Category: Uncategorized

AI prospects for biology

Banging through it all, though, to come up with a model that fit the data, tweaking and prodding and adjusting and starting all over when it didn’t work – which is what the evolutionary algorithms did – takes something else: inhuman patience and focus. That’s what computers are really good at, relentless grinding. I can’t call it intelligence, and I can call it artificial intelligence only in the sense that an inflatable palm is an artificial tree. I realize that we do have to call it something, though, but the term “artificial intelligence” probably confuses more than it illuminates.

2022-12-09: Some new hopes for paper mining, but see this caveat.

SciHub has 88m papers, and if we assume that we can extrapolate the Semantic Scholar dataset statistics (2600 words per article) with some paper loss due to old/faulty PDFs, it could be reasonable to expect 200b tokens of scientific knowledge, 10x bigger than the Minerva training set of Arxiv papers (21b tokens). This is a 10x boost in technical knowledge that would exist inside current LLMs.

There will be a universal language of physical science work that does not speak directly to humans. Monolithic cloud labs alone may not be optimal deployment of automated biology in the future. Projects like PyHamilton demonstrate growing open source communities for benchtop automation, and the SayCan collaboration by Google and Everyday Robots is a reminder of how multifunctional robots are steadily progressing (as well as ultralight indoor drones). As the cost curve goes down and the natural-language programmability goes up, there may be an intersection at which it is easier to convert an existing lab environment/protocol into an automated one, rather than to outsource work to a physically separate facility. Or, there may be a steady-state solution that some tasks are optimal for large automated warehouses and others are optimized for more distributed, edge labs. If there is any future of multiple robotic work providers, then interoperability will become a bottleneck, which will motivate a universal formalization of life science work.

Jackson Heights Food Tour

Whether you’re just visiting New York or you’ve lived here all your life, chances are you haven’t spent enough time exploring Jackson Heights, Queens. Take it from someone who lives there—truly knowing this immigrant-dominated neighborhood, where Colombians and Mexicans rub shoulders with Tibetans and Thai—is an impossible task. It’s the New York dream writ small: astonishingly diverse, always changing, and endlessly interesting. Few other places on earth are as culturally rich and complex, and even fewer are dense enough to walk through in an afternoon.

That’s enough of a reason to learn more about Jackson Heights. Then there’s the food—dumpling shops hidden in cell phone stores, tacos and tortas cooked on every block, late night ceviche hawkers under the rumbling 7 train. Step off the subway and the air itself tastes good: grilled lamb and the perfume of 100 curries.

Mapping Rome underground

We journeyed via the icy, crystal clear waters of subterranean aqueducts that feed the Trevi fountain and 2000 year old sewers which still function beneath the Roman Forum today, to decadent, labyrinthine catacombs. Our laser scans map these hidden treasures, revealing for the first time the complex network of tunnels, chambers and passageways without which Rome could not have survived as a city of 1M people.