AIs excel at exploring millions of problems at a surface level (breadth), a scale humans cannot match. Human experts provide the depth needed to tackle the difficult "islands" AIs identify. Science must shift from its current depth-focused model to one that first uses AI to map entire fields and clear away low-hanging fruit.

Like Darwin, whose breakthroughs came from connecting recent observations with notes from 20 years prior, professionals can use AI to do the same. A personal intelligence layer creates a system where AI can surface and connect your own past learnings, unlocking insights impossible to recall manually.

Information scientist Don Swanson showed novel discoveries lie hidden in existing literature. If one paper shows A implies B and another shows B implies C, a new link (A implies C) can be found. AI can now scale this process of recombining old knowledge.

An AI tool can map citation or patent networks to find unexplored "blank spots" bordered by heavy research activity. These gaps represent high-potential opportunities for superstar papers or valuable patents, as any discovery there will connect and influence many adjacent fields.

Early AI models advanced by scraping web text and code. The next revolution, especially in "AI for science," requires overcoming a major hurdle: consolidating and formatting the world's vast but fragmented scientific data across disciplines like chemistry and materials science for model training.

To make genuine scientific breakthroughs, an AI needs to learn the abstract reasoning strategies and mental models of expert scientists. This involves teaching it higher-level concepts, such as thinking in terms of symmetries, a core principle in physics that current models lack.

Future AI-driven mathematical discoveries will likely follow two paths. One is finding 'lightning bolt' connections between existing, disparate fields (e.g., number theory and physics). The other, more profound path, is 'mountain building'—constructing entirely new theoretical frameworks, a skill signifying a much higher level of general intelligence.

Current AIs are trained on the established, consensus-driven scientific literature. The real breakthrough will occur when AI is trained on the 'trash can corpus'—all the ideas and papers that were rejected, laughed at, and dismissed by the orthodoxy. This is where undiscovered alpha lies.

Traditional science failed to create equations for complex biological systems because biology is too "bespoke." AI succeeds by discerning patterns from vast datasets, effectively serving as the "language" for modeling biology, much like mathematics is the language of physics.