ChatGPT Named One of Nature's 10 People of the Year 2023
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ChatGPT has earned a place in Nature's 10 People of the Year for 2023, demonstrating its profound influence across society.
In the early hours of December 14, Nature unveiled its annual list, Nature's 10, highlighting 10 individuals—five men and five women—selected from major global scientific events. This year, however, the list also included a non-human entry: ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI.
Additionally, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist and an AI pioneer, was named to the list—not the company's CEO, Sam Altman.
"While ChatGPT isn't technically a person and doesn't fully meet the criteria for Nature's 10, we made an exception to acknowledge the transformative impact of generative AI on science and progress," said Richard Monastersky, features editor at Nature. "ChatGPT has dominated headlines this year, and its effects have been felt deeply in the scientific community and beyond."
Nature's 10 People of the Year for 2023 include:
- Kalpana Kalahasti, deputy project director of India's Chandrayaan-3 mission;
- Marina Silva, Brazil's environment minister;
- Katsuhiko Hayashi, a developmental biologist at Osaka University, Japan;
- Annie Kritcher, lead designer of the US National Ignition Facility and a physicist;
The United Nations' first Global Chief Heat Officer Eleni Myrivili;
Chief Scientist of OpenAI and AI pioneer Ilya Sutskever;
Physicist from the University of Florida James Hamlin;
Biochemist Svetlana Mojsov;
Director of the Nanoro Clinical Research Unit in Burkina Faso, Dr. Halidou Tinto;
Cancer researcher at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, Thomas Powles;
And ChatGPT.
Kalpana Kalahasti: After the crash of Chandrayaan-2, she helped India become the fourth country to land on the moon
Kalpana Kalahasti was delighted to see how the successful landing of Chandrayaan-3 ignited the passion of young Indians.
Kalpana Kalahasti is an engineer and deputy project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for Chandrayaan-3, playing a crucial role in its successful moon landing.
On July 14th, Chandrayaan-3 was launched amid the nation's hopes and concerns. On August 23rd, the lander safely touched down, making India the fourth country in the world to achieve a lunar landing after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China.
Born in 1974 in Chennai, India, Kalpana Kalahasti graduated with a degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Madras, one of India's oldest universities. From joining the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in 2000 to becoming the deputy director of the lunar mission, Kalahasti has come a long way.
Her first job at ISRO was as a radar engineer at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, the organization's primary launch site. There, she contributed to various satellite projects and played crucial roles in the successful launches of multiple communication and remote sensing satellites, including the development of precise propulsion systems and the design of imaging devices for high-resolution Earth observation. Eventually, she secured her place in ISRO's landmark projects, Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3.
The success of Chandrayaan-3 was a sweet victory for Kalahasti's team after bitter setbacks. In 2019, India's Chandrayaan-2 mission ended in failure when its lander crashed on the lunar surface, dealing a heavy blow to the team. Internationally, three other lunar landing attempts also met with failure: the Beresheet lander built by Israel's SpaceIL in 2019, Japan's ispace Hakuto-R mission, and Russia's Luna-25 lander, both of which crashed in 2023.
One of the biggest challenges faced by Kalahasti's team was that the total mass and available budget for the new spacecraft had to remain the same as Chandrayaan-2. Working alongside project director Palanivel Veeramuthuvel, Kalahasti reconfigured the orbiter and lander: reducing the orbiter's mass, equipping the lander with more fuel, sturdier landing legs, and other optimizations.
Facing the enormous task of designing a lunar lander, Kalpana Kalahasti's team appeared understaffed—conducting numerous tests, integrating results, and planning navigation routes required coordination across more than a dozen ISRO centers nationwide. Kalahasti said, 'It was like building five or six different satellites simultaneously.'
In the process of coordinating multi-front operations, Kalahasti demonstrated remarkable leadership, a skill seemingly rooted in her background in project management and systems engineering.
