{"id":14355,"date":"2025-01-25T17:26:10","date_gmt":"2025-01-25T22:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14355"},"modified":"2025-01-25T17:26:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-25T22:26:10","slug":"nature-research-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14355","title":{"rendered":"Nature Research Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just noticed something new showing up in Google searches, summaries of the state of scientific research areas such as this one about String Theory And Quantum Gravity<\/a>. They’re produced by Nature Research Intelligence<\/a>, which has been around for a couple years, trading on the Nature journal brand: “We’ve been the most trusted name in research for over 150 years.” The business model is you pay them to give you information about the state of scientific research that you can then use to make funding decisions.<\/p>\n

Each of their pages has a prominent button in the upper right-hand corner allowing you to “Talk to an expert”. The problem with all this though is that no experts are involved. The page summarizing String Theory and Quantum Gravity is just one of tens of thousands of such pages produced by some AI algorithm. If you click on the button, you’ll be put in touch with someone expert in getting people to pay for the output of AI algorithms, not someone who knows anything about string theory or quantum gravity.<\/p>\n

It’s very hard to guess what the impact of AI on scientific research in areas like theoretical physics will be, but this sort of thing indicates one very real possibility. Part of Nature’s previous business model was to sell high-quality summaries of scientific research content produced by the best scientific experts and journalists who consulted with such experts. This kind of content is difficult and expensive to produce. AI generated versions of this may not be very good, but they’re very cheap to produce, so you can make money as long as you can find anyone willing to pay something for them. <\/p>\n

The relatively good quality of recent AI generated content has been based on having high-quality content to train on, such as that produced by Nature over the last 150 years. If AI starts getting trained not on old-style Nature, but on new-style Nature Research Intelligence, the danger is “model collapse” (for a Nature article about this, see here<\/a>). Trained on their own output, large language models start producing worse and worse results.<\/p>\n

I’m no expert, you should probably consult an AI about this instead, but it seems to me that one possibility is that instead of superintelligence producing ever more impressive content, we may have already hit the peak and it’s all downhill from here. A thought that occurred to me recently is that back in the 80s when people were talking about string theory as science that anomalously happened to fall out of the 21st century into the 20th, they may have been very right, but not realizing what was going to happen to science in the 21st century…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just noticed something new showing up in Google searches, summaries of the state of scientific research areas such as this one about String Theory And Quantum Gravity. They’re produced by Nature Research Intelligence, which has been around for a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14355"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14362,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14355\/revisions\/14362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}