“I’m writing this post because when I look at all the publicly available information I reluctantly come to the view that there’s a likely chance (60%+) that no-human-involved AI R&D – an AI system powerful enough that it could plausibly autonomously build its own successor – happens by the end of 2028.

This is a big deal.

I don’t know how to wrap my head around it.

It’s a reluctant view because the implications are so large that I feel dwarfed by them, and I’m not sure society is ready for the kinds of changes implied by achieving automated AI R&D.

I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.

The purpose of this essay is to enumerate why I think the takeoff towards fully automated AI R&D is happening.”

From Import AI.

“Johnson & Johnson is using artificial intelligence to slash by half the time it ‌takes to generate new leads for developing drugs, the company’s chief information officer said on Monday.

Discovering new products outright and bringing them to market using AI is not yet possible, but J&J is using the new technology to screen the “potential universe” for promising chemical compounds or ​biologics, CIO Jim Swanson said at the Reuters Momentum AI event in New York…

J&J is also using AI to streamline preparation of documents for regulators. The traditional process for a clinical trial report can take 700 to 900 hours, the CIO ​said.
That time has gone from ‘700 ​hours to about 15 ⁠minutes,’ Swanson said.”

From Reuters.

“Researchers are a step closer to understanding volcanic lightning, one of the most spectacular atmospheric phenomena, which can be seen playing among the clouds of smoke and ash during an eruption. The intensity is extreme: the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai eruption, in the Tongan archipelago in 2022, produced more than 2,600 lightning flashes a minute stretching up to 19 miles (31km) above sea level.

We know that storm clouds become electrically charged as a result of collisions between ice crystals rising in updraughts and falling particles of graupel, or soft hail. The ice picks up positive charge and the hail negative. What has puzzled scientists is how a volcanic plume, which is dry and consists of ash and rock fragments, could pick up charge. Particles made from the same rocky material should not do that during collisions.

New research published in Nature from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria shows the secret lies in a fine coating of carbon-rich molecules. Perfectly clean particles of silica did not tend to pick up charge, but where there was a carbon coating, charge transfer happened in collisions. The effect could be produced simply by heating the silica, as there are enough carbon-containing molecules in normal air to produce surface contamination.”

From The Guardian.

“AI has solved one of the problems in FrontierMath: Open Problems, our benchmark of real research problems that mathematicians have tried and failed to solve.

The newly-solved problem came from Will Brian, who had placed it in the Moderately Interesting category. It is a conjecture from a paper he wrote with Paul Larson in 2019. They were unable to solve it at the time, or in several attempts since.”

From Epoch AI.