Kalahasti was delighted to see the success of 'Chandrayaan-3' ignite the passion of young Indians. She said, 'Beyond the technical aspects, I hope young experts in India and around the world are inspired by how a team can rise from failure.'
Marina Silva: Guardian of the Amazon Rainforest
Brazil's Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, likens herself to the resilient fibers of Amazonian trees, which bind wood to make rafts. 'This is how I see my work,' she said.
In a year filled with grim news—record-breaking global warming, heatwaves, and rampant wildfires—Silva brought a hopeful message: satellite images showed a 43% decrease in deforestation alerts in the Amazon rainforest from January to July 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. This marked a stark contrast to the rising trend of deforestation alerts over the past four years.
The reduction in deforestation alerts is credited to the efforts of Marina Silva and others.
This is not her first tenure as Minister of Environment and Climate Change; she previously held the position from 2003 to 2008.
During her first term, Marina Silva organized the formulation of the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon (PPCDAm) to combat rampant deforestation. Between 2004 and 2012, the deforestation rate in the Amazon rainforest decreased by 83%.
However, from 2019 to 2022, many environmental protection measures including PPCDAm were abolished by the government. Fines for environmental crimes decreased by 40% compared to the previous four years, while logging rates in the Amazon increased by approximately 60%.
This year, Marina Silva and her team have resumed action.
One key achievement was the optimized PPCDAm plan introduced on June 5th.
Data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) shows that from August 2022 to July 2023, Amazon deforestation decreased by about 22% compared to the previous 12 months. This is the lowest rate since 2018, but still double that of 2012.
Additionally, Marina Silva has restored support for enforcement of environmental regulations in the region. Data from the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) shows that from January to July this year, fines related to environmental crimes in the region increased by 147% compared to the average for the same period between 2019 and 2022.
Marina Silva has faced challenges courageously since childhood. Born in 1958 in Rio Branco, in the heart of Brazil's Amazon region, she grew up in a poor family with 11 children (three of whom died young). Silva and her siblings started working early—extracting latex from rubber trees. She once wanted to become a nun. It wasn't until her teenage years that she learned to read and write.
In the mid-1970s, Silva met environmental activist Chico Mendes at a rural leadership course, beginning her career in environmental activism that eventually led her into politics. In 1994, at age 35, she became Brazil's youngest senator.
However, simply ending deforestation is far from enough. "If countries do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, forests are at risk of being destroyed by climate change. Therefore, we need a civilizational-level transformation to change our way of life," Silva said.
She compares herself to the resilient fibers in Amazonian trees, which bind wood to make rafts. "This is how I see my work," she says. "Bringing together capable people and everything needed to form a platform and foundation in this challenging era."
Katsuhiko Hayashi: Reshaping Reproduction
Japanese developmental biologist Katsuhiko Hayashi from Osaka University hopes to extend his experiments to another animal: the northern white rhino. Currently, only two surviving northern white rhinos are known, both female, and the species is on the brink of extinction.
When Hayashi and his team announced in March that they had successfully bred mice from two male parent cells, Robert Gilchrist, a reproductive biologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, said, "I was so surprised I fell off my chair. This is an astonishing scientific achievement."
Previously, many researchers believed this task was impossible or nearly so. Hayashi says, "Actually, it wasn’t that difficult."
Since his undergraduate days, Hayashi has been deeply fascinated by germ cells: they naturally develop into sperm and eggs, hold great significance for reproduction, and can perpetuate through generations. He developed a profound research interest in them. "Germ cells are the source of life," he says.
For years, Katsuhiko Hayashi has gained fame for taking on challenging and imaginative tasks. Daisuke Kitamura, an immunologist at Tokyo University of Science and Hayashi's doctoral advisor, said, "He works like ten people combined."
Hayashi and his team previously induced mouse stem cells to become immature eggs, matured them, fertilized them, and bred offspring. This year, his lab built on this success by using male mouse cells to cultivate eggs. Out of 630 embryo transplants, only seven offspring survived.
