Anthropic · AI Agent · Claude · New York · MIT Technology Review
Instead, it argued that the particular result may not be the one mathematicians care most
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That’s part of what concerns Lucas Harrington, the biologist who wrote the post critiquing Anthropic’s announcement.
Key facts
- What Anthropic says its system of 950 agents found after 21 hours was not a brand-new sequence
- Whittling 200,000 candidates down to a few worth exploring is no small feat; it is legitimate scientific work
- AI agents are not yet creative enough to carry out genuinely innovative open-ended AI research, it seems
- That’s part of what concerns Lucas Harrington, the biologist who wrote the post critiquing Anthropic’s announcement
Summary
Last Wednesday, Anthropic announced that earlier this year it had launched a molecular biology lab, where Claude agents read and conjecture about hard biology problems and human scientists run experiments on what they report. To understand what Anthropic says its system did, imagine you’re flipping through a library of millions of DNA sequences, amassed as scientists sequence more and more of the living world. What Anthropic says its system of 950 agents found after 21 hours was not a brand-new sequence. These claims have angered some biologists. It’s a reminder that even if AI does something impressive—like finding a pattern in a mass of biological data that would be difficult to perceive with human eyes alone—the result itself may not constitute a breakthrough for science.