A Spanish foundation used large language models to screen out proposals predicted to be unsuccessful. But its evaluators are sceptical
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A Spanish research funder is using generative artificial intelligence to weed out weak proposals in a potentially controversial trial aimed at reducing evaluator workload.
The La Caixa Foundation, a non-profit that distributes €145 million in research funding a year, used a specially trained AI model to screen out around one in six applications to one of its biomedical calls, although two human reviewers check whether these rejections were fair.
The idea is contentious because large language models (LLMs) cannot understand research proposals, nor can they explain why they have made a decision. Instead, they statistically check whether a proposal’s language matches up with…
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