Wang Mengdi at Bund Summit: AI Has Not Yet Discovered New Basic Science
On September 10, Wang Mengdi, director of Princeton University's Center for AI Innovation, delivered a keynote at the 2026 Inclusion·Bund Summit main forum, arguing that while large models have absorbed vast human knowledge, they remain clearly limited in making original discoveries in basic science because they excel at finding the most likely answer in a probability distribution, whereas true discoveries often lie in the long tail. In collaboration with Princeton sociology professor Xie Yu, her team used large models such as ChatGPT and Claude for "simulated life" experiments, finding that models overestimate the most common outcomes and underestimate rare ones. Wang argues that the key to AI-driven autonomous scientific discovery lies in making the real world more verifiable, and her team is building an automated experiment platform and LabOS, an intelligent operating system for research laboratories.