← Hard Fork
Hard Fork
Where Is All the A.I.-Driven Scientific Progress?
00:39:28
A tech C.E.O. explains why A.I. probably won’t cure diseases anytime soon. Hint: You still need humans.
Loading summary
Transcript171 lines
- [00:00]
University of Michigan Announcer
The University of Michigan was made for moments like this. When facts are questioned, when division deepens, when the role of higher education is on trial, look to the leaders and best Turning a public investment into the public good. From using AI to close digital divides to turning climate risk into resilience. From leading medical innovation to making mental health care more accessible. Wherever we go, progress follows for answers, for action, for. For all of us. Look to Michigan. See more solutions at umich. Edu.
- [00:32]
Kevin Roose
Look, Cynthia Erivo is the best singer in the world.
- [00:36]
Casey Newton
She's incredible.
- [00:37]
Kevin Roose
I don't know what it is about her voice, but it, like, brings me to tears, like, every single fucking time. I hear she has the most incredibly, like, emotional voice. I don't know, I. I was, like, trying to figure out what it was, but it's just like, she's just the best, like.
- [00:50]
Casey Newton
Cause she, obviously, she has the power, but there's all these, like, textures in there. Did you see the design to go viral? Clip of her visiting her old school?
- [00:59]
University of Michigan Announcer
Yes.
- [01:00]
Kevin Roose
I obviously lost my shit.
- [01:02]
Casey Newton
I was the absolute best. Is that the students start singing and they just sound like shit.
- [01:13]
Kevin Roose
That's like my nightmare suite.
- [01:15]
Casey Newton
Just imagine you're one of these kids. You're not that. It's just like after school class, you know, it's a little club. You're just doing it for a little bit of enrichment and, like, you're just kind of plodding along, trying to get through the day. And then fucking Cynthia Riva shows up and they're like, all right, kid, you're up next. What do you got?
- [01:29]
Sam Rodriguez
No, thanks.
- [01:30]
Kevin Roose
No, it was so sweet.
- [01:31]
Casey Newton
I would throw up.
- [01:32]
Kevin Roose
So sweet. I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.
- [01:40]
Casey Newton
I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.
- [01:42]
Kevin Roose
And this is Hard for this week.
- [01:43]
Casey Newton
Future House CEO Sam Rodriguez joins us in the studio to separate the hype from the reality of AI science.
- [02:05]
Kevin Roose
Well, Casey, it's time for some science.
- [02:07]
Casey Newton
Yeah, give me a second, Kevin. I'm just going to put on my lab coat here, get out my Bunsen burner, and see what you've got cooking for us today.
- [02:13]
Kevin Roose
So I have been obsessed with this question of what AI is and isn't doing for science and scientific discovery. Obviously, this is something we hear a lot about from the leaders of the big AI companies. People like Dario Amade, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis. They have all been saying things in recent months about how close they believe we are to solving new scientific problems and curing diseases and fixing the climate. With all of these new AI tools that they're building. And some of that is obviously hype, or at least has the sort of markings of hype. But there's actually a lot of real stuff going on in AI and science that I just do not feel personally qualified to evaluate.
- [02:54]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And I would also say that science has become one of the main ways that the leaders of these tech companies want us to evaluate them. Because whenever one of their models does something horrible, the message we basically get back in response is, don't worry, we're about to cure cancer. Just hang on tight. I know that this chatbot might be driving you to madness, but if you could just give us a few more releases, we're gonna do some really good stuff.
- [03:15]
Kevin Roose
Yes. And this is something that we're also hearing now from the US Government. The Genesis mission was announced by the White House just before Thanksgiving. That is what they're calling a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI, accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.
- [03:32]
Casey Newton
I thought the Genesis mission was just them trying to get Collins to play the White House Christmas party. I guess not.
- [03:39]
Kevin Roose
And so today we have brought in a bonafide scientist to help us understand which of the sort of scientific discoveries and possibilities out there are real and which are not. We needed an expert with a broad focus, someone tracking the impact of AI, not just on biotech or drug discovery, but across the different sciences. And Casey, we have found the perfect person.
- [04:01]
Casey Newton
Let's hear about him.
- [04:01]
Kevin Roose
Sam Rodriguez is the co founder and CEO of Future House and Edison Scientific, which is a San Francisco based. I guess it's both a nonprofit and a for profit. Not Future House is.
- [04:13]
Casey Newton
Where have I heard that before?
- [04:15]
Kevin Roose
Yes, come back when he has his board coup. Future House is the nonprofit. Edison Scientific is the for profit that spun out of it. I've been to their office in Dogpatch. It's really fun. It's. It sort of feels like a kind of wacky mad scientist lab. They've got all these like, you know, sort of lab machines that I don't understand. And you know, people running around in lab coats and they're all talking about AI and it just feels like kind of a cool place to be. And they are building what Sam calls an AI scientist, which is an AI agent that can do sort of parts of the process of scientific research. And Sam is also himself a scientist. He has a PhD in physics from MIT. And before he launched Future House, he spent several years running an applied biotech lab. So he has sort of seen this stuff happening from a couple different angles.
