A bank of white freezers hums away at a former watch factory in central London. Inside: dozens of small boxes with barcoded glass tubes, collectively containing one hundred billion genes. Just two boxes may hold 10 times more information than all the text on the internet, says Dr Oliver Vince, the facility’s co-founder.
His firm, Basecamp Research, plans to collect as much DNA as possible to create an artificial intelligence that can speak the language of biology, in the same way that US and Chinese tech firms have hoovered up written material online to create Large Language Models (LLMs), the basis of current AI systems.
Vince, like many in business and academic research, believes AI will supercharge scientific research. But increasingly, it also comes with controversy.
Last month, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, said it had solved one of maths’ great unsolved problems, relating to the famous Navier–Stokes equations. The company said its AI agents had cracked it in 88 hours. The body that runs a prize for whoever can solve the problem said it had “apparently been settled”, but that its review would take time.
But hours before the announcement, Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University, went public with concerns. He formed an independent team with Levent Alpöge, a mathematician employed by day by the rival company Anthropic.
They had been working towards the same goal, and kept their drafts in OpenAI’s coding tool, Codex. Buckmaster said that his co-researcher was tipped off that news of their progress had “reached” OpenAI, though he did not specify how. He asked whether his research, stored in Codex, could have fed into OpenAI’s own work, though he stressed he was “not accusing anyone of anything”.
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