Racing Towards the Future: How AI is Transforming Scientific Inquiry

I recently bought a second hand copy of A Handbook of Small Data Sets, a lovely little book packed with 510 data sets. Many are so small they can be printed on half a page, as shown below:

As I was lounging on my sofa, flipping through the book, I had the idea to snap a picture of the above dataset with my Android phone and analyze it with ChatGPT 4o. I wanted to experience an end-to-end pass at data analysis with ChatGPT—from data extraction, to visualization, inference, estimation, and decision making. All from the comfort of my sofa, using only my phone. In doing so I wanted to learn about its capabilities, and get a glimpse at what AI might imply for the future of scientific work.

Below is a somewhat sanitized version of that end-to-end interaction, followed by my reflections as a scientist about this process.

Because my focus is the impact of AI on the scientific workflows, I tried to keep the prompts simple and open ended—to see what ChatGPT does. After all, great research assistants are often ones who don’t need careful supervision and instruction. I then took whatever it did at face value and moved on. I will come back to notions of correctness in the discussion section.

Extracting the Data

I opened the ChatGPT Android app, attached the above photo, and issued the prompt:

1. Extract the text and data table from the image
2. Explain what the data are about

Below is a screenshot of ChatGPT’s response:

Visualizing the data

Plot the data

Hypothesis Testing

Next I prompted:

Formally state the null and alternative hypothesis

ChatGPT replied:

I was expecting a more formal math formulation like:

Lacking a clear math formulation the alternative hypothesis is ambiguous. If we have reason to believe starting position 1 is more likely to be advantageous than 2, which may be more advantageous than 3, and so on we could have written the ordered alternative hypothesis:

In general, adding more structure to the alternative hypothesis may increase the probability of detecting a true difference if the assumed structure is correct. However, as Charles Manski would point out, by adding more assumptions it also makes the analysis less credible. As usual, different scientists will have different beliefs and preferences. Disagreements will happen.

Next, I prompted ChatGPT to test the null against the alternative hypothesis:

Test the null against the alternative

To which it replied:

Basically, the Chi-square test statistic compares observed wins (e.g. 29 wins in position 1) against the expected 18 wins if all starting positions are equally likely to win (e.g. 144 wins / 8 starting positions = 18 wins per starting position). Larger differences are less compatible with the null. In this application the differences are large enough to reject the null. However, I am still unclear what alternative hypothesis ChatGPT has in mind. Lets ask it:

I am not exactly sure what is the exact alternative hypothesis. Is it that position 1 is more likely to win, or that at least one position, to be determined, is more likely to win. Put differently, we know from the chi-squared goodness of fit test that the probability of winning is not 1/8 across all starting positions, but we don’t know which one is better or worse.

Tell me which starting positions have win probabilities significantly different from 1/8

Here is the reply:

It concludes that the proportion of wins in starting positions 1 and 6 (not shown) are significantly different from 1/8.

I tried this last step 3 or 4 times and each time I got a different analytical approach. Here it using the binomial test with no correction for multiple hypothesis testing. At other times it used the chi square test, the Z-test, and the binomial test with Bonferroni correction for multiple hypothesis testing (in which case no starting position is significantly different from 1/8).

I would expect four different scientist to come up with four different answers but I am surprised if the same scientist comes up with 4 different answers in the same day.

Estimation

Taking ChatGPT’s analysis at face value we have learned that the proportion of wins in positions 1 and 6 are statistically different from he others. But how much different are they? And are they better or worse? Again, I asked ChatGPT:

Can you plot the point estimates, the 95% confidence interval, and the null expectation

Here is the reply:

This is a very nice chart created in seconds. ChatGPT creates this by writing and running python code in a cloud playground.

(I said I would not comment on the correctness of the analysis but note one should be extra careful in picking the correct standard errors so the hypothesis tests and the estimates are logically coherent. Also, some scientist would have started and ended their analysis with the estimation step. Some would have done OLS straight away. There is reasonable disagreement about all of this.)

Decision

Often, the point of an analysis like this is to inform some decision to improve some outcome. For example, if the public perceives the racing track is unfair, it may damage the track’s reputation, leading to decreased attendance and revenue. At the same time, taking measures to adjust starting positions when, in fact, there are no differences in the proportion of wins is costly. Indeed, it may introduce a problem where previously there was none.

I asked ChatGPT what to do:

The owner of the horse racing track wants to know if the starting positions should be adjusted in some way to ensure the proportion of wins is 1/8 across all starting positions. Based on the analysis thus far what do you recommend?