- [04:59]
Casey Newton
Yeah. And today we want to talk to him about what he is up to, but also kind of get his vision of the entire landscape. Tell us what is working, what isn't. Where's the hype? Where's the real stuff? Sam has a lot to say about it.
- [05:10]
Sam Rodriguez
Yes.
- [05:10]
Kevin Roose
And I think it's fair to say that Sam is on the more optimistic end of the spectrum of beliefs about what AI will do for science. But as you'll hear in our conversation, he's more skeptical than some of the most optimistic people who are claiming that we'll cure all disease in five or 10 years.
- [05:27]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah.
- [05:27]
Casey Newton
If you've been craving a little bit of cold water for the wildest projections, he has some of that to offer you.
- [05:32]
Kevin Roose
So let's bring him in. When we come back, we'll be joined by Sam Rodriguez.
- [05:56]
University of Michigan Announcer
The University of Michigan was made for moments like this. When facts are questioned, when division deepens, when the role of higher education is on trial, look to the leaders and best turning a public investment into the public good. From using AI to close digital divides to turning climate risk into resilience. From leading medical innovation to making mental health care more accessible. Wherever we go, progress follows. For answers for action for all of us, look to Michigan. See more solutions@umich.edu.
- [06:28]
Betterment Advertiser
Look, don't just imagine a better future. Start investing in one with betterment. Whether it's saving for today or building wealth for tomorrow, we help people in small businesses put their money to work. We automate to make savings simpler. We optimize to make investing smarter. We build innovative technology backed by financial experts. For anyone who's ever said, I think I can do better, so be invested in yourself. Be invested in your business. Be invested in better with betterment. Get started@betterment.com Investing involves risk performance not guaranteed.
- [07:01]
Fidelity Advertiser
Introducing Fidelity Trader plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity. Customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web and mobile. For faster trades anywhere you go, try the all new Fidelity Trader Plus. Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet@fidelity.com TraderPlus investing involves risk and click, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE SIPC.
- [07:39]
Kevin Roose
Sam Rodriguez welcome to Hard Fork.
- [07:41]
Sam Rodriguez
Hello. Thank you.
- [07:42]
Kevin Roose
So we have brought you here today to be our science expert. Our guide to the biggest recent AI powered breakthroughs that are happening in science. This is an area that I sort of understand in an ambient way is important and there are big things happening. But neither of Us are scientists. Although I did make a killer baking soda volcano in, in elementary school. So we have so much to talk about today. But before we get into some of the particulars, I want to ask you about your project that you've been working on. Last month, the commercial arm of your nonprofit, which is called Edison Scientific, launched a new AI scientist called Cosmos that you say can accomplish work equivalent to six months of a PhD or postdoctoral scientist in a single run of this model. Tell us about how Cosmos works and where that six month number comes from.
- [08:30]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah, exactly. And actually I will just like start out by saying that when I got that six month number, my reaction originally was like, there is no way that this is true. Right. And we've now measured in a bunch of different ways. I can walk you guys through that. But basically just to take a step back. So we've been working for two years on figuring out how to build an AI scientist. And the concept here is there's so much more science that we can do than we have scientists, right? And so how do we scale up science? And the thing that is, that happened with Cosmos, that is pretty cool, is Cosmos is like the first thing that I think that we've made that actually really feels like an AI scientist when you're working with it, right? Which is to say that you go in, you give it a research objective, it goes away, and it comes back with insights that are actually really deep and interesting and sometimes wrong. But about 80% of the time, right, which is kind of similar to if you ask a human to go away and do something, comes back similar, percentage of the time is right. And it's a kind of new experience working with it. So that's very exciting. The six month number, specifically the way that we measured this was we had a bunch of academic collaborators, scientists who had done a bunch of science previously that they had not published yet. And we basically gave the same research directive and the same data set to the AI, to Cosmos. And we ask it, you know, to go away and just make new discoveries. And it would come back and it had found the same things that the researchers had found overnight. And then you go and you ask the researchers, you know, how long did it take you to find this in the first place? And they would say like three months, five months, like six months, whatever. And so that's where it comes from. And it's like that's the amount of time that it took them to come up with the finding.
- [10:15]
Casey Newton
So let me just ask a couple of questions so I can ground myself. Here is. Is this tool kind of a box you type into, like, the other chatbots? And if so, what is powering it? Did you guys sort of build your own model from scratch? Did you sort of, you know, make fine tunements, fine tunings to another company's model?
- [10:30]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah. So it is. It is indeed a box that you basically type into. You. You ask a research objective. It's not a chatbot, right? Like, it runs for 12 hours or so before eventually coming back to you with its findings. In terms of how it's built, we build on top of a bunch of different language models from OpenAI, from Google, from Anthropic. In any given run, we use models from all the different providers. We also have our own models for specific tasks that we've trained internally, where those models are much better for the specific tasks that we train them on than the models that the frontier providers make. And then the key insight in Cosmos is basically this use of what we call, like, a structured world model. So one of the main limitations with AI systems today is that they're just limited in the length of the task and the sophistication of the task they can carry out. Before they kind of go off the rails. They, like, you know, forget what they're doing. They no longer are on task. And what we figured out was a way to have them contributing to this world model that gets built up over time. That basically describes, like, the full state of knowledge about the task that they're working on, which then means that we can orchestrate hundreds of, like, different agents running in parallel, running in series, and have them all working towards a coherent goal. And that was like the real unlock, right?
