The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI

Miles Cranmer, a Cambridge researcher, aims to accelerate scientific discovery through AI. He's developing "foundation models" for general scientific use, similar to ChatGPT but focused on accurate simulations and predictions across research areas. In 2023, Cranmer and colleagues launched the Polymathic AI initiative to create these models. Challenges include improving AI's out-of-distribution predictions and extracting insights from neural networks. By training models on large scientific datasets, Cranmer hopes to enable researchers to do more with limited data and potentially speed up scientific breakthroughs.