Now, he hopes to extend the experiment to another species: the northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). With only two surviving females left, the species is on the brink of extinction. This new technology might offer a way to save them. However, Hayashi notes that cultivating white rhino sperm and eggs in the lab is far more challenging than with lab mice.
Creating human reproductive cells is even more complex. Amander Clark, a developmental and stem cell biologist at UCLA, suggests that applying Hayashi's pioneering techniques to human egg and sperm cultivation could take decades.
Meanwhile, Hayashi largely stays out of the ethical debates surrounding this research. "From a scientist's perspective, it's relatively simple—we aim to produce high-quality eggs," he says. "But whether such eggs should be used isn't for us to decide; it's a decision for society."
Annie Kritcher: The Fusion 'Igniter'
Annie Kritcher, chief designer and physicist at the National Ignition Facility, believes nuclear fusion isn't a question of "if" but "when." She hopes lasers will play a key role. "I'd love to be part of that," she says.
At the end of 2022, Annie Kritcher, the chief designer and physicist at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), helped the U.S. Department of Energy's NIF achieve a goal that had eluded global laboratories for decades: compressing atoms so tightly that they undergo nuclear fusion, producing more energy than the reaction consumes.
The $3.5 billion NIF, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, was designed to advance nuclear weapons science. Its research also contributes to the development of fusion energy—a safe, clean, and nearly limitless energy source. NIF's success in 2022 came as a surprise to many, as the ignition program had already been delayed by a decade, with some doubting its feasibility.
However, the first success did not mean the end of challenges. After reaching this milestone, Kritcher's team faced pressure to replicate the process.
The journey was far from smooth. Their first attempt at replication in June 2023 fell short. Kritcher admitted, "Things can get crazy, and I definitely felt the pressure."
But subsequent attempts succeeded. On July 30, 2023, the facility's laser beams delivered 2.05 megajoules of energy to a frozen pellet of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium suspended in a metal cylinder. The resulting collapse fused the isotopes into helium, releasing energy and generating temperatures six times hotter than the sun's core. These reactions produced 3.88 megajoules of fusion energy.
Following the July success, Kritcher and her team conducted two more ignition attempts in October, achieving four successes out of six attempts. They are now preparing for higher output in 2024.
NIF's primary purpose is to help government scientists ensure the safety and reliability of U.S. thermonuclear weapons without explosive testing. But this was not what initially drew Kritcher to the facility. During her 2004 summer internship at Livermore, she worked on fusion energy projects. Before starting graduate studies, she set her sights on NIF and officially joined in 2012—because it was one of the few places on Earth studying fusion reactions.
In 2016, Kritsch began making significant strides, becoming central to the fusion program. She led a team analyzing experimental data and used computer models to design experiments aimed at achieving and increasing fusion yields by adjusting parameters such as the energy and timing of various laser beams.
After officially achieving the ignition target, Kritsch has already embarked on a series of new experiments aimed at further boosting energy output—targeting tens of megajoules or even higher.
She stated that nuclear fusion is not a question of 'if' but 'when.' She hopes lasers will play a crucial role. "I'm thrilled to be part of this," she said.
Eleni Myrivili: The Temperature Regulator
Myrivili attended the Dubai climate negotiations with the goal of halting global warming trends and preparing for the future.
Eleni Myrivili, formerly the deputy mayor of Athens, Greece, and the city's Chief Heat Officer, now holds a global position as the United Nations' first Chief Heat Officer, dedicated to mitigating the catastrophic impacts of rising temperatures.
2023 is likely to become the hottest year on record by the end of December. This extreme heat has had deadly consequences: a July 2023 study reported that heatwaves claimed over 61,000 lives across Europe between late May and early September 2022, with Italy, Greece, and Spain experiencing the highest heat-related mortality rates.
