A bank of white freezers hums away at a former watch factory in central London.
asserted
bank → hum → London
Just two boxes may hold 10 times more information than all the text on the internet, says Dr Oliver Vince, the facility's co-founder.
uncertain
Vince → hold → internet
His firm, Basecamp Research, plans to collect as much DNA as possible to create an artificial intelligence that can speak the language of biology, in the same way that US and Chinese tech firms have hoovered up written material online to create Large Language Models (LLMs), the basis of current AI systems.
asserted
firms → plan → systems
Vince, like many in business and academic research, believes AI will supercharge scientific research.
asserted
AI → believe → research
But increasingly, it also comes with controversy.
asserted
it → come → controversy
Last month, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, said it had solved one of maths' great unsolved problems, relating to the famous Navier–Stokes equations.
asserted
it → say → equations
The company said its AI agents had cracked it in 88 hours.
asserted
agents → say → hours
The body that runs a prize for whoever can solve the problem said it had "apparently been settled", but that its review would take time.
asserted
review → run → time
But hours before the announcement, Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University, went public with concerns.
asserted
Buckmaster → go → concerns
He formed an independent team with Levent Alpöge, a mathematician employed by day by the rival company Anthropic.
asserted
He → form → company
They had been working towards the same goal, and kept their drafts in OpenAI's coding tool, Codex.
asserted
They → work → tool
Buckmaster said that his co-researcher was tipped off that news of their progress had "reached" OpenAI, though he did not specify how.
asserted
he → say → OpenAI
He asked whether his research, stored in Codex, could have fed into OpenAI's own work, though he stressed he was "not accusing anyone of anything".
uncertain
he → ask → anything
OpenAI said that nobody at the company, human or AI, saw the other teams' work before it was published.
asserted
it → say → work
Initially it said that while unlikely, it could not "rule out" that anonymised data from use of its products may have helped improve its models.
uncertain
data → say → models
Days later, it said Buckmaster's Codex prompts from the two months before the announcement "could not have influenced the system in any way".
uncertain
prompts → say → way
It's a complicated story; we still don't fully know what happened.
asserted
what → know → ?
But it highlights a growing issue about the use of AI in science.
asserted
it → highlight → science
Usually, those words make us conjure up images of robots building terrible genetically-engineered viruses, or chemical weapons, to wipe out humanity.
asserted
us → make → humanity
But there's a more subtle problem that hasn't attracted the same headline-grabbing attention: that AI could undermine faith in the scientific process, raising questions about the novelty and accuracy of research.
uncertain
AI → be → research
It's well known that AI chatbots like Claude or Gemini can sometimes hallucinate things that simply aren't true.
asserted
that → know → things
They will tell you about a film that never existed, or a quote that was never said.
asserted
that → tell → film
Now there is evidence that this is increasingly happening in science.
asserted
this → be → science
Eventually, it's feared, it will become difficult to separate true scientific discovery from AI-generated fiction.
asserted
it → fear → fiction
And all of this could threaten to erode - if not explode - the rock on which scientific research rests: trust.
uncertain
research → threaten → which
A 'watershed moment'
One threat is to scientific journals, the guardians of scientific integrity, which are seen to be failing to deal with a tsunami of AI-generated distortions.
asserted
which → see → distortions
"Generative AI has basically disrupted the whole scientific process," says Dalmeet Singh Chawla, a science journalist who has spent a decade reporting on research misconduct.
asserted
who → disrupt → misconduct
He tells the BBC that publishers' integrity staff - the people who screen submissions for accuracy and reliability - will need to "drastically increase [in number and effort] if they're anywhere near the fight".
asserted
they → tell → fight
He says: "Right now, it seems like they're not."
asserted
they → say → ?
On the face of it, AI seems just the right tool to power scientific research.
asserted
AI → seem → research
Scientists deal with huge amounts of information.
asserted
Scientists → deal → information
Telescopes and particle accelerators, for example, collect billions of data points – too large for the brain to comprehend.
asserted
brain → collect → points
AI can pick the scientific highlights from the surrounding humdrum.
asserted
AI → pick → humdrum
The poster child of scientific AI is the UK-based firm Google DeepMind, which in 2020 solved one of biology's biggest problems: how proteins in living things fold into their precise shapes.
asserted
proteins → base → shapes
It may sound dull, but proteins are the tiny machines that make life work, and the shapes they fold into determine what they can do; from building cells and fighting infection to helping form the tissues and organs of the body.
uncertain
they → sound → body
Before AI, scientists had to conduct time-consuming experiments in the lab.
asserted
scientists → have → lab
Then, Google DeepMind developed an AI model called AlphaFold that accurately predicted 200 million protein folds in just one year.
asserted
that → develop → year
The equivalent experimental work would have taken hundreds of millions of years in laboratories.
asserted
work → take → laboratories
The firm gave the results away for free to researchers.
asserted
firm → give → researchers
The head of DeepMind and the project's lead scientist were both awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
asserted
head → award → Chemistry
…and 57 more, not listed.
The Aporia
