AI and the Future of Science

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AI is generally is likely to have a lot of boost potential but then there are others too which is sort of like fine tuning a large language model on some domain any area where there's just a lot of human generated data. Maybe it's not enough that you have one person who can do a cognitive task that's involved in science it would take too much of that person's time to actually generate the training data so maybe there're 50 or 100 people out there good at certain tasks and models could be trained on them. So I think if we had LLMs on our desktop that can kind of take any one of these type 2 skills anything for which there's a lot of ample demonstration data

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What are focused research organizations? Which kinds of research projects lend themselves to the FRO model? Researchers in academia frequently complain about the incentive structures around funding and publishing; so how do FROs change those dynamics? Why must FROs be time-limited, especially if they're successful? Who's in charge in an FRO? How does "field-building" help to improve science? What effects might large language models have on science?

Adam Marblestone is the CEO of Convergent Research. He's been launching Focused Research Organizations (FROs) such as E11 bio and Cultivarium. He also serves on the boards of several non-profits pursuing new methods of funding and organizing scientific research including Norn Group and New Science. Previously, he was a Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellow, a consultant for the Astera Institute, a Fellow with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a research scientist at Google DeepMind, Chief Strategy Officer of the brain-computer interface company Kernel, a research scientist at MIT, a PhD student in biophysics with George Church and colleagues at Harvard, and a theoretical physics student at Yale. He also previously helped to start companies like BioBright and advised foundations such as the Open Philanthropy Project. His work has been recognized with a Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 Award (2018), a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship (2010), and a Goldwater Scholarship (2008). Learn more about him at adammarblestone.org.

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