Myrivili's focus on heatwaves is a far cry from her beginnings as a cultural anthropologist. She earned a Ph.D. in migration, violence, and border studies before teaching at the University of the Aegean in Mytilene, Greece.
In the summer of 2007, wildfires ravaged parts of Greece, with large areas of Parnitha National Park near Athens burning. This served as both a warning about climate change and a turning point in Mirivili's career.
Frustrated by the lack of information and initiatives related to the fires, she decided to enter politics. After collaborating with Greece's Green Party for some time, she read Benjamin R. Barber's book If Mayors Ruled the World and shifted her focus to municipal government. Working in various roles at Athens City Hall, she dedicated herself to promoting climate adaptation and planning across city departments.
In 2021, she was appointed as Athens' Chief Heat Officer.
To raise awareness about dangerous weather patterns, Mirivili advocated for naming heatwaves. She also worked to secure funding for climate initiatives: in 2018, her team obtained a €5 million (then valued at $5.9 million) loan from the European Investment Bank for climate adaptation projects.
Now, Mirivili focuses on increasing global awareness about extreme heat and raising funds for projects through UN Habitat, including the Global Cooling Pledge introduced at COP28 in Dubai.
Mirivili detests air conditioning and dislikes people who bring it up to her. However, during the 2021 heatwave, she eventually bought a small AC unit. "But I still hate it," she says.
Yet as temperatures rise, air conditioning use will only increase. This is why Mirivili participated in Dubai's climate negotiations—to curb global warming trends and prepare for the future.
Ilya Sutskever: AI Visionary
Ilya Sutskever is a visionary pioneer in the fields of deep learning and large language models (LLMs), now focusing on controlling AI systems through OpenAI's 'Superalignment' project.
Ilya Sutskever is a key figure in the development of artificial intelligence technology. He played a central role in the development of the chatbot ChatGPT. At the same time, he is concerned about the future of AI.
Sutskever was born in the Soviet Union in 1986. He has always been a precocious learner. As a teenager, he studied university-level programming courses in Israel.
After moving to Canada with his family, the teenage Sutskever knocked on the door of Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of modern artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Toronto, seeking a job.
"He said he was making money frying fries in the summer and would rather work for me on AI," Hinton said.
In 2003, at the age of 17, Sutskever began working with Hinton on deep learning.
In 2012, Sutskever and another of Hinton's students built the neural network AlexNet, which won a landmark image recognition competition by a stunning margin. Later, Sutskever moved to Google, where he helped develop the AI Go software AlphaGo, which defeated human champions in the complex board game Go.
In 2015, Sutskever was invited to dinner with Sam Altman and others, including billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. That same year, they co-founded the nonprofit OpenAI with the goal of 'benefiting humanity.' Sutskever saw it as an opportunity to seriously pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Ilya Sutskever is a visionary pioneer in the fields of deep learning and large language models (LLMs), and is now focusing on controlling artificial intelligence systems through OpenAI's 'Superalignment' project.
OpenAI and some other companies keep their code and training data confidential. Sutskever argues that, in the long run, closed systems will prevent others from creating powerful AI, which he considers a responsible approach. "At some point, AI capabilities will become so immense that open-sourcing models would clearly be irresponsible," he said.
On November 17, 2023, Sutskever and other OpenAI board members fired CEO Sam Altman, causing internal chaos within the company. However, he later expressed regret for his actions.
Many employees threatened to leave with Altman for Microsoft, including Sutskever.
Five days later, when Altman rejoined OpenAI, Sutskever was removed from the board. But Altman stated he harbored no ill will toward Sutskever. "Although Ilya will no longer serve on the board, we hope to continue our working relationship and are discussing how he can remain involved at OpenAI," Altman said.
After the turmoil, Sutskever declined an interview request from Nature.
Renowned AI expert Andrew Ng remarked that Sutskever possesses an admirable trait—the ability to choose a direction and pursue it relentlessly, regardless of whether others agree with his views.
