AI For Science
4 items across 1 edition. First seen Sat 12 Sep, last seen Sat 12 Sep.
- Terence Tao published the declaration on his blog on 11 September; it is signed by 25 Fields Medallists and argues that "solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight".
- The signatories write that AI solutions are "announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others", and warn that without that step "AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive and the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost".
- TechCrunch reports that New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleged OpenAI pressed him to exclude an Anthropic collaborator from credit on a mathematics problem, and questioned whether OpenAI had drawn on earlier Codex work to produce its own proof.
- The full text of the declaration is hosted at mathandai.org, which blocked our fetcher, so the quotations above are taken from Tao's own post and TechCrunch. Neither source gives a count of signatories who are also AI-lab collaborators.
- Gizmodo reported on 11 September at 9:05 pm ET that OpenAI research lead Dan Roberts announced by tweet that the company would drop its sponsorship; OpenAI had been supplying $10,000 of the $20,000 in credits available per team, and OpenAI and Anthropic together had pledged $2 million in credits.
- The withdrawal followed an open letter from current and former Caltech mathematicians saying AI firms have "advanced a campaign of scientific misinformation about the goals of mathematical research" and describing the solutions as having "destructive impacts for the mathematical community".
- Mathathon organisers told Gizmodo "We do not anticipate that this will affect the event in any substantial way", adding they were "currently in talks with other firms who are willing to provide a similar amount per team". The first round begins 30 October, with each team given 40 hours and $20,000 in tokens.
- Gizmodo is the only outlet we could open carrying the dollar figures; OpenAI did not give a statement in the piece beyond Roberts's post.
- Business Insider reported on 11 September that Discovery Loop is seeking funding at a valuation of roughly $50 billion, up from the approximately $10 billion valuation at which it was seeking $1 billion just weeks earlier.
- The company was founded by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, and says it aims to "use AI to accelerate scientific and engineering research through the parallel execution of thousands of experiments".
- Its initial funding was led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures with Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins and Doerr Capital participating; Alphabet is a founding investor and cloud partner.
- A Discovery Loop spokesperson declined to comment and Dean did not respond. There is no confirmation the financing will close at that valuation, and the company has no disclosed commercial product.
- The study, published in Clinical Cancer Research on 11 September as "Spatial Configuration of Pancreatic Cancer Is Associated with Disease Recurrence after Neoadjuvant Therapy and Curative-Intent Resection" (DOI 10.1158/1078-0432.ccr-25-4968), analysed tissue from 203 patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
- The AI measured "tissue shape, fragmentation and the degree to which the cancer and stroma were intermixed" on standard pathology slides. "High-risk patients had a 71% higher adjusted risk of recurrence" in one model and "more than twice the adjusted risk" in another, while "the amount of residual cancer alone did not reliably separate patients at higher and lower risk".
- High-risk spatial patterns "contained fewer immune cells within the cancer itself, with immune cells tending to collect around the tumor instead of entering it" — a mechanism, not just a correlation, and one that runs on slides hospitals already produce.
- Dr Ryan Carr said "the results are promising but need to be confirmed in prospective studies before this approach could be used to inform clinical decision-making". Mayo Clinic's own newsroom page blocked our fetcher, so the figures above are as Medical Xpress reports them.