Where Is All the A.I.-Driven Scientific Progress?

Cynthia Erivo is the best singer in the world. She's incredible. 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 I I was, like, trying to figure out what it was, but it's just, like, she just has like because, like, she obviously she has the power, but there's all these, like, textures in there. Did you did you see the, designed to go viral clip of her visiting her old school? Everyone I obviously lost my shit. I was The absolute best is that the students start singing, and they just sound like shit. No worries. Nightmare sweet. Just imagine you're one of these kids. You're not that it's just 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 kinda plotting along trying to get through the day. And then fucking Cynthia Riva shows up, and they're like, alright, kid. You're up next. What do you got? No. Thanks. No. It was so sweet. I would dwell up. So sweet. I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Neud from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, Future House CEO Sam Rodriguez joins us in the studio to separate the hype from the reality of AI science. Well, Casey, it's time for some science. Yeah. Give me a second, Kevin. I'm just gonna put on my lab coat here, get up my Bunsen burner, and, see what you've got cooking for us today. 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 this 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. 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. Yes. And this is something that we're also hearing now …