James Hamlin: The 'Superconductivity' Detective
James Hamlin, a 'superconductivity' detective and associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Florida.
James Hamlin, an associate professor of physics at the University of Florida, helped uncover flaws in the sensational claims about room-temperature superconductivity.
He earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. His current laboratory focuses on researching novel electronic and magnetic materials, with particular interest in unconventional superconducting states and the conditions for high-temperature superconductivity.
Superconductivity refers to the phenomenon where a material's electrical resistance drops to zero below a certain temperature. Under these conditions, superconductors exhibit zero resistance and perfect diamagnetism.
Hamlin recalls his first experience being deceived by an experiment. As a graduate student, he observed signs of superconductivity in an unexpected material - electrons passing through unimpeded. Excited, he told his advisor, who remained calm and asked many questions, suggesting further tests. When conducting additional tests, the superconducting phenomenon disappeared. The lesson he learned: "Don't assume you've discovered something," Hamlin said.
In March 2023, Ranga P. Dias, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, published a paper in Nature and presented at the American Physical Society meeting in Las Vegas, claiming discovery of a new material - lutetium nitrogen hydride - that exhibited superconductivity at room temperature (about 21°C) under 10,000 atmospheres of pressure.
Amid controversy, Hamlin and Cornell University superconductivity researcher Brad Ramshaw expressed concerns about this research to Nature.
This is not the first time, nor even the second, that Hamlin has exposed issues in Dias' research findings.
In 2020, Dias published a paper in Nature claiming the discovery of the first room-temperature superconductor, albeit requiring much higher pressure.
After Dias' 2020 paper was published, University of California, San Diego physicist Jorge Hirsch found a measurement in the research suspiciously similar to one in Hamlin's 2009 paper. Prompted by Hirsch, Hamlin investigated his own work and found evidence that another co-author, Matthew Debessai, had tampered with the data. This paper was retracted in 2021.
Hamlin wondered whether Dias' 2020 research might also have problems.
However, it took Dias and his co-authors over a year to release the data Hirsch requested. Hirsch, Hamlin, and others analyzed it and found evidence of manipulation. In September 2022, Nature retracted Dias' aforementioned controversial research paper. The retraction notice did not mention misconduct, and Dias denied any wrongdoing.
Hamlin also discovered that Dias plagiarized his own and others' research—Dias reused data from Hamlin's paper in a later paper published in Physical Review Letters. The paper in question was retracted in August 2023.
Approximately eight months after Dias' 2023 Nature paper was published online, it was retracted in November 2023. This marked the third retraction of Dias' papers within just over a year.
Notably, on March 15, just eight days after Dias announced the discovery of high-pressure room-temperature superconducting materials and released data at the American Physical Society annual meeting, a team led by Professor Wen Haihu from Nanjing University's School of Physics published replication results that overturned Dias' room-temperature superconductivity findings, causing a sensation.
Professor Wen Haihu's team's findings were published online in Nature on May 11: their prepared nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (also known as lutetium-hydrogen-nitrogen compound) did not exhibit near-ambient temperature superconductivity.
Hamlin is not a full-time detective; he prefers to dedicate more time to his superconductivity research. "This remains one of the most exciting topics in physics," he said.
Svetlana Mojsov: The Pioneer Researcher Behind the 'Star' Weight-Loss Drug
A new weight-loss drug mimicking glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) is sweeping the globe, generating billions in profits for pharmaceutical companies and earning scientific acclaim for its researchers.
However, one early pioneer has not received due recognition: Svetlana Mojsov, a Yugoslav-born scientist in her 70s, now a biochemist at Rockefeller University in New York.
She played a key role in identifying and characterizing active GLP-1. Yet, much of her work has gone unrecognized, and she has not shared in the scientific awards for these achievements.
