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NIH Websites Are Changing

Per Executive Order 14434, federal agencies are now using “Super Intelligence” (SI) in place of “Artificial Intelligence” (AI). You may see both terms across NIH content during this transition.

— National Institutes of Health, Office of Data Science Strategy, "Super Intelligence at NIH"

Certainly lots of scary hockey-stick plots! I worry that “slop” and “BS” oversimplify the problem. True slop was last year’s deluge. This year’s explosion in volume still misses an essential element of real scientific advances, but it can be difficult to tell apart from genuine LLM-facilitated advances and from the standard, non-groundbreaking work we would accept in normal times.

For instance, I just finished judging a data challenge. There were twice as many submissions as last year, and on average they were also much higher quality. At the same time, diversity dropped: teams converged on the same approaches, to the extent that many of the highest-quality submissions were redundant. As a result, across the entire effort, I think we probably learned less than we would have from truly independent teams not synchronized by their LLM usage.

It definitely is an upheaval.

— Prof. Aaron Meyer (lab), Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Vice Chair of Graduate Student Affairs, UCLA

BETHESDA, MD—The National Institutes of Health announced Tuesday that it would replace its 50-year-old numerical scoring system with a streamlined three-emoji format, in which grant applications will receive either a thumbs up (👍), a shrug (🤷‍♂️), or a laughing face (😂).

“The old system created a false sense of precision,” said NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. “A researcher would get a 23 and think, how is my grant different from a 27? Now there’s clarity. You get a thumbs up, you’re in the conversation. You get a shrug, it could go either way. You get crying laughter, well, you know where you stand.” […]

— In Preparation, satirical science news, in the spirit of The Onion