88 | How AI dreams up new science – with Jure Leskovec

What happens when AI starts doing science? We talk with Stanford computer scientist Jure Leskovec about AI agents that find patterns in large datasets, come up with hypotheses and try to kill them with more data, enduring the tedious work human scientists would rather avoid. What are we human scientists still uniquely good for? Taste, judgment, intuition, emotion, procrastination? And we discuss whether AI might be opening up a whole new continent of discoveries, a terra incognita with plenty of ways to get lost and found. Worth a look: 50×50: Science Across America – 50 creators, 50 scientists, 50 states, 50 videos over ten weeks in 2026, from the Independent Media Initiative. It goes where science actually happens, with the people who actually do it – which is the part we're always most curious about. https://www.5050science.com/ The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .