🔬 An Oscar, Two Asteroids, and the Algorithm in Your sklearn: John Platt on AI for Science

Latent Space · 3 weeks ago · 51

John Platt discusses Google’s Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) and how AI can automate science by optimizing “scoreable” problems like contrail climate counterfactual modeling. ERA uses a tree of prior experiments and a step change from Gemini 2.0 to 2.5, which the article says went from not working to working well. The approach shifts scientific work toward faster, automated search with predictive models that scientists must validate to avoid metric and dataset overfitting when the optimization objective can be “hacked.”