AI for Scientific Discovery Won't Work Without Fixing How We Collaborate.
My co-author @cgeorgiaw and I just published a paper challenging a core assumption: that the main barriers to AI in science are technical. They're not. They're social.
Key findings:
🚨 The "AI Scientist" myth delays progress: Waiting for AGI devalues human expertise and obscures science's real purpose: cultivating understanding, not just outputs. 📊 Wrong incentives: Datasets have 100x longer impact than models, yet data curation is undervalued. ⚠️ Broken collaboration: Domain scientists want understanding. ML researchers optimize performance. Without shared language, projects fail. 🔍 Fragmentation costs years: Harmonizing just 9 cancer files took 329 hours.
Why this matters: Upstream bottlenecks like efficient PDE solvers could accelerate discovery across multiple sciences. CASP mobilized a community around protein structure, enabling AlphaFold. We need this for dozens of challenges.
Thus, we're launching Hugging Science! A global community addressing these barriers through collaborative challenges, open toolkits, education, and community-owned infrastructure. Please find all the links below!
🤖 What if building your own robot arm costs less than £220?
For years, robotics has been locked behind high prices and complex systems. So we decided to change that.
Today, we’re open-sourcing Ark-Bot — a fully 3D-printed, 6-DOF robot arm that works seamlessly with our Python robotics library, Ark.
And yes… It’s only £215.86 to build.
🧠ArkBot Specs 🧠
1️⃣ Reach: 1 meter 2️⃣ Weight: 2.6 kg 3️⃣ Payload: 1.8 kg 💪 4️⃣ DOF: 6 5️⃣ Input Voltage: DC 12V
🤟Fully 3D-printable & open-source 🤟Integrated with Ark — no ROS required
📹 We’ve also released a video showing the full assembly process — because robotics should be something everyone can learn, build, and improve on.
👩🎓 With Ark-Bot, anyone — from students to AI researchers — can experiment with embodied AI, robot learning, and control algorithms on real hardware, affordably.
If you could control a 1-meter robot arm from your laptop for under £220… 👉 What would you build first?
Smol course has a distinctive approach to teaching post-training, so I'm posting about how it’s different to other post-training courses, including the llm course that’s already available.
In short, the smol course is just more direct that any of the other course, and intended for semi-pro post trainers.
- It’s a minimal set of instructions on the core parts. - It’s intended to bootstrap real projects you're working on. - The material handsover to existing documentation for details - Likewise, it handsover to the LLM course for basics. - Assessment is based on a leaderboard, without reading all the material.
To start the smol course, follow here: smol-course
PawMatchAI — Now with SBERT-Powered Recommendations! 🐶✨
⭐️ NEW: Description-based recommendations are here! Just type in your lifestyle or preferences (e.g. “I live in an apartment and want a quiet dog”), and PawMatchAI uses SBERT semantic embeddings to understand your needs and suggest compatible breeds.
What can PawMatchAI do today? 📸 Upload a photo to identify your dog from 124 breeds with detailed info. ⚖️ Compare two breeds side-by-side, from grooming needs to health insights. 📊 Visualize breed traits with radar and comparison charts. 🎨 Try Style Transfer to turn your dog’s photo into anime, watercolor, cyberpunk, and more.
What’s next? 🎯 More fine-tuned recommendations. 📱 Mobile-friendly deployment. 🐾 Expansion to additional species.
My goal: To make breed discovery not only accurate but also interactive and fun — combining computer vision, semantic understanding, and creativity to help people find their perfect companion.