logoalt Hacker News

dekhn • today at 12:28 AM • 0 replies • view on HN

The most common and obvious example is image duplication. This is used to invalidate large numbers of paper (I was absolutely shocked at the observed rate of image duplication). I am not sure I would call that a model.

The next example I can think of- I am not sure it qualifies. I read a paper where they deleted one gene at a time in yeast (it has 6000 genes) and determined whether the mutated yeast could live or not. For each gene where the yeast died, they added that to a list of "essential for life" genes. The paper concluded they had found some interesting proteins that should be studied. I read the paper and the first thing that sprang to mind, are any of these genes overlapping? Because we know (somebody already demonstrated in a lab) that genes do overlap (which is truly weird!)

I wrote a script and showed that every gene they reported as essential for life overlapped an already known gene that was essential for life. I wrote the authors, who never responded, but wrote a followup paper where they acknowledged they probably had a high false positive rate due to overlapping genes with known fatal effects. My guess is you'd say that either I used a model (existing literature) or I compared against the world, but realistically, what I did was trivially come up with a better explanation than the authors. T hat's what I want LLMs to do for me, and it seems like the direction LLMs are going will fulfill my desires.