Nature chooses ChatGPT as one of its scientists of the year

AI research lab OpenAI's Generative AI ChatGPT has been put on the international journal Nature's list of scientists of the year.

Nature’s 10 was announced on Thursday to give 10 researchers credit for helping shape science this year. ChatGPT shared the honor of being part of this list as well.

Nature's 10 placed a technology, not a human being, on this list for the first time. The journal said that the AI system designed to imitate the human language deserves full credit for contributing to scientific advancement and progress.

Released last November, OpenAI's ChatGPT has made an explosive change across society, even greatly influencing human scientists. For example, the program improves the way they write theses by saving time spent studying literature and summing up experiment results, which will help researchers allocate more time to perform experiments for new discoveries. Critics worry that the AI-driven software will hinder a scientist's creativity and reduce the quality of scientific theses overall.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist and developer of ChatGPT, was also chosen among Nature's 10 scientists. He was recently at the center of controversy as he helped oust the start-up's CEO Sam Altman and abruptly reversed his position. He is currently out of the board of directors at OpenAI.

Women took up half this year's Nature's 10 list: researcher Kalpana Kalahasti at the Indian Space Research Organization who played a key role in Chandrayaan-3’s historical touchdown on the moon; U.S. National Ignition Facility's scientist Annie Kritcher who first produced nuclear reactions in history; and Rockefeller University's professor Svetlana Mojsov who proved the functions of glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), the main component of multibillion-dollar weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy and Zepbound.

On the list are also Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi at Osaka University who created eggs from two male mice's cells and Halidou Tinto, the leader of the Clinical Research Unit of Nanoro (CRUN) in Burkina Faso, a contributor to the trial tests on R21, a malaria-targeted vaccine that is affordable and mass-producible.


jwchoi@donga.com