SIR DEMIS HASSABIS says he started Google DeepMind to create “the ultimate tool for science”. In the years since, DeepMind’s research has grace(为……增光；登上)d the cover of Nature nine times. At the beginning that was for breakthroughs in AI itself, but its more recent successes have come from applying AI to other areas of scientific endeavour(努力；事业、活动). Its protein-folding model AlphaFold, for example, earned Sir Demis a share of a Nobel prize in 2024.
戴密斯·哈萨比斯爵士说，他创办谷歌 DeepMind 是为了打造“科学的终极工具”。此后这些年，DeepMind 的研究成果九次登上《自然》杂志封面。起初，这些突破都发生在 AI 自身领域；但近来的成功，则来自把 AI 应用到其他科学领域。例如，其蛋白质折叠模型 AlphaFold 就为哈萨比斯爵士赢得了 2024 年诺贝尔奖的一部分。
DeepMind’s peers are catching up. This autumn, OpenAI reshaped the terrain(地形；领域、版图) of mathematics, first by solving a landmark Millennium Prize problem and then by publishing solutions to more than 300 open questions in a single day. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s boss, declared in September that the company had discovered a potential successor to CRISPR, a gene-editing technique, using its Claude model, promising that AI-powered biology is on an “exponential trend(指数级增长趋势)”.
DeepMind 的同行们正在迎头赶上。今年秋天，OpenAI 重塑了数学的版图：先是解出了一道里程碑式的千禧年大奖难题，随后又在一天之内公布了 300 多个未解问题的解答。Anthropic 的老板达里奥·阿莫代伊 9 月宣称，公司利用其 Claude 模型发现了 CRISPR 这种基因编辑技术的潜在替代方案，并断言 AI 驱动的生物学正处在“指数级增长”的轨道上。
Smaller companies are joining in: in 2024 Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based research group, unveil(发布、揭幕)ed an “AI scientist” which its creators claimed could complete all the tasks required to write a scientific paper. In a peer-reviewed article published in Nature this March, Sakana reported that the AI scientist wrote a paper which passed the first round of peer review for a top-tier AI conference—a hurdle which defeated almost a third of the human-written papers.(今年 3 月，Sakana 在《自然》发表的同行评审文章中报告称，其 AI 科学家撰写的论文通过了某顶级 AI 会议的首轮同行评审——而这一关曾让近三分之一的人类论文折戟。)
规模较小的公司也在加入：2024 年，总部位于东京的研究机构 Sakana AI 发布了一款“AI 科学家”，其开发者声称它能完成撰写科学论文所需的全部工作。今年 3 月，Sakana 在《自然》上发表的一篇同行评审文章中报告称，这位 AI 科学家撰写的论文通过了某顶级 AI 会议的首轮同行评审——而这一关曾让近三分之一的人类投稿论文折戟。
Greater goods
更大的善
