The news was so jolting that, when it arrived, Professor José Penadés had to take a break from shopping. "I said, 'please leave me alone for an hour, I need to digest this thing,'" he later told the BBC. After working for a decade with a team at Imperial College London to figure out why certain superbugs are immune to antibiotics, Penadés gave a Google AI tool a prompt about the central problem. The "co-scientist" tool had just given him several hypotheses in response, with the top answer confirming the team's conclusion, within 48 hours.
The professor assumed the AI tool must have tapped his team's body of work, because it hadn't been published or shared with anyone. "I wrote an email to Google," Penadés said, "to say, 'you have access to my computer, is that right?'" The answer was no. The tool agreed with the Imperial College researchers on their leading hypothesis, that superbugs can form a tail from different viruses—something like having a key to use when moving from house to house, Penadés said—that enables them to spread among species.
Several universities participated in Google's tests by asking the tool a question whose answer could speed up research, per Imperial College. Google posted results Wednesday. The idea is to help researchers, Google and Penadés said, not replace them. In Penadés' case, the co-scientist went beyond checking the team's work. "It's not just that the top hypothesis they provide was the right one. It's that they provide another four, and all of them made sense," he told the BBC. "And for one of them, we never thought about it, and we're now working on that." (More artificial intelligence stories.)
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