Novelty and Discovery: Bonnie Kruft (Microsoft) and Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) at CVAI London

AI is a fantastic synthesizer of data, but even top researchers had doubts that this wave of generative AI models was capable of making totally autonomous scientific discoveries. Hugging Face CEO Thomas Wolf, generally an AI optimist, drilled down on his conclusion from his essay that AI as it stands today cannot produce the next Einstein, since it cannot generate truly novel ideas. Even major models like DeepMind’s AlphaFold, Wolf said, “explore the field of possibilities, but it’s not really inventing a new way to play.” The discoveries that AI will make, he pointed out, will still come from human creativity. Still, Microsoft’s AI for Science Deputy Director Bonnie Kruft said that generative AI’s capability to process very large datasets will allow scientists to look for new patterns. Otherwise, constantly performing the same operation will result in finding “the same molecules that we’ve always been looking for.” Kruft shared that Microsoft is currently working on building a model that can account for the “dynamic” nature of proteins and the way they fold. That could power scores of scientific discoveries, but still with humans steering it along, for now.