John Platt on AI for Science: an Oscar, two asteroids, and the algorithm in your sklearn

🔬 An Oscar, Two Asteroids, and the Algorithm in Your sklearn: John Platt on AI for Science

John Platt, inventor of Platt scaling and SMO, leads Google's ERA project. ERA turns scientific problems into scoreable tasks and uses Gemini to auto-iterate experiments via a Monte Carlo tree search variant. The jump from Gemini 2.0 to 2.5 made it go from broken to highly productive, yielding at least 10 papers. Platt warns against overfitting and says always start with linear regression or SVM. The post also covers his team's work on contrail mitigation, which accounts for 1% of human-induced global warming.

Why it matters: In-depth interview with John Platt revealing Google's ERA project: automated science iteration via Gemini, yielding 10+ papers. Hits all three HKR axes — legendary figure, concrete new mechanism, strong audience resonance. Score capped at 78 because it's a podcast interview ra...