From Eric Kvaalen, Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
The article on using artificial intelligence to tackle scientific challenges paints too rosy a picture of its accomplishments up to now. AlphaFold sometimes inaccurately predicts protein folding. The matrix multiplication methods found by AI only achieve a 10 to 20 per cent improvement for certain small matrices and only when using certain hardware. The sorting algorithms found by AI were 70 per cent faster only for a list of five items. The concrete formulation found by AI entails 40 per cent less carbon dioxide emissions only when compared with a form of “standard” concrete that hasn’t been used much for the past 25 years (29 July, p 32).