- [11:47]
Kevin Roose
Another thing that I found interesting about Cosmos is the cost. This model costs $200 per prompt. So every time you give it a task, you're paying $200. Why is it so expensive?
- [11:57]
Sam Rodriguez
I mean, it uses a lot of computer. I mean, that's like the fundamental answer is it uses a lot of compute, right?
- [12:04]
Kevin Roose
Give us a sense of how much.
- [12:05]
Sam Rodriguez
Well, so an individual run from Cosmos will write 42,000 lines of code and read 1500 research papers on average. Like, if you run Claude, it might write, like a few hundred lines of code, right? So that gives you some sense. It's like there's a lot of compute that is going into this.
- [12:25]
Casey Newton
Have you ever had, like, a scientist whose cat walks across the keyboard and accidentally hits entered and all of a sudden spends like $600?
- [12:30]
Venmo Stash Advertiser
This is a problem.
- [12:31]
Sam Rodriguez
This is we like, right? So the thing that you have to understand, right, Is that if you are a scientist and you go and do an experiment, you get some data back, you're going to spend five or ten thousand dollars gathering that data. And so what scientists want is they want the absolute best performance that they can get. And, like, scientists who have used Cosmos generally come back to me and are like, they can't believe we're only charging $200 for it. Right. And, you know, I will say, like, you know, $200 right now is a. Is a promotional price. We actually have to eventually charge more.
- [13:00]
Casey Newton
Oh, it's going. It's going up. So get those prompts in before Christmas.
- [13:05]
Sam Rodriguez
But, like, but really, you know, it's like if you have to spend thousands of dollars gathering the data, like, the cost at the end of the day is not the limitation. We do have to be very generous with refunds because people have, you know, make.
- [13:17]
Kevin Roose
I made a typo, right?
- [13:18]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah, exactly.
- [13:18]
Casey Newton
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [13:19]
Kevin Roose
So what you just mentioned about the sort of the tests that you all ran to figure out how long this thing could run for, how much time it was saving scientists, that's about, like, sort of replicating existing research that's out there. But a lot of what we hear from the people who are running these big AI labs is the possibility that pretty soon I will start making novel scientific discoveries. We'll start doing things that existing scientific methods and processes can't do. How close are we to that?
- [13:48]
Sam Rodriguez
That's already happening, actually. So if you go and you read the paper that we put out about, about Cosmos, we put out seven conclusions that it had come to, three of which were replications of existing findings, four of which are net new contributions to the scientific literature, like new discoveries.
- [14:05]
Casey Newton
And of those, what's the most impressive?
- [14:07]
Sam Rodriguez
So I like one of the ones that we really like. The human genome contains millions of genetic variants, right. These are differences between different people's DNA that are associated with disease. And for the most part, we know that a variant is associated with a disease, but we have no idea why. Right. And so we asked Cosmos, we gave it a bunch of raw data about a huge number of different genetic factors. So, like, what the variants are, what proteins bind near the variants. Right. Like all these kinds of things, and just asked it for type 2 diabetes to go and, you know, identify a mechanism associated with one of these variants. And it came back and it identified this was a variant that was not in a gene. And Cosmos identified that this is actually somewhere where a different protein binds. It was able to identify what protein binds and what gene is being expressed and connected that to the actual mechanism of that gene, SSR1, which is involved in the pancreas in secreting insulin. Right.
- [15:08]
Casey Newton
Okay, so in this case is what I'm hearing that your model was able to do some very fancy reasoning over some existing data and identify something that sort of no other human scientist had gotten around to and might not have for a really long time.
- [15:23]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah, that's right.
- [15:24]
Kevin Roose
Okay.
- [15:24]
Sam Rodriguez
And I think science generally consists of deciding what data to gather, gathering that data, and then drawing conclusions. And so at this point, basically it's like step number three that Cosmos is aimed at. You know, and there's.
- [15:37]
Casey Newton
You left out step zero, which was getting the Trump administration to unfreeze your funding, but everything else was right.
- [15:42]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah.
- [15:43]
Kevin Roose
So what happens when you get a discovery like this from Cosmos? Do you have to then go validate it? Do you hand it to like, a team of researchers who then have to like, make sure it works or like, what happens next?
- [15:52]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah, absolutely. You have to go and validate it. And so that's actually one of the things also, you know, in the paper, actually, we describe how we went and validated that particular variant in general, when people are using it. Yeah. You go in. I mean, actually, literally when you run a Cosmos run, the first thing you have to do is you have to understand what it's telling you, because it has just done something that scientists think is like six months worth of work. And you're going to sit there for a long time just like reading and understanding it. Once you've read it and understood it, then yes, indeed, you're going to go and you're going to run various experiments, do your own analysis, cross reference to try to like, convince yourself that this is true. And then based on what your research objective is, you'll decide next steps. Right. You know, in this case, I think it's probably low likelihood there's a new drug target, like from this particular finding. Right. But you could go and you could run this on other findings and then eventually maybe you find new drug target, you start a drug program. That's, you know.
