrics for or to parameterize, and this misunderstanding from the AI community is one of the most damaging things to the realization of great science with AI. Seems like we’re actually pretty far from having AI models do that… Over the summer, @evijit and I wrote about this (and some other things hindering AI for science) at a bit more length, and today that work is out in Patterns! So, if you care about these problems and the real challenges in bringing AI to science in the real work, I recommend giving it a read!

Some people at frontier AI labs told me they believe startups are over. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI will absorb every industry as AGI nears. Coding today, science, medicine, and finance next. Then everything else. If they’re right, that’s a pretty boring end of the world.



Some people at frontier AI labs told me they believe startups are over. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI will absorb every industry as AGI nears. Coding today, science, medicine, and finance next. Then everything else. If they’re right, that’s a pretty boring end of the world.











