Episode 10 - How AI Is Accelerating Scientific Discovery Today and What's Ahead
Episode publishedPodcast: OpenAI PodcastOpenAI Podcast
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Hello, I'm Andrew Main, and this is the OpenAI Podcast. Today, my guests are Kevin Weil, Head of OpenAI for Science, and Alex Luchowska, who is an OpenAI Research Scientist and Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University. We're going to be discussing how AI is impacting science, an upcoming research paper, and where science may be headed in the next five years.
Maybe the most profound way that people are going to feel AGI in their lives is through science.
With ChatGPT, I can just launch it in that direction, in that direction, that direction.
The acceleration that is going to come from these tools is going to change science.
So you're running the Opening for Science initiative. Could you explain what that's about?
Yeah, the mission of Opening Eye for Science is to accelerate science. So the question is, can we help scientists do the next, say, 25 of scientific research and scientific discovery in five years instead. Science underpins so much of, you know, what we do and how we live. And if we can make progress go faster by putting our most advanced models into the hands of the best scientists in the world, we should do that. That's what we're trying to do. You could ask like, why now? Why didn't we do this a year ago? Why aren't we doing this a year from now? One of the big reasons is we're just startin
We've seen examples of, let's say, AI helping with mathematical proofs. Could you give me an example of how it might do things in some other areas like physics or whatever kind of things we might see in the short term?
Yeah. I mean, we're seeing examples every day and they're across the range of sort of the scientific frontier. You see examples in mathematics, in physics, astronomy, life sciences, like biology. Alex, I mean, you've worked on some of these. Maybe it's a good time to talk about some of the physics stuff that you've seen.
Yeah, I think coming back to Kevin's point about how this is a special time, that's very much how I feel as well, because I started the year, 2025 thinking, yeah, ChatGPT is cool. Like everybody, I used it when it came out and I thought it's a great chatbot, but I was sure it would take a very long time before it would become really relevant for my own work. So I started the year, I would say, an AI skeptic, because I like to see evidence before I'm convinced of something. And, I saw people using it to help in their writing and I started to use it for that as well. It's very useful for proofre
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