AI's Great - Largely Unspoken - Potential for Intellectual Matchmaking

A frontier we rarely capture is the value hidden in the interactions between fields. We train specialists to go deep, but many discoveries occur where domains overlap—where, say, material science meets biology, or optics meets chemistry, and the emergent behavior is the real prize.

The bottleneck is not intelligence; it’s coordination: finding the right counterpart in another field and then constructing a shared language to work together. 

AI has the potential to lower both costs. It might surface non-obvious connections across literatures, suggest plausible joint hypotheses, and translate between vocabularies—essentially matching complementary experts who would never have met or even realize that their great theories and expertise could meet and have a baby that would yield something dramatically different. 

But the final step is institutional: we’ll need incentives and structures that reward the collaboration AI makes possible. To translate these possibilities into value means creating institutions that fund these efforts and create the supporting infrastructure of teammates, equipment, project management, and experts who might be called in for portions of this project. And, of course, visionary marketing to create the support needed to translate this possibility into reality.