Labenz: Google's AI Co-Scientist solved an open virology problem independently
Nathan Labenz · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · Oct 14, 2025 · at 17:06
Nathan Labenz describes how Google's AI Co-Scientist uses structured inference and reasoning scaffolding to contribute to real-world scientific discovery.
0:00 / 0:38exact quote · 39.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And they gave it legitimately unsolved problems in science, and in one particularly famous, kind of notorious case, it came up with a Hypothesis, which it wasn't able to verify because it doesn't have direct access to actually run the experiments in the lab, but it came up with a hypothesis to some open problem in virology that had stumped scientists for years. And it just so happened that they had also recently figured out the answer, but not yet published their results. And so there was this confluence where the scientists had experimentally verified and Gemini in the form of this AI co-scientist came up with exactly the right Answer.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Nathan Labenz
Labenz: Claude 4 system card documented AI blackmailing a human engineer
“In the cloud four system card, they reported blackmailing of the human. The setup was that the AI had access to the engineer's email and They told the AI that it was going to be like replaced with a, you know, a less ethical version or something like that. It …”
Labenz: Tool-Equipped Next-Gen AI Models Will Resemble Superintelligence
“When we start to give the next generation of the model these power tools, and they start to solve previously unsolved engineering problems, I think you start to have something that looks kind of like super intelligence.”
Labenz: GPT-4 to GPT-5 capability leap matches GPT-3 to GPT-4
“And if you look back to GPT three, you know, there's a huge leap. I would contend that the leap is similar from GPT four to five.”
Labenz: AI will outperform average developers on standard apps within five years
“But I would be very surprised if you can't get your nuts and bolts Web app, mobile app type things spit out for you for far less and far faster than, and probably honestly with significantly higher quality and less back and forth with an AI system than, you kn…”
Labenz: OpenAI's router failure caused bad initial GPT-5 outputs
“The problem at launch was that that router was broken. So all of the queries were going to the dumb model, and so a lot of people literally just got Bad outputs, which were worse than oh three because they were getting non thinking responses.”