- [16:43]
Kevin Roose
So one concern that I've heard people express about models like, like Cosmos is that there's this is just like sort of not where the roadblocks are. That the sort of reason that we don't have more AI discovered drugs and design drugs out there curing diseases is not actually because, like, we don't have the research methods to discover those. It's because there's like, you got to go to trials and you got to recruit human subjects and you got to get FDA approval. Like, all that stuff just takes a lot longer than the actual discovery of the drug. So what. What problems are models like these helping to solve in our scientific process right now?
- [17:19]
Sam Rodriguez
So. So, absolutely. I actually like, you know, I really agree that, like, the bottleneck at the end of the day in solving medicine is basically, you know, clinical trials. I mean, and the easiest way to see this is if you look at the number of diseases that we, like, know how to cure in mice, right? It's, like, astronomical, because obviously you can just, like, run experiments, and in humans, things are just slow. That said, if you think that every experiment that is being run right now by pharma companies, like, every clinical trial that's being run is, like, optimally planned and optimally, you know, conceived, given the full state of knowledge, you are off your rocker. Right? There's, like, no way. And those experiments cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And so the question is, like, we do, at the end of the day, have to run clinical trials. How do we make sure that those experiments are the best experiments we could possibly be running given all the knowledge that we have, given all the data we have? There's so much data that we have that has insights in it that are waiting to be found where we just, like, do not have people to go and find them. And that's ultimately going to feed into better experiments, better trials. Right.
- [18:27]
Casey Newton
Well, so then I'm curious how you see, like, your tool fitting into the workflow of today's scientist. Is it the sort of thing where, like, I have completed my experiments and now I want some help doing some analysis and is it. I have all these old experiments that I only did a little bit of analysis on, and I'm curious if I can, like, sort of squeeze any more juice out of them or, like, like, what other ways? Are you seeing the AI being, like, really good right now for a working scientist?
- [18:52]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah. Yeah, Great question. So. So going back to me in 2019, which is when I was wrapping up my PhD, right, I had this gigantic data set, and I wanted to graduate because I was a PhD student, which meant that I was making, like, you know, $40,000 a year or something on. And, like, there were a ton of great opportunities to go out and, like, don't be a ph anymore, okay? So I spent six months literally just sitting at my desk trying to analyze the data and drawing conclusions, reading papers. For right now, that's where Cosmos fits in. It's like, you would just take that data Set, you give it to Cosmos, it comes up with a lot of findings. Right now you need to go and do a bunch of manual work to validate those findings and so on. Pretty soon it's going to come with findings and you're going to be like, great.
- [19:37]
Kevin Roose
Sam, I'm curious if you could help sort of give us and our listeners a state of the art world of AI science right now. Recently the White House announced what it's calling the Genesis mission, which is a federal effort to kind of corral and harness all of these data sets that the federal government is sitting on and use them to do new scientific exploring. We also have lots of efforts, including yours, but lots of things going on in and around the tech industry, the biotech industry. People doing AI for materials science give us a sense of like, the lay of the land of like what's hot right now in AI science. Where is the effort and money going, right?
- [20:16]
Sam Rodriguez
In order to understand the landscape of AI and science, the first thing fundamentally that you have to understand is that AI is about building models, right? So, for example, a language model. What is a language model? A language model is fundamentally a model of human language. It just so happens that when you build a model of human language, it learns how to think like a human in some sense, because humans encode their thoughts in language. This is like one of the brightest discoveries, right? Certainly of the 21st century, maybe of all time. So similarly, when we talk about AI in science, what you have to think about is that you are modeling things. That is what AI does. And there are kind of two fundamental categories. There's modeling the natural world, right? And there's modeling the process of doing science. These things are fundamentally different. And the reason to make this distinction is because you know what we are doing, right? We are modeling the process of doing science. The other side of the AI for science world is building models that can, for example, predict the structure of proteins, that can generate a new antibody, that can create a new organism from scratch, which are all things that have kind of like happened in 2025, where there's just a huge amount of momentum.
- [21:35]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, of the things that are happening in the part of the sort of process of modeling the natural world you mentioned protein folding, novel organisms, like, what has most excited you as a scientist that you've seen?
- [21:50]
Sam Rodriguez
So it's absolutely what's most exciting right now, I think, without a doubt, is this trend towards what we call generative models. So these are things where. These are models that can produce examples of you know, proteins or antibodies or whatever that have desired characteristics basically from scratch. This is a new capability that we have never had before, and it's huge.
- [22:11]
Casey Newton
I'm curious about the reliability piece as you're running all of these experiments. You know, I saw this going around on social media this week. I reproduced it myself. If you asked Google, Is 2026 next year? It said, no, 2026 is not next year, it is the year after next. So in such a world, Sam, some people might get concerned at the idea that we're now entrusting the AI with all of our data analysis. So how much time are scientists having to spend, go back and essentially rechecking the work of the AIs and what kind of tax does that place on their work?
- [22:46]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah, this is very funny. I mean, look, you have to spend a lot of time going back and checking.
