Notes 240520 153817
Notes 240520 153817
Presentation of Finding
-
Hypothesis -
A hypothesis is a function that
best describes the target in
supervised machine learning.
The hypothesis that an algorithm
would come up depends upon the
data and also depends upon the
restrictions and bias that we have
imposed on the data.
There's a ridiculous amount of
stuff being written these days
about artificial intelligence, and
here I go adding more to the
pile. I got to thinking about this
item in Nature on the possibility of
AI-driven hypothesis generation.
Getting beyond language models,
though, now that's a wide field
with vast amounts of hype in it.
Hypothesis generation lands here,
an important part of the general
questions about the impact of
AI/ML on science.
The question is whether AI
systems can look over data sets
and come up with such questions.
I don't think it's fair to ask them to
invent quantum mechanics, but
we don't have to be at that level.
As the Nature article linked at first
notes, the more general the
hypothesis, the harder it is to
come up with, and the fewer
examples there are of AI being
useful. It seems likely to me that
the more likely uses are going to
come from the well-known
capacity of machines and
software to be more able to grind
things out than humans do.