Yes, AI is rapidly advancing mathematics (and theoretical physics problems that are essentially mathematical). Like Ramanujan’s notebooks, human mathematicians will spend months (years?) poring over the stream of papers that AI effortlessly generates, hoping to verify and understand them, probably until math itself (via Lean) becomes a branch of computer science like almost everything else.
However, after math and physics, there is still a next scientific frontier: chemistry, and especially biology and medicine.
I mean, it was already the frontier, but it’s the next one too. AI can crush deterministic math problems on the computer, but biomedicine is a highly empirical, noisy, multivariate, and yet often predictable domain.
Thus, AI radically increases our ambitions in biomedicine. All the omics data, all the messy literature, it can all be synthesized and analyzed in a flash. This is what the labs mean when they talk about curing all diseases. The tooling is available to take cracks at biomedical problems previously thought impossible.
Midjourney is doing this, Chan Zuckerberg is doing this, Anthropic is doing this, but there will be so much more.
However, after math and physics, there is still a next scientific frontier: chemistry, and especially biology and medicine.
I mean, it was already the frontier, but it’s the next one too. AI can crush deterministic math problems on the computer, but biomedicine is a highly empirical, noisy, multivariate, and yet often predictable domain.
Thus, AI radically increases our ambitions in biomedicine. All the omics data, all the messy literature, it can all be synthesized and analyzed in a flash. This is what the labs mean when they talk about curing all diseases. The tooling is available to take cracks at biomedical problems previously thought impossible.
Midjourney is doing this, Chan Zuckerberg is doing this, Anthropic is doing this, but there will be so much more.