Other GLP-1 experiments conducted at the time in cell lines used the peptides and antibodies Mojsov created; early clinical trials proving GLP-1 could lower blood sugar also used her peptides and antibodies.
These studies laid the foundation for drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Their active ingredient, semaglutide, is a GLP-1 analog with only minor modifications to the peptide outlined in Mojsov's original paper, enhancing its stability and ensuring longer-lasting efficacy.
Currently, semaglutide's global sales exceed $1 billion per month and it is projected to become one of the best-selling drugs.
However, Moisov's role in this discovery has long been overlooked.
In 2023, Moisov battled stereotypes in the field, and her contributions began to gain broader recognition. "All I wanted was to clarify the scientific record," she said.
To have her name added as a co-inventor on the foundational patent, she endured a protracted legal battle. This effort earned Moisov one to two years of royalties tied to sales of the first-generation GLP-1 drugs.
But since her patent had long expired, she received no share of semaglutide's windfall profits. This lack of recognition left Moisov feeling that history was being "manipulated."
At her urging, academic journals like Cell and Nature updated their narratives about the GLP-1 discovery to better reflect Moisov's contributions: she independently discovered and described the active form of the GLP-1 hormone at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), while researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark made the same discovery separately.
Additionally, about 40 years after Moisov began studying GLP-1, media outlets finally told her story.
Supportive emails poured in from fellow scientists, particularly women in the field, who expressed frustration with the hierarchy in biomedical research.
Awards and prestige may follow. But these are not Moisov's priorities. Her main focus remains continuing her lab work on GLP-1 and related proteins. "I'm happy my work is being recognized," she said. "Everything else is secondary."
Haridu Tinto: Malaria Fighter
Halidou Tinto, director of the Nanoro Clinical Research Unit (CRUN) in Burkina Faso, West Africa, helped complete the clinical trials for the second approved malaria vaccine.
Tinto once had the opportunity to pursue postdoctoral research at a U.S. university but declined, returning to the landlocked West African nation in 2006.
There, he worked with local scientists and clinicians to establish the Nanoro Clinical Research Unit (CRUN), which became a testing site for malaria vaccines like R21. Many scientists credit the center's success to Tinto's dedication.
"He (Tinto) genuinely wanted to advance science and research in Africa," said Umberto D'Alessandro, Tinto's doctoral advisor at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Tinto earned his Ph.D. at the university in 2006 for his research on epidemiology and malaria drug resistance mechanisms.
The vast majority of malaria infections occur in Africa, with over 200 million cases and 500,000 deaths annually, primarily among children under five.
In October 2023, Tinto's six-year-old daughter contracted malaria but fortunately recovered after experiencing fever, headaches, and vomiting. That same month, the R21 malaria vaccine, which Tinto had been testing, was recommended for use by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is only the second approved malaria vaccine and is expected to save millions of lives.
The WHO stated that R21 could be widely available in Africa by mid-2024.
In 2007, pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and its partners were conducting clinical trials for a malaria vaccine they had been developing for years. For Tinto's fledgling clinic with just 10 staff and the region's limited infrastructure, participating seemed unlikely. Nevertheless, Tinto convinced the coordinators they were up to the task.
Today, the Nanoro Clinical Research Unit has over 400 staff and colleagues, including dozens of postgraduate students from across Africa. They are conducting more than 30 clinical trials, including studies on two additional malaria vaccines and further research on the R21 vaccine.
What inspires the team most is the opportunity to save lives. As one researcher said, "For me, life is the most important thing."
Thomas Powles: The Cancer Explorer
Thomas Powles, a cancer researcher at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, UK, reported clinical trial results that herald major advancements in the treatment of bladder cancer and other cancers.
Thomas Powles led a transformative clinical trial for severe bladder cancer. In October 2023, when he presented the data from this late-stage bladder cancer clinical trial at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) annual meeting in Madrid, Spain, the audience erupted in applause twice.
