this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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No duh - why would it have any ability to do that sort of task?
Part of the reason for studies like this is to debunk peoples' expectations of AI's capabilities. A lot of people are under the impression that cgatGPT can do ANYTHING and can think and reason when in reality it is a bullshitter that does nothing more than mimic what it thinks a suitable answer looks like. Just like a parrot.
It doesn't check the stuff it generates other than on grammatical and orthographical errors. It's not intelligent or has knowledge outside of how to create text. The text looks useful, but it doesn't know what it contains in a way something intelligent would.
Recent papers have shown that LLMs build internal world models but about a topic as niche and complicated as cancer treatment, a chatbot based on GPT-3.5 be woefully ill-equipped to do any kind of proper reasoning.
People who understand the technology did not assume that, but yes the general public has a lot of misconceptions about it.
If you want an AI that can create cancer treatment, you need to train it on creating cancer treatment, and not just use one that is trained on general knowledge. Even if you train it on science publications, all it can now reliably do is mimic a science journal since it has not been trained on how to parse the knowledge in the journal itself.
Which is exactly the problem people think has been solved but isn't anywhere near being solved. It cannot comprehend semantics, the meaning of things is completely beyond it and all other AIs.
Unfortunately saying I made a thing that creates vaguely human looking speech with little content isn't astonishing to most people hence they are looking for something useful this breakthrough machine must be able to do and then they don't find anything leading to these articles.
I don't know about AI, but there are already computer programs that try many different combinations of, for example, chemical structures with known pharmacological properties and then output new drugs that could possibly be used to treat something. Of course you have to verify with research and studies.
I'm sure there will be AI's or machine learning programs, if not already, that can do this as well and perhaps improve upon the process. But they would need to be specifically trained for that purpose. ChatGPT is a LLM, it's made to generate language that fits a given prompt, I would not expect it to be great at creating cancer treatments and I'm not sure why we needed a study to learn that. OpenAI tells you already that the results can be inaccurate or outright wrong.