Inside a former watch factory in central London, rows of humming white freezers hold barcoded glass tubes containing an estimated 100 billion genes. The facility’s co-founder, Dr. Oliver Vince, says two of the boxes contain 10 times more information than all the text on the internet. His company, Basecamp Research, aims to use vast DNA collections to build artificial intelligence capable of understanding biology, while recent claims about AI solving a major mathematics problem have raised questions about how research data is handled.
Building an AI model for biology
Basecamp Research plans to collect as much DNA as possible to create AI that can “speak the language of biology.” The approach mirrors the way technology companies in the United States and China gather documents from the internet to train large language models (LLMs), which underpin many current AI systems.
Like many people in business and academia, Vince believes AI could significantly improve scientific research. But the technology has also generated controversy.
Questions over an AI mathematics claim
Last month, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, announced that it had solved one of the major open problems in mathematics, involving the famous Navier–Stokes equations. The company said its AI agent had cracked the problem within 88 hours.
The organization that awards prizes to people who solve such problems said the problem “appears to have been resolved,” while noting that its review process would take time.
Hours before OpenAI’s announcement, however, New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster raised concerns. He formed an independent team with Levent Alpöge, a mathematician whose day job is at rival company Anthropic.
The team was working toward the same goal and had saved its drafts in Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool. Buckmaster said his collaborators received information that news of their progress had “reached” OpenAI, although he did not say how.
He asked whether research results stored in Codex could have been reflected in OpenAI’s own research. Buckmaster stressed that he was “not criticizing anyone.”
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
