Science was widely seen as stuck in a productivity slump, but recent early results from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind in drug discovery, fusion and rare disease research suggest AI is starting to speed it up.
Only a few years ago, very smart researchers were publishing papers asking whether ideas were getting harder to find. Now Anthropic says its AI has made progress toward a food allergy treatment, and Google's Gemini is credited with helping on nuclear fusion reactor design.
One number stuck with me: research expansion has been estimated to lower average researcher ability by 37% to 53%. AI simply removes the constraint on the number of researchers. Short on people? Build more chips.
These results are still very preliminary, and the author calls them just minor, early efforts.
It took centuries to train a human scientist; an AI reads the whole literature in hours. That gap is hard to digest.
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