How AI Will Change Science Forever - Ep. 43 with Alice Albrecht

Dec 18, 2024

Alice Albrecht, a cognitive neuroscience Ph.D. from Yale and Senior Director of AI Product at SmartNews, dives into how AI is revolutionizing science. She discusses the importance of large-scale data gathering and the shift towards personalized, contextual predictions in research. The conversation explores the ethical challenges of AI in mental health, particularly in treating OCD, and highlights the transformative power of data in understanding psychological dynamics. Albrecht also anticipates a new era for scientific publishing through greater transparency and open data sharing.

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00:00 / 00:00

Recollect's Product Evolution

Recollect aimed to map everything you consume into personal, recallable networks for knowledge workers.
The product evolved to focus on user goals and synthesizing relevant materials for tasks.

00:00 / 00:00

Launch Early, Iterate Fast

Ship earlier and accept messiness when building AI products to learn faster from users.
Let customers tolerate rough edges instead of waiting for perfect polish.

00:00 / 00:00

Augmentation Over Autonomy

Augment human intelligence rather than pursue standalone superintelligence as the primary AI goal.
Connect AI to human touchpoints in knowledge work to amplify creativity and judgment.

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AI is going to change science forever.

Small scale studies will give way to large scale open data gathering efforts. We’ll shift from seeking broad general theories to making contextual predictions in individual cases. The traditional research paper will change fundamentally.

That’s why I had Alice Albrecht on the show. Few people straddle the worlds of science and AI like she does: She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from Yale and is a machine learning researcher with almost a decade of experience. In 2021, she founded re:collect, an app that aimed to augment human intelligence with AI. It was acqui-hired by news curation app SmartNews in September of this year, and she is now the senior director of AI product.

We discuss the contours of this new paradigm of science: the growing importance of data in scientific discovery, how AI makes N-of-1 studies imperative—when they’re normally seen as unscientific, the case for big tech to open-source their data for research, and the power of unbundling data from interpretations, in both science and media. Here is a link to the episode transcript.

In January of this year, we published Alice’s thesis about how augmenting human intelligence with AI is more effective than attempting to achieve super intelligence through standalone AI systems, and in a happy coincidence, she’s our last podcast guest of 2024. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you in the new year.

In the meantime, this is a must-watch for anyone interested in how AI is changing the future of scientific research.

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Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Alice Albrecht: @AliceAlbrecht

The company that recently acquired Alice’s startup: SmartNews

The piece Alice wrote for Every about how AI can augment human intelligence: The Case for Cyborgs

Every’s product incubations that we discuss in the context of how AI is changing media: Extendable Articles, TLDR