AI is already making impressive advances in coding — an AI is now among the top 200 coders in the world — but these advances might soon be coming to the hard sciences.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has said that AI agents will begin coming up with novel scientific discoveries and theorems in two years. “The world of agents is right here with us now,” she said in an interview. “And so where does that take us? Which is maybe next year, maybe it’s more like 24 months out — I think we are going to start to see, and we may already be seeing novel scientific discoveries, theorems that have never been proven by a human yet being proven by an agent,” she added.
Friar said that researchers already had indications that AI systems were coming up with such novel discoveries. “This is not the world of kind of sci-fi. We have heard from a number of really the best and the brightest, right on the edge of frontier research (researchers) say, “I think it might have discovered something novel, but I actually don’t know because I need to go away now and prove that the thing that Deep Research brought me or the model brought me is new — and is right””.
“And so I think we are actually shifting into that world already. Particularly in the university setting, where you have graduates, PhD levels and so on, I think (AI agents) are now pushing that border of science. I mean, there’s a reason why the national labs in the United States use our models from OpenAI — deeply firewalled — but are using it for frontier research right now,” she said.
OpenAI isn’t the only company that’s talked about how AI will revolutionize scientific research. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI will lead to a century of progress in 5-10 years. Google Deepmind’s David Silver has said that AI mathematicians will transform the whole of mathematics, and even economist Larry Summers claims that AI will lead to 50 years of scientific progress in 5-7 years. And with OpenAI saying that its models are already being used in frontier research labs, a new age in scientific discovery might be closer than we think.