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How scientists are using Claude to accelerate research and discovery
- alsetmusic 10mo agoCall me when a disinterested third-party says so. PR announcements by the very people who have a large stake in our belief in their product are unreliable.
- NewsaHackO 10mo agoIs your argument that the quotes by the researchers in the article are not real?
- taormina 10mo agoWhat quotes? This is an AI summary that may or may not have summarized actual quotes from the researchers, but I don't see a single quote in this article, or a source.
- famouswaffles 10mo agoWhy are you commenting if you can't even take a few minutes to read this ? It's quite bizarre. There's a quote and repo for Cheeseman, and a paper for Biomni.
- WD-42 10mo agoThere is only one quote in the entire article, though: > Cheeseman finds Claude consistently catches things he missed. “Every time I go through I’m like, I didn’t notice that one! And in each case, these are discoveries that we can understand and verify,” he says. Pretty vague and not really quantifiable. You would think an article making a bold claim would contain more than a single, hand-wavy quote from an actual scientist.
- famouswaffles 10mo ago>Pretty vague and not really quantifiable. You would think an article making a bold claim would contain more than a single, hand-wavy quote from an actual scientist. Why? What purpose would quotes serve better than a paper with numbers and code? Just seems like nitpicking here. The article could have gone without a single quote (or had several more) and it wouldn't really change anything. And that quote is not really vague in the context of the article.
- inferiorhuman 10mo ago[flagged]
- inferiorhuman 10mo ago[flagged]
- bpodgursky 10mo agoAre you accusing Anthropic of hallucinating an MIT lab under the MIT domain? I mean they literally link to it https://cheesemanlab.wi.mit.edu/ https://cheesemanlab.wi.mit.edu/
- inferiorhuman 10mo ago[flagged]
- famouswaffles 10mo agoYou know things have shifted a gear when people just start flat out denying reality.
- NewsaHackO 10mo agoHonestly, it doesn't even seem they read the article, just came in, saw it was pro-AI, and commented.
- falloutx 10mo agoAnd if you go to that site, the researchers say nothing about using Claude, or any LLMs for that matter.
- simonw 10mo agoMost people aren't software developers. The HN audience can benefit from LLMs in ways that many people don't value.
- catlifeonmars 10mo agoThe point is to look at who is making a claim and asking what they hope to gain from it. This is orthogonal to what the thing is, really. It’s just basic skepticism. Even if the article is accurate, it still makes sense to question the motives of the publisher. Especially if they’re selling a product.
- joshribakoff 10mo agoThis company predicts software development is a dead occupation yet ships a mobile chat UI that appears to be perpetually full of bugs, and has had a number of high profile incidents.
- simonw 10mo ago"This company predicts software development is a dead occupation" Citation needed? Closest I've seen to that was Dario saying AI would write 90% of the code, but that's very different from declaring the death of software development as an occupation.
- falloutx 10mo agoThe clear disdain he has for the profession is evident in any interview he gives. Him saying 90% of the code was not a signal to us, but it was directed to his fellow execs, that they can soon get rid of 90% of the engineers and some other related professions.
- throw234234234 10mo agoI think it's pretty clear that Anthrophic was the main AI lab pushing code automation right from the start. Their blog posts, everything just targeted code generation. Even their headings for new models in articules would be "code". My view if they weren't around, even if it would of happened eventually, code would of been solved with cadence to other use cases (i.e. gradually as per general demand). AI Engineers aren't actually SWE's per se; they use code but they see it as tedious non-main work IMO. They are happy to automate their compliment and raise in status vs SWE's who typically before all of this had more employment opportunities and more practical ways to show value.
- throw310822 10mo agoAI is already writing 90% of my code. 100% of Claude Code's code, too. So Amodei was right.
- signatoremo 10mo ago> Call me when a disinterested third-party says Call me when a disinterested third-party says so Saying what? This describes three projects that use an Anthropic’s product. Do you need a third party to confirm that? Or do you need someone to tell you if they are legit? There are hundreds of announcements by vendors ơn HN. Did you object to them all or only when your own belief is against them?
- username223 10mo agoPairs well with this: https://hegemon.substack.com/p/the-age-of-academic-slop-is-upon https://hegemon.substack.com/p/the-age-of-academic-slop-is-u... Taking CV-filler from 80% to 95% of published academic work is yet another revolutionary breakthrough on the road to superintelligence.
