I'm not a scientist but I like to LARP as one in my free time, and I have found ChatGPT/Claude extremely useful for research, and I'd go as far as to say it supercharged it for me.

When I'm learning about a new subject, I'll ask Claude to give me five papers that are relevant to what I'm learning about. Often three of the papers are either irrelevant or kind of shit, but that leaves 2/5 of them that are actually useful. Then from those papers, I'll ask Claude to give me a "dependency graph" by recursing on the citations, and then I start bottom-up.

This was game-changing for me. Reading advanced papers can be really hard for a variety of reasons, but one big one can simply be because you don't know the terminology and vernacular that the paper writers are using. Sometimes you can reasonably infer it from context, but sometimes I infer incorrectly, or simply have to skip over a section because I don't understand it. By working from the "lowest common denominator" of papers first, it generally makes the entire process easier.

I was already doing this to some extent prior to LLMs, as in I would get to a spot I didn't really understand, jump to a relevant citation, and recurse until I got to an understanding, but that was kind of a pain in the ass, so having a nice pretty graph for me makes it considerably easier for me to read and understand more papers.

It's a very complicated matter honestly. This is a new height that AI has reached, even though it follows the usual methods of success that it has had.

What strikes me as unusual though is that they do make a point of saying things like "this is a general purpose model that wasn't trained on the problem" among a few other things as if that's new. The last bountied problem they accomplished used a public model that ALSO didn't rely on specialized training. And that didn't make their blog.

I absolutely believe that AI will supercharge science.

I do not believe it will replace humans.

Not only it supercharged science it supercharges scientist. Research on any narrow topic is a different world now. Agents can read 50 papers for you and tell you what's where. This was impossible with pure text search. Looking up non-trivial stuff and having complex things explained to you is also amazing. I mean they don't even have to be complex, but can be for adjacent field where these are basics from the other field but happen to be useful in yours. The list goes on. It's a hammer you need to watch your fingers, it's not good at cutting wood, but it's definitely worth having.

Isn’t that a joke? It already has supercharged science

It will notice things that humans may have missed. That said - it can only work off the body of work SOMEONE did in the past.

To be strict, Math is not Science.

But AI is supercharging Math like there is no tomorrow.