- [22:51]
Casey Newton
Yeah.
- [22:51]
Sam Rodriguez
But like, to be clear, this is true. Regardless of whether or not an AI does it or whether you ask a friend to do it, if you're going to publish a paper, you damn well better go back and check it and, like, be sure that you are confident. And it's never gonna be 100%. Right. The best you're gonna do is you're going to get to a place where it is similarly good to if you were doing it yourself, which is not 100% because you're not infallible. Right. And checking the work is like, always gonna be faster than producing it in the first place.
- [23:23]
Casey Newton
Got it. Got it.
- [23:24]
Sam Rodriguez
Right by a lot.
- [23:25]
Kevin Roose
A lot of our biggest scientific breakthroughs in history have come from these kind of strange accidents, these moments of serendipity. You know, penicillin starts growing in a petri dish. So we discover, oh, my God, you know, this is great. Does AI preserve that kind of serendipity, those kinds of accidents, or do they sort of optimize it away?
- [23:47]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah, this is a great question. And the fact of the matter is we just, like, really don't know yet. This is going to be a, like, really important core question that a lot of people are asking.
- [23:55]
Kevin Roose
What's your intuition on it?
- [23:56]
Sam Rodriguez
I mean, I think that they probably will because.
- [23:58]
Kevin Roose
They probably will.
- [23:59]
Sam Rodriguez
They probably will preserve it. Preserve it because penicillin, My understanding is that basically the window was left open on some agar with no antibiotic, and obviously they didn't have antibiotics. This was the discovery of the first one. Right. So the window was left open with some agar and like, you know, some spores flew onto it and began growing. And they observed that the Bacteria was inhibited, right? That's a mistake. Someone screwed up, right? And that mistake led to something fantastic. And you will have mistakes, I think that will be preserved.
- [24:29]
Casey Newton
But in the meantime, scientists should always leave their windows open. You never know what's happening.
- [24:33]
Sam Rodriguez
You have no. You know, seriously though, like there's so much. When you get a graduate student in academia, right? When you get graduate students, first year graduates, they have no idea what to do. They have no idea what to do. And that is a huge source of scientific progress because they just do the most random kooky stuff that no one who knew anything, who knows anything, would ever think to do. And it's actually, it's actually really important.
- [24:53]
Kevin Roose
It's like you almost want your like AI scientist model to hallucinate a little bit.
- [24:56]
Sam Rodriguez
Totally.
- [24:57]
Kevin Roose
So that it doesn't lose that quality.
- [24:59]
Sam Rodriguez
Of life or just adding noise, right? We talk about this as just like adding noise in order to. This is actually important for like biological evolution also, right? Like the genome has a lot of noise and that's how the evolution randomly comes up with like new stuff, is that there's a protein that like is just totally random, doesn't do anything. Then one day, all of a sudden, oops, it does something. And that's great, right?
- [25:19]
Kevin Roose
So what do you make of the leaders of the big AI labs, people like Demis and Dario and Sam Altman, who are saying, you know, AI is going to allow us to cure all diseases or most diseases within the next decade or two.
- [25:33]
Sam Rodriguez
Decade is crazy. Oh, and I'm happy to take a very strong stance on this because if I'm wrong, it's a great thing, right? But if I'm wrong, everyone wins. But like a decade is crazy.
- [25:44]
Kevin Roose
Why is it crazy?
- [25:44]
Sam Rodriguez
Because for the reason that we were talking about before, you have to run clinical trials, right? If we had a drug right now that prevented aging, completely halted aging in humans, you know, between the ages of like 25 and 65 or something, you would not know for 10 years. Cuz you can't detect in humans in that age range whether or not they're aging for like at least like, you know, five or 10 years. You don't detect from one year to the next that you're aging. So you won't know if the thing is working.
- [26:13]
Casey Newton
I don't know. Some people at my 10 year high school reunion were already looking pretty rough. I hate to say it.
- [26:20]
Sam Rodriguez
I did say 25.
- [26:22]
Casey Newton
Yeah, okay, fair enough, fair enough.
- [26:25]
Sam Rodriguez
But right, I mean, you know, so we have to conduct experiments, those experiments will take time now will we? Like 30 years, I think is very plausible. We don't know what is going to be possible. We don't know if it's possible to halt aging. We don't know if it's possible to like, cure all diseases or whatever. But between now and 30 years from now, I think you should expect to see a humongous leap forward.
- [26:49]
Casey Newton
Let me drill in on that a bit though, because I think some people might hear that in saying that, like, this is essentially a regulatory issue that like, we just don't have, you know, the FDA set up to measure this. I'm curious about the, the experimental side of it though, right? Because my understanding is like, we don't really have enough biologists to run all the experiments that we, we might not have, like, the funding to, to fund the experiments. And you did raise the point that some of these experiments just actually take a long time to run, right? So, like, what are all of the factors that in your mind are just going to make it so hard to.
