Along with image generators and conversational agents, artificial intelligence (AI) is challenging artists and writers, but scientists believe it could also revolutionize research and even figure prominently in the Nobel Prize.
In 2021, Japanese scientist Hiroaki Kitano launched what he called the Nobel Turing Challenge. He challenged researchers to create an "AI scientist" capable of autonomously conducting Nobel Prize-worthy research by 2050.
Some researchers are working hard to create such an artificial colleague, and about 100 "scientific robots" are already at work in science, says Ross D. King, a professor of artificial intelligence at Chalmers University in Sweden.
The specialist published an article in 2009 in which he presented, with other researchers, a scientific robot called "Adam", the first machine to produce scientific discoveries autonomously.
" We built a robot that discovered new scientific ideas, tested them and confirmed that they were correct," King told AFP.
The robot was programmed to autonomously formulate hypotheses, design experiments to test them, and even program other laboratory robots to perform these experiments and ultimately learn from these results.
“Non-trivial” discoveries
"Adam" was tasked with exploring the inner workings of yeast and discovered previously unknown "gene functions."
These findings are "modest" but "not trivial" for all that, the authors said in their article.
A second scientific robot called "Eve" was later created to study drug candidates for malaria and other tropical diseases.
With such robots, " it costs less money to conduct research, and they work 24 hours a day," says Ross D. King, adding that they are also more rigorous in monitoring processes.
The researcher concedes, however, that AI is far from being at the level of a Nobel-winning scientist. For that to happen, it would require "much more intelligent" robots capable of "understanding the situation as a whole" to compete with the Nobels.
"Not about to be replaced"
" The scientific tradition is not about to be replaced by machines," Inga Strümke, associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, told AFP.
" That doesn't mean it's impossible," she adds, saying it is " certainly " clear that AI is having and will have an impact on how science is conducted.
A good example is the AI model Alphafold, developed by Google Deepmind, which can predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their amino acid.
“We knew there was a relationship between amino acids and the final three-dimensional shape of proteins and that we could use machine learning to find it,” Strümke says. Artificial intelligence, the next rival of Nobel laureates?
But these calculations are too complex for humans and " the machine has done something that no human could do," she continued.
Alphafold has at the same time highlighted the weakness of current AI models such as neural networks, according to it.
Artificial intelligence, the next rival of Nobel laureates?
They are very good at processing massive amounts of information and coming up with an answer, but not able to explain why that answer is correct.
So, while the more than 200 million protein structures predicted by Alphafold are " extremely useful," Strumke said, " they don't tell us anything about microbiology."
Assisted by AI
For her, science seeks to understand the universe and not simply to "make the right assumption."
Yet Alphafold's groundbreaking work has led experts to place its designers among potential candidates for a Nobel Prize.
Google DeepMind Director John M. Jumper and CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis have already received the prestigious Lasker Prize in 2023.
They are listed in the data of the Clarivate analysis firm, which predicts potential Nobel laureates in science based on citations in research papers.
David Pendlebury, the firm's director, admits that while Jumper and Hassabis' 2021 paper has been cited thousands of times, it would be unusual for the Nobel jury to reward work so quickly after its publication.
The Nobel Prizes usually reward discoveries that date back several decades.
But he believes AI-assisted research will soon feature prominently in Nobel prize-winning work.
" I'm sure that in the next decade there will be Nobel Prize winners that will be assisted in some way by computing, and computing these days is increasingly AI," Pendlebury told AFP.
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