The somewhat abridged answer is below:

As a final test, I started a new chat, attached the picture with the data and prompted it to do the whole analysis in one shot:

Extract text and data from the picture. Explain the data.

The owner of the horse racing track wants to know if the starting positions should be adjusted in some way to ensure the proportion of wins is the same across all starting positions. Analyze the data. What do you recommend?

It pretty much did all the above in one shot. At this point I put down my phone and starting thinking about what just happened.

Discussion

First, the experience was awesome! I was exploring a book of tiny data, got curious about a data set, took a picture with my smartphone, and conducted an end-to-end analysis using natural language prompts—all from my sofa. In parallel chats (not reported above), I delved into various tests, explored their pros and cons, plotted charts, ran regressions, and more. It was a fantastic way to learn and explore. Take a screenshot of the data set above and try it yourself!

Second, I can definitely see 60x improvements in productivity in some discrete tasks but much lower overall. With AI it only takes one minute to complete some tasks that, previously, may have taken you an hour. For example:

This is a game changer. It enables scientists to operate at a much higher level of abstraction. For example, as abstraction rises, code becomes the new log files.

In the case study above, ChatGPT provided links to the code it generated, but you may find yourself looking at the code less frequently. AI will handle all errors at that layer. AI will also disrupt writing, editing, typesetting, idea generation, literature reviews, synthesis, and many others. Still, these are only a relatively small share of scientists’ work, so the overall productivity increase is likely to be less than 60x, at least in the immediate future.

Moreover, it is hard to see how AI will remove [hard binding constraints like recruiting patients to a trial, waiting for the effect of an intervention to manifest itself (e.g. the impact of an education intervention on labor outcomes may take weeks, months, or years), and so on. Maybe one day we develop in silico models so good, we no longer need to experiment in the real world. But if our in silico models are so good, then why would we need to experiment? And if not, then why should we trust their answers?

Third, the clash of powerful AI and pernicious research incentives will result in drastic changes to the way science is taught and practiced. AI can drastically improve, or worsen, science. It can be used to adopt better, more laborious, scientific practices—like writing pre-analysis plans and simulation-based power calculations—or to manufacture bogus findings at scale.

The impact will depend on the interaction between technology and incentives. Currently, the incentives are terrible. The opportunity cost of wasteful science is about to skyrocket. Change will happen much faster than most expect.

Fourth, at present I would not trust an AI to do the full analysis, nor would I act blindly on its recommendations. This is a topic of another blog post. Suffice it to say that the simple horse racing case study above hides many tiny steps, options, and consequential decisions. Which option and path is best for you depends on unknown states of the world, as well as your preferences, beliefs, and risk tolerance. Here are some things ChatGPT papered over:

1. Was the horse’s starting position randomized before each race?
2. Is the alternative hypothesis ordered or not?
3. What test statistic, power, level of significance and inferential method is best fit for the purpose at hand? According to what criteria (e.g. Pittman efficiency)?
4. How to approach post hoc multiple hypothesis testing?
5. What are possible estimators, and specifications for standard errors? How to choose among them?
6. What are the relevant states of the world for these decisions, and their probabilities?
7. What are the available actions and their payoffs under the various states of the world?

All the above generate a decision tree, or garden of forking paths. For now, ChatGPT does not solve the decision tree. It simply predicts the next step based on its training, prompts, and previous answers. The final analysis corresponds to a single path like the one highlighted below. Whether that analysis is fit, or not, for your purpose is for you to adjudicate, maybe with further prompting to ChatGPT—but you need to know what to ask!

You could use prompt engineering, chain of thought, and so on to try to get it to go down your preferred path, or hope that new reasoning models like DeepSeek R1 get better at this.

Taking the results blindly is not without risk. For instance, when ChatGPT rejected the null hypothesis it concluded: “There is evidence to suggest that the starting position has a significant effect on a horse’s chances of winning a race (my emphasis)”. It assumes causation form association (like much of the published literature).

If the cost of remedial action is high, and experiments are cheap, you may want to run a few experiments before taking any action. In addition, ChatGPT’s decisions are stochastic, meaning you may get a different solution path each time you ask. Reproducibility may require setting a random seed.

For now, the biggest value scientists add is knowing the right questions to ask, and working with AI to resolve the decision tree in line with decision-maker preferences.

I am very excited about this. In my experience most applied scientists have been so bogged down in the implementation details, that they do not spend nearly enough time modeling the stakeholder’s decision. Yet, presumably, the whole research design should work backwards from that decision. We are about to unlock that at scale.

What an exciting time to be a scientist!

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