Did Anthropic’s AI genuinely make a scientific discovery on its own?
When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used A.I. agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology.
Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules — which Anthropic calls ARTs — for four years.
Dr. Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic’s A.I. models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.
In doing so, Dr. Mestre said he and colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.
“So, for me, the most important question is not ‘Were ARTs already known?’ They were,” Dr. Mestre said in an interview. The issue instead, he added, is whether Anthropic’s A.I. actually reasoned its way to the results, or whether it was guided to them based partly on his own work.
“My concern is that this information was used to train future versions of the models,” Dr. Mestre said of his own research. “I think it’s important to raise this possibility.”
In a statement on Sunday, Anthropic said: “We are not aware of any previously published work describing the ART system we recently found. Claude was also not trained on any user transcripts, and our molecular biology team has no such access, either.”
Anthropic said that Claude’s key contribution was identifying an array of RNA molecules and a protein associated with reverse transcriptase in a system. But Dr. Maestre said that he and his colleagues had made that discovery over a year ago.
Similar worries surfaced recently when researchers at OpenAI claimed to have solved a longstanding mathematics puzzle. A leading mathematician noted that he had been using the company’s A.I. to work toward a solution for some time.
Anthropic, which is expected to go public at a valuation potentially as high as $2 trillion, has touted biological research as a central part of its mission. [Continue reading…]