New ChatGPT-style tool will use AI to create 'digital Leonardo da Vinci'

Rob Waugh
·Contributor
·3 min read
Can AI be a polymath, mastering multiple disciplines, like Leonardo da Vinci? (Getty)
Can AI be a polymath, mastering multiple disciplines, like Leonardo da Vinci? (Getty)
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Move over Einstein, the next generation of scientific discoveries might come from robots, not people.

An international team of scientists including researchers from University of Cambridge hope to use the same technology behind ChatGPT to build an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool for scientific discovery.

The researchers hope the AI can be a 'polymath' mastering multiple disciplines, like historical figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei.

While ChatGPT deals in words and sentences, the team's AI will learn from numerical data and physics simulations to help scientists in modelling everything from supergiant stars to the Earth's climate.

Polymathic AI principal investigator Shirley Ho, a group leader at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City, said: "This will completely change how people use AI and machine learning in science."

Recommended reading

How will this help scientists?

The idea behind Polymathic AI "is similar to how it's easier to learn a new language when you already know five languages", said Ho.

Starting with a large, pre-trained model, known as a foundation model, can be both faster and more accurate than building a scientific model from scratch, the researchers said.

That can be true even if the training data isn't obviously relevant to the problem at hand.

Hologram of the artificial intelligence robot showing up from binary code.
Can AI come up with scientific breakthroughs? (Getty)

Co-investigator Miles Cranmer, from Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Institute of Astronomy, said: "It's been difficult to carry out academic research on full-scale foundation models due to the scale of computing power required."

What is a polymath, and why create a digital one?

The idea behind polymathic AI is to create an AI system that masters many different fields – in the same way as human polymaths who master many disciplines, the researchers said.

Co-investigator Siavash Golkar, a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics, said: "In previous centuries, some of the most influential scientists were polymaths with a wide-ranging grasp of different fields.

"This allowed them to see connections that helped them get inspiration for their work. With each scientific domain becoming more and more specialised, it is increasingly challenging to stay at the forefront of multiple fields. I think this is a place where AI can help us by aggregating information from many disciplines.

"Polymathic AI can show us commonalities and connections between different fields that might have been missed."

What are the challenges?

ChatGPT has well-known limitations when it comes to accuracy – for instance, the chatbot says 2,023 times 1,234 is 2,497,582 rather than the correct answer of 2,496,382.

Polymathic AI's project will avoid many of those pitfalls, Ho said, by treating numbers as actual numbers, not just characters on the same level as letters and punctuation.

The training data will also use real scientific datasets that capture the physics underlying the cosmos.

Transparency and openness are a big part of the project, Ho said.

"We want to make everything public. We want to democratise AI for science in such a way that, in a few years, we'll be able to serve a pre-trained model to the community that can help improve scientific analyses across a wide variety of problems and domains."