Why it matters: Public trust in AI is eroding, putting the technology's wide adoption and potential benefits at risk.
Driving the news: At a forum in London hosted by Google DeepMind and the Royal Society, a roster of renowned scientists described how AI tools are transforming and turbocharging science.
Between the lines: In industry, the buzz around AI has largely centered on the technology's capacity to streamline business -- along with the possibility that it might advance toward artificial "superintelligence."
But, the painstaking, thorough work of science can be at odds with the "move fast break things" ethos of the tech industry that is driving AI's development.
What they're saying: "I think the scientific method is, arguably, maybe the greatest idea humans have ever had," DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told the London gathering.
Zoom in: A slew of recent papers show how scientists are trying to put AI to work on some of nature's most complex problems.
An ambitious AI-driven effort is underway to map the human body's 37.2 trillion cells.
"It's just dizzying. I've never seen anything like it in my life," Eric Topol, founder and director of Scripps Research Translational Institute, said at the event.
Yes, but: "We're moving so fast, we've got to be careful," said Alison Noble, a professor of biomedical engineering at Oxford University.
There also needs to be a shift in how AI-enabled discoveries are described, Denis Newman-Griffis of the Centre for Machine Intelligence at Sheffield University told Axios.
The big picture: Google's top executives in attendance -- Hassabis and James Manyika, senior vice president of research, technology and society -- said they're trying to increase trust in AI by using it to solve practical problems, including forecasting floods and predicting wildfire boundaries.
What's next: Next month, Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper will collect their Nobel Prize for developing AlphaFold, an AI system that can predict the structure of proteins and is used for drug discovery and other problems.