Supercomputers alone won’t speed up discoveries without trained researchers, says NSCC chief

This will allow researchers to explore more ideas and accelerate discoveries beyond what they could achieve on their own, he added.

“That paradigm shift – where there will be a need for more computer support, large-scale simulation, data analysis, and AI models – requires a lot of compute power.”

Dr Hung said he expects researchers’ roles to evolve, with more time spent designing research plans and less time devoted to tasks such as reading papers and running experiments. 

“So the AI agents in a sense would serve as workers, or research assistants, to support the researchers to do all the things that (they) want to do, but may not have the time,” he added. 

“The researchers are still required to be in the loop to steer, advise, monitor, and make sure that the AI agents are doing things according to their plans. They may have to come in and intervene and get the AI agents to redo certain things, or to take a different approach when necessary.”