It Got to My Field

For the folks who found this blog from Anthropic’s site, welcome! For everyone else, I’d better give some context. Last month, I had a blog post titled “It Only Counts When AI Gets to My Field”. The title was a joke, the content less so. I said that if some of the longstanding problems of my old research field got solved by AI, then I’d sit up and take notice. The post turned out to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, after some folks at Anthropic read it and decided to tackle one of the outstanding problems I mentioned. They then invited me to write a post about it on their science blog. The post is here. I recommend reading it, then coming back. The rest of this post will be a little Q&A. Q: At the end of that post, it says Anthropic paid you for your time. Can we trust what you wrote? A: When I agreed to write the post, I made it clear that I was going to give my own opinion, not write an ad for Anthropic. They could propose light edits, but that’s it. And I avoided signing…