- [27:20]
Sam Rodriguez
To go and you have to. Even supposing you have a molecule that you want to test in a human and you know which humans you want to test it in, you have to go and make it, right? Humans are big. They require, like, a lot of it. You have to make sure it's like high enough grade that you can actually put it into a human. You have to find the patients, which means forming relationships with the doctors, right? Actually, you know, waiting until you have enough patients who are willing to do it. For many diseases, like, there just aren't that many patients. And so finding the patients is hard, right? And it just. And then you have to actually dose them. You have to wait and see what happens, right? Even with no regulation, it would be slow.
- [27:56]
Casey Newton
There's no AI shortcut for almost any of that, at least not right now.
- [27:59]
Sam Rodriguez
No, what AI will allow us to do is it will allow us to discover a lot of things where we already have the information to discover it. We just haven't figured that out yet. You should not expect that you're one day going to get GPT7 and just ask it how to cure Alzheimer's and it will just tell you. Um, my expectation is that there is not enough knowledge. We do not have enough knowledge to solve it. In principle, even with infinite intelligence, right? Like with infinite intelligence, there would still be some things that are just not known about the world where we have to conduct the experiments to see. You'll be able to plan the best possible experiment. Given everything that's known. But you will not just be able to like, you know, de novo kind of figure it out, right?
- [28:43]
Kevin Roose
Casey I I took Latin. That means from new.
- [28:46]
Casey Newton
Oh, thank you, thank you. That's saved me a step of Googling.
- [28:52]
Kevin Roose
When we come back, we'll play a game of overhyped or underhyped with our guest Sam Rodriguez.
- [29:15]
University of Michigan Announcer
The University of Michigan was made for moments like this. When facts are questioned, when division deepens, when the role of higher education is on trial, look to the leaders and best turning a public investment into the public good. From using AI to close digital divides to turning climate risk into resilience. From leading medical innovation to making mental health care more accessible. Wherever we go, progress follows. For answers, for action for all of us, look to Michigan. See more solutions at umich. Edu Look Hey Fidelity, what's it cost.
- [29:50]
Sam Rodriguez
To invest with the Fidelity app?
- [29:52]
University of Michigan Announcer
Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on U.S. stocks and ETFs.
- [29:59]
Betterment Advertiser
Hmm. That's music to my ears.
- [30:02]
University of Michigan Announcer
I can only talk.
- [30:05]
Sam Rodriguez
Investing involves risk.
- [30:06]
Kevin Roose
Including risk of loss.
- [30:06]
Sam Rodriguez
0 account fees applied to retail brokerage.
- [30:08]
Kevin Roose
Accounts only sell order assessment Fe not included. A limited number of ETFs are subject to a transaction based service fee of $100. See full list of Fidelity.com commissions Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC member NYSE SIPC.
- [30:19]
Sam Rodriguez
With.
- [30:19]
Venmo Stash Advertiser
Venmo Stash a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more. Pick a bundle with your go tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with stash. Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Stash terms.
- [30:58]
Kevin Roose
This isn't quite science per se, but but I'm curious what you make of this, Sam. All of the big AI labs are obsessed with math.
- [31:06]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah.
- [31:07]
Kevin Roose
With winning the International Math Olympiad, with putting up a gold medal score. With solving these unproven math theorems. And I have a take about this, which is that I believe that this is because these labs are filled with people who were themselves competitive mathletes in high school and took part in the IMO and did pretty well. And a lot of those people think that like AGI will just sort of be like a slightly smarter version of them. But I'm Curious. Like, why are these places so obsessed with math as being one of these sort of first places that they want to make a lot of progress?
- [31:41]
Sam Rodriguez
There are two reasons. I think that one of the reasons is exactly what you just said. It's just familiar, right? But the other reason is that you can measure progress, right? So ultimately, like, what drives progress in machine learning, A big part of what drives progress is benchmarks. With math, you can tell whether or not your proof is right. And there's kind of like an infinite number of things to go and prove. So it's just like really easy to tell whether or not you're getting better. And things like the IMO just present great opportunities. By contrast, if you look at some of the biggest breakthroughs recently, biggest breakthroughs this year in AI for biology, things like CHAI discovery, nabla, coming up with these extremely good models for producing antibodies de novo, right? Huge breakthrough. But ultimately the win for them is going to be, like, when it's approved in a human, and that might be another five years or something. ARK Institute putting out, like, the first time anyone has designed an organism from scratch. They designed a bacteriophage. It's a kind of virus that infects bacteria. Incredible, right? But, like, just harder to evaluate. Like, how good is it? Like, you're not gonna release it into the wild. And so, et cetera, like, it's harder to evaluate. Whereas, like, the IMO is just like, super clean. And so I think that's one thing that we think about a lot is just like, you know, how do we get really clear benchmarks that we can pursue to measure whether or not we're doing a good job at science?
- [33:07]
Kevin Roose
I have an answer here. International Cancer Curing Olympiad.
- [33:12]
Casey Newton
I like that.
- [33:13]
Kevin Roose
Should we start this?
- [33:14]
Casey Newton
I think that would be great.
- [33:15]
Kevin Roose
We can give people a medal if they win. Let's get on it.
- [33:18]
Betterment Advertiser
Labs.
