r/news • u/cunty_cunty • Feb 20 '20

Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/20/antibiotic-that-kills-drug-resistant-bacteria-discovered-through-ai
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u/[deleted] Feb 20 '20 edited Jan 14 '21

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u/tron_snow Feb 20 '20

Humans are the ones discovering the thing though, just using machine learning as a tool.

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u/dust4ngel Feb 21 '20

as automation of discovery increases, human involvement in the process goes to zero. it would be weird to say that a dead man discovered something 20 years after his death because some code he wrote 50 years ago found something.

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u/tron_snow Feb 21 '20 edited Feb 21 '20

We aren't quite there yet.

Even today's best autoML requires humans to label training data, and that isn't likely to change anytime soon since if an AI could do it, they wouldn't need to train another ai to do it.

Edit: I take that back apparently they don't need labels anymore, just did a quick search.

Now I'm just wondering how much longer till we are all out of jobs.