Powles found that compared to standard chemotherapy, a combination of two new drugs appeared to extend patients' median survival time from about 16 months to 2.5 years.
Eila Skinner, a bladder cancer researcher at Stanford University in the US, admitted: "This particular trial is absolutely the biggest breakthrough we've had in the treatment of advanced bladder cancer in nearly 40 years."
Professor Powles has played a significant role in the development of biomarkers and new drug strategies for urological tumors. The research he led has resulted in the approval of four cancer therapies.
His MD thesis at the University of London focused on drug resistance mechanisms in urological tumors.
A clinical trial for bladder cancer tested an ADC (antibody-drug conjugate) named enfortumab vedotin, used in combination with another drug, pembrolizumab, targeting a protein called nectin-4, which is abundant in bladder cancer cells. Earlier in 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this combination therapy for patients ineligible for cisplatin-based chemotherapy, about half of whom are advanced bladder cancer patients.
Guru Sonpavde, a bladder cancer researcher at AdventHealth Cancer Institute in Orlando, one of the largest cancer centers in central Florida, stated that broader use of this drug might be approved in early 2024.
Beyond the eagerness for new discoveries, Powers remarked, "Patients participating in these trials are making tremendous sacrifices."
ChatGPT: The Generative AI Revolution Has Begun, With No Turning Back
ChatGPT is not a person, yet over the past year, it has had a broad and profound impact on science in many ways.
Why include a computer program in the list of 2023's most influential figures in science?
Created by researchers at OpenAI, an AI company based in San Francisco, California, ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 as a free-to-use conversational agent (chatbot). ChatGPT is not a person, yet over the past year, it has significantly influenced science in numerous ways. ChatGPT's sole objective is to continue seemingly plausible conversations in the style of its training data. But in doing so, it and other generative AI programs are transforming how scientists work. They have also reignited debates about the limitations of AI, the nature of human intelligence, and how best to regulate the interaction between the two. This is why this year's Nature's 10 list includes a non-human member.
ChatGPT is built on a neural network with hundreds of billions of parameters, trained on a massive corpus of online books and documents at an estimated cost of tens of millions of dollars. Numerous workers edit or evaluate its responses to further shape its output. This year, OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT's underlying LLM (large language model) and connected it with other programs, enabling the tool to receive and create images. Other companies have rushed to launch competing products.
For some researchers, these applications have become invaluable lab assistants—helping summarize or draft manuscripts, refine applications, and write code. Marinka Zitnik, who works on AI in medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, says ChatGPT and related software can help people brainstorm, enhance scientific search engines, and identify research gaps in the literature. Models trained on scientific data in a similar manner could help build AI systems that guide research, potentially by designing new molecules or simulating cellular behavior.
However, this technology is also dangerous. Automated conversational agents can aid cheaters and plagiarists, and if left unchecked, they could irreversibly pollute the treasure trove of scientific knowledge. Undeclared AI-generated content has already begun to permeate the internet, with some scientists admitting to using ChatGPT to generate articles without formal disclosure.
It collaborates on scientific papers—sometimes covertly; it drafts outlines for speeches, grant proposals, and courses; it mass-produces computer code and serves as an echo chamber for research ideas. It also invents references, fabricates facts, and replicates hate speech. Above all, it captures people's imaginations: sometimes compliant, sometimes charming, sometimes amusing, and even frightening. ChatGPT plays whatever role the interlocutor desires, some even unintended.
Secondly, errors and biases are embedded in the way generative AI operates. LLMs (large language models) build a model of the world by mapping interconnections in language—without evaluating the concepts of truth or falsehood. This leads the programs to reproduce historical biases or inaccuracies from the training data and to fabricate information, including references to non-existent scientific literature.
Some countries are developing national AI research resources to enable scientists beyond large corporations to build and study large generative AI.
No one knows how much more potential systems like ChatGPT have. But the generative AI revolution has begun, and there's no turning back.