- [33:19]
Kevin Roose
So when the CEOs or the leaders of these companies make these statements about how we're going to cure all disease using AI in the next 10 years or 15 years or what, that whatever timeline they give, are they doing that because they don't understand the bottlenecks? I mean, these are very smart people. So what are they not seeing? Or are they just doing this as sort of a marketing exercise? Is this an attempt to get people excited about AI who might otherwise be freaked out about it? Why are they giving these projections?
- [33:44]
Sam Rodriguez
No, look, I mean, I think that they are. Reasonable people could disagree. There are lots of reasons why you could argue that, like, actually the models will get super Smart. And they will figure out ways to measure whether or not we're making progress before run a clinical trial. And that will increase the iteration cycle. Right. Like there are reasonable arguments to be made about that. Right. Like, you know, that we are just going to not do full clinical trials anymore. We'll just like use biomarkers. Like, that's not crazy. And that's one way that I could be wrong. And maybe in 10 years we do have cures for all diseases. So that's part of it. Like, obviously there's part of it which is that they want to hype the thing. Part of it is that, you know, does Sam Altman, like, really intimately understand, like what it takes to go and manufacture, like scale up manufacturing for a small molecule to put into the clinic? Probably not. Right. So there's a mixture. I don't think any of it's in bad faith. It's just people are very excited. There will be a little bit of a collision with reality at some point. We're going to see exactly where that is. But regardless, the future is going to be awesome.
- [34:50]
Casey Newton
At this moment in 2025, how much do you think AI tools have changed the life of a working scientist? And how different do you expect that will be a year from now?
- [35:01]
Sam Rodriguez
I think that you'd be shocked to the extent that they have not yet. Scientists in general are extremely conservative people because if you're running an experiment, you never actually fully know, in biology at least, you usually do not fully understand why the experiment works. And why not. There are some things that you've inherited from protocols that you've run in the past where it's like, we do it this way, you could go and test it, but there are way too many things to test. So you're just kind of locked in, in your methods and it's what works, and you just want to do what works. And so for that reason, biologists just adopt new methods slowly. I think most labs around the world are still probably doing science the way they've done it before and probably will continue to do so for a while. And that's okay. One plays, I think, with coding. A lot of people are already adopting it because in biology historically, coding has been a big bottleneck. It's a huge unlock now that biologists who didn't know how to code can like, do a lot of coding using Claude code, using OpenAI's models, Gemini, et cetera. So that's a huge unlock. I think that's going to see a lot of adoption quickly. Literature search right like being able to parse the immensity of the scientific literature. That's a huge unlock that's going to get adopted very quickly. Right. The tools like what we're building are like a little bit more frontier. Ultimately, people will adopt them when they see other people using them and getting great results.
- [36:15]
Kevin Roose
Sam, can we play a little lightning round game here with you? We're calling this one Overhyped Underhyped. So we'll tell you something and you tell us whether in your scientific opinion it is overhyped or underhyped. You ready?
- [36:26]
Venmo Stash Advertiser
Yeah.
- [36:27]
Kevin Roose
Vibe proving this is when AI systems go out and like write math proofs.
- [36:33]
Sam Rodriguez
Probably just. If I have a fourth choice, probably overhyped. It's great for. I mean, it's great as like a progress driver in AI. It's like. And we'll probably have not, you know, being good at it will probably have implications elsewhere. But is it itself that useful? I'm not sure.
- [36:50]
Betterment Advertiser
Sure.
- [36:52]
Kevin Roose
Robotics for AI lab. Automation.
- [36:56]
Sam Rodriguez
Robotics for automating AI labs or yes. Or for.
- [36:59]
Kevin Roose
For automating scientific labs.
- [37:01]
Sam Rodriguez
Robotics for automating scientific labs. I think appropriately hyped. It is going to be totally transformative. The technology is not at all there yet. There's a lot that we need to do. But like, yeah, probably appropriately hyped.
- [37:15]
Casey Newton
AlphaFold3.
- [37:19]
Sam Rodriguez
That'S an interesting one. I mean, I think that I would say probably underhyped in that I think all of the protein structure models, there's a lot of hype around them, but they're still probably. They're going to be extremely transformative. So maybe I would say probably underhyped. There's a lot of hype around it though. So it's a hard decision to make.
- [37:41]
Kevin Roose
But virtual cells, like, we heard from Patrick Collison this summer about what the ARC Institute has done with making a virtual cell.
- [37:50]
Sam Rodriguez
This is overhyped, but for a specific reason. Right. Like the models that they're building at ARK are awesome. The models and they're doing similar things at like new limit. Chan Zuckerberg. Right. Like many of these places, many of these great companies and great organizations are doing it. I think that like calling it a virtual cell, like, is a little bit. That's like a little bit over. That's overhyped. Right. Like ultimately that kind of model models something like very specific. Like actually building like a true virtual cell. Like being able to simulate a cell in a computer is an amazing goal. We are very far away from that.
- [38:25]
Casey Newton
Quantum computing.
- [38:29]
Kevin Roose
Overhyped brain computer interfaces.
- [38:34]
Sam Rodriguez
I'm also, oh man, this one's really hard. I will, I'm going to say overhyped. I'm a huge believer in BCIs. I think, like, effective BCIs are the way that we imagine them in Sci fi are further out than people imagine. Even, like neuralink is making amazing progress.