- eleventen 10mo ago> scholarly dark matter that exists to pad CVs and satisfy bureaucratic metrics, but which no one actually reads or relies upon. Is it cynical to believe this is already true and has been forever? Is it naive to hope that when AI can do this work, we will all admit that much of the work was never worth doing in the first place, our academic institutions are broken, and new incentives are sorely needed? I’m reminded of a chapter in Abundance where Ezra Klein notes how successful (NIH?) grant awardees are getting older over time, nobody will take risks on young scientists, and everyone is spending more of their time churning out bureaucratic compliance than doing science.
- jadenpeterson 10mo agoNot to be a luddite, but large language models are fundamentally not meant for tasks of this nature. And listen to this: > Most notably, it provides confidence levels in its findings, which Cheeseman emphasizes is crucial. These 'confidence levels' are suspect. You can ask Claude today, "What is your confidence in __" and it will, unsurprisingly, give a 'confidence interval'. I'd like to better understand the system implemented by Cheeseman. Otherwise I find the whole thing, heh, cheesy!
- djtango 10mo agoCan't LLMs be fed the entire corpus of literature to synthesise (if not "insight") useful intersections? Not to mention much better search than what was available when I was a lowly grad...
- fatherwavelet 10mo agoI use Gemini almost obsessively but I don't think feeding the entire corpus of a subject would work great. The problem is so much of consensus is wrong and it is going to start by giving you the consensus answer on anything. There are subjects I can get it to tell me the consensus answer then say "what about x" and it completely changes and contradicts the first answer because x contradicts the standard consensus orthodoxy. To me it is not much different than going to the library to research something. The library is not useless because the books don't read themselves or because there are numerous books on a subject that contradict each other. Gaining insight from reading the book is my role. I suspect much LLM criticism is from people who neither much use LLMs nor learn much of anything new anyway.
- djtango 10mo agoI never suggested I want an LLM to be the definitive answer to a question but I'm certain that there are a lot of low hanging fruit across disciplines where the limit is the awareness of people in one field of the work of another field, and the limiting factor was the friction in discovery - I can't see how a specialised research tool powered by LLMs and RAG wouldn't be a net gain for research if only to generate promising new leads. Throwing compute to mine a search space seems like one of the less controversial ways to use technology...
- bpodgursky 10mo ago[flagged]
- saagarjha 10mo ago[flagged]
- inferiorhuman 10mo ago[flagged]
- dang 10mo agoYou broke the site guidelines badly and repeatedly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- baxtr 10mo ago[flagged]
- grayhatter 10mo agoHave you done anything interesting with this army that you can share and you're proud of? Specifically something concrete you can link to, not just something you can imagine or describe?
- WD-42 10mo agoDon't worry, they have multiple agents working on that, right now.
- utopiah 10mo agoNothing I can see on https://github.com/bpodgursky/ https://github.com/bpodgursky/ nor https://bpodgursky.com/projects/ https://bpodgursky.com/projects/ but I'd be curious. Honestly it's a pattern when arguing about the topic : - wow AI is amazing! - OK, why? - because it can do so much stuff! I'm making so much projects and earning a lot! - cool, care to share a link to anything? - ... radio silence or yet another NES emulator or something that is clearly so curated it might have taken more work than without any "AI assistance"
- desireco42 10mo agoBy paying Anthropic large sums of money ?!? Funny you say that.
- black_13 10mo ago[dead]
- LegitShady 10mo agooh look another advertisement for anthropic
- Ronsenshi 10mo agoSteady stream of these very regularly. Lately feels like place is a marketing board AI-anything companies.
- CyberDildonics 10mo agoI say hacker news should just be for low information clickbait headlines and daily pop culture articles that have nothing to do with technology, not AI advertisements.
- falloutx 10mo agoAnything posted by anthropic always gets to the front page.
- signatoremo 10mo agoTheir blog is their advertisement? You mean water is wet? As for why it’s featured on HN, do you think it’s less important than the politics that is Nobel peace prize that is top of the front page at the moment?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- falloutx 10mo agoOf course this comes from Anthropic PR. Stanford basically has a stake in making LLMs and AI hype so no wonder they are the most receptive.
- blahblaher 10mo agooh look, marketing, disguised as "news"
- tim-tday 10mo agoThis will quickly corrupt the scientific record.
- jonplackett 10mo ago*source, maker of Claude.
- sieep 10mo agoHonestly, it was fun ride HN but the never ending AI blog spam & advertising is 'gumming the works'. The writing is on the wall that AI will continue to dominate discussion on here for the forseeable future (yawn...) Its time for me to move to a space where the AI bros are not, wherever that may be. I hope to see some of you there!