OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he hopes artificial intelligence can identify a candidate treatment for a major disease within the next couple of years, an early step toward a therapy that would still require testing.
In an interview with Matthew Berman, Altman connected that hope to AI’s progress on difficult mathematics problems. He expects similar methods to help researchers generate knowledge in biology, materials science and energy.
Finding a candidate would not make a treatment available to patients. Altman said testing and review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would take time. He said the path after discovery could be improved without giving up the protections provided by safety tests.
Altman said future AI models might identify new materials if given enough computing power and real-world data. He argued that some foundational scientific findings should be shared publicly, even when they could have commercial value.
Discussing how AI might change research work, Altman suggested mathematicians could spend more time interpreting machine-generated results and turning them into proofs people can understand. He said human judgment would remain involved in deciding which findings matter.