- [38:51]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, Casey's got one in his head right now. Yeah, it's on the fritz.
- [38:56]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah, there are, there are a lot of great people who are making progress there, but it's further out, I think, than people think.
- [39:02]
Casey Newton
So we're, we're nearing the end of the year. If we can put you in a bit of a reflective mode, what do you think were the top three AI driven scientific advancements this year?
- [39:14]
Sam Rodriguez
Yeah, I think that honestly, like this year is the year has been the year of agents. This was the year when people discovered agents. And so I do like, you know, in good faith have to put myself, I have to put us on that list also with Google co scientists. I mean, we're not the only people who are working on this. You know, Google has been doing a great job. There are a bunch of other people. So AI agents for science, definitely. And then generative design is just having a huge moment. Right. So the other ones would probably be the work that CHAI has been doing, the work that NABLA has been doing and many others on de novo antibody design.
- [39:49]
Casey Newton
I'm really glad you defined de novo earlier in the broadcast, by the way. It's come up a lot.
- [39:52]
Sam Rodriguez
Yes, sorry, when I say de novo, I just mean like, literally, you just like, it generates it from scratch. You don't give it anything. Right. You just like. Or you give it a target that you want to bind to and it generates it from scratch. This is huge because basically the promise that companies like Chai, Nabla and so on are going after is a world in which you can say, like, we know to cure this disease, we have to target that protein. You click a button and you have an antibody that you can go and put in humans tomorrow. It's huge. It cuts out an enormous amount of what people had to do previously. So that's a huge one. And the third one, I just think like, what Brian, He, Patrick Hsu and so on at the ARC Institute have done with like generating organisms. Sorry, generating organisms.
- [40:33]
Casey Newton
We can say we know what it means now. That's the important thing.
- [40:35]
Kevin Roose
This is our like Pee Wee's Playhouse word of the week.
- [40:40]
Sam Rodriguez
The de novo design of organisms. Is it useful? I don't know. Is it awesome? Like, absolutely. It's so it's such a big breakthrough.
- [40:47]
Kevin Roose
And Sam, what should we be watching for next year? What are you excited about that may be coming down the pipe for 2026?
- [40:55]
Sam Rodriguez
Honestly, it is again going to be the agents that see an explosion. We are right now at the beginning of that S curve and that is going to continue. Maybe a year ago I would tell people that I thought in 2026 or maybe 2027 that the majority of the high quality hypotheses that are generated by the scientific community would be generated by us or by agents that are like the ones that we're building. And when I said it in 2024, I thought I was overhyping. Right. But I was just like, I need some hype at this point. Point it may be real. I mean, I think 2026 would be ambitious for that. I mean, that's a huge right. For the majority of the good hypotheses that come out to be made by agents, that's a huge leap. But like 2027, yeah, man. I mean, 2026 is going to be the year when we just see these agents start to like infiltrate everything. Right? Infiltrate labs, infiltrate people's normal life. I mean, it's already happening.
- [41:47]
Kevin Roose
Cool.
- [41:47]
University of Michigan Announcer
Yeah.
- [41:48]
Kevin Roose
Well, I look forward to it. Sam, thank you so much for giving us the science education that we clearly didn't get in school.
- [41:53]
Casey Newton
Yeah, you've really given us some de novo things to think about.
- [41:56]
Kevin Roose
And I app.
- [41:58]
Sam Rodriguez
Good. Thank you guys. Thank you.
- [42:22]
University of Michigan Announcer
The University of Michigan was made for moments like this. When facts are questioned, when division deepens, when the role of higher education is on trial, look to the leaders and best turning a public investment into the public good. From using AI to close digital divides to turning climate risk into resilience. From leading medical innovation to making mental health care more accessible. Wherever we go, progress follows. For answers for action for all of us, look to Michigan. See more solutions@umich.edu look introducing Fidelity Trader.
- [42:57]
Fidelity Advertiser
Plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity. Customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web and mobile for faster trades anywhere you go. Try the all new Fidelity Trader Plus. Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet@fidelity.com TraderPlus investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE SIPC.
- [43:25]
Venmo Stash Advertiser
With Venmo Stache a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo stash on your favorite brands. When you pay with your Venmo debit card from takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more. Pick a bundle with your go tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms@venmo me stashterms.
- [43:56]
Casey Newton
Hard fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. Were edited by Jen Poyant. Today's show was fact checked by Will Pieschel and engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Diane Wong, Rowan Nimisto, Alyssa Moxley and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, Jake Nichol and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube@YouTube.com hardfork Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam and Dalia Haddad. You can email us@hardforkytimes.com.
- [44:40]
Betterment Advertiser
Foreign don't just imagine a better future. Start investing in one with betterment. Whether it's saving for today or building wealth for tomorrow, we help people in small businesses put their money to work. We automate to make saving simpler. We optimize to make investing smarter. We build innovative technology backed by financial experts. For anyone who's ever said, I think I can do better. So be invested in yourself. Be invested in your business. Be invested in better with betterment. Get started@betterment.com investing involves risk performance not guaranteed.