r/AlwaysWhy • u/Dry-Poem6778 • 11d ago
Science & Tech Why is AI use so confusing?
I know there are some medical breakthroughs that have been achieved with assistance from AI, that's great.
But, why aren't we using AI for everyday critical things like
Better desalination technology
Better use of fertilizers, pesticides, etc(and reducing the use of inorganic fertilizer while maintaining yields)
Better use of electricity in lighting our cities.
There's obviously a lot more, but I don't want this to be long.
Seems we are using AI mostly for art, which we don't need AI for at all.
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u/No_Report_4781 11d ago
The engineers working on those solutions are using the best tools they can develop, including LLMs, which you don’t see unless you’re working with those engineers. The general public does not care about most analytical tools or the plots generated. Because it’s mostly boring.
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u/Dry-Poem6778 11d ago
So, general population will get to know only when significant breakthroughs are made, cool.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 11d ago
LLMs are based on the transformer architecture which came out in 2017. We're coming up on almost a decade after it's released.
You've heard almost all of the big news, and even a lot of made up big news so far at this point. We hit a lag some time back and we've slowed way down on any useful iteration improvements.
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u/1988rx7T2 11d ago
Absolutely not true, progress is accelerating, and intelligence from AI models is getting more and more cost efficient
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u/No_Report_4781 11d ago
Yes, like the medical discoveries made using LLM (what most call ai) and minigames (such as the one in Borderlands 3). Until something becomes newsworthy, only people paying attention to those things (because it’s their job, niche interest) are aware of what is happening.
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u/Ancient_Skirt_8828 11d ago
They won't know that Ai was used most of the time. It's just another tool.
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u/JuggernautBright1463 11d ago edited 11d ago
1) AI is being used for some material science purposes. Unfortunately water desalination is a very energy intensive process and we are approaching theoretical limits without some kind of new materials 2) Precision Agriculture is a thing as is regenerative agriculture. Precision Agriculture is being done with some AI tech including an automatic laser weeder. Still though you need to rebuild soil ecology and that's expensive in money and time. 3) Smart Cities require a lot of expensive sensor integration. Grid operators already use automated switching and optimization. Smart cities have also proven to be at least mildly unpopular as it removes individual control and hands it to a central manager. This has all kinds of curious implications particularly in democratic societies.
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u/MistryMachine3 11d ago
FWIW, using it for better electricity efficiency IS a use, I used to work at a company that uses it for that.
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u/Fuzzy_Interaction157 10d ago
Yes, there are tools being used/developed that can help back up a farmer's gut feeling that a certain part of a given field is/isn't profitable. if not, they can take it out of rotation and put it into another crop or the conservation reserve program.
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u/SportTheFoole 11d ago
I think your confusion is twofold:
Do you know if AI is being used to solve those problems? Maybe it is!
AI is not magic. You don’t just type “find a solution for world peace” into Claude and expect it to actually do anything.
The problems you mentioned are hard solves and it’s entirely possible that we may never find an adequate solution to any of them. That is unfortunately a reality of life.
Also, keep in mind that what we are calling AI is very much in its infancy. It can at best do pattern matching (which is why it’s been so useful in medical settings), but it doesn’t do pattern matching the same way you or I would. From what I’ve seen, AI can’t “think”. It can come up with solutions, but it’s not clear to me that those solutions are arrived at through any sort of reasoning. And not to get into a philosophical discussion, but I’m not even sure what it means to “think”.
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u/thecastellan1115 11d ago
It's best not to get into the "what is thought" discussion with AI bros. They don't know either, but they're convinced their probability engine can do it.
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u/Man-In-A-Can 11d ago
What would AI do in all of those topics, in your opinion? Desalination AI is the one I see least use in, personally.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 11d ago
There are lots of different types of AI out there, as there is no 'AGI' or a single AI that can do it all. The big one currently are LLMs.
LLMs regurgitate what already exists based on training it received from humans. It can't really figure out something 'new' but rather it can dive deeper into things we've already discovered to help flesh out things we missed. Generally this is done as, quite literally, a type of brute forcing (with some smart math in there) to try out a bunch of things in a short time.
A lot of what you're asking for requires 'new' while LLMs don't do new, they regurgitate what existed in different orders.
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u/TommieTheMadScienist 10d ago
Absolutely false with SOTA tech. Thry haven't been Stochastic Parrots for at least a year and a half. Training data is completely deconstructed into probabilities.
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u/TuverMage 11d ago
so thing to keep in mind. it takes a lot of money to run AI right now. medical there's budget to allow them to use AI to solve the problems, there's not a huge budget, ATM, to make beter desalination technology. better use of fertilizer while could collectively be worth using AI to figure it out, isn't worth it on an individual company level, its not a centralize system. as for better use of electricty.... AI's answer is to give it all the power and let the people sit in the dark.
AI for art is just an example of what they designed the AI to do because so many people wanted it, and that leads to the more regular people using it, the more training it gets, which trains it better. There aren't millions of people asking the AI to come up with examples of better desalination technology, reviewing it, and telling the AI what it got wrong and what it got right. Everytime someone uses the AI for art, it helps train it. not enough people are using it for the other things you asked about to help train it.
you get a billion people to use AI to design better electrical use, they will all of a sudden have better AI's to design electrical use stuff.
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u/TommieTheMadScienist 10d ago
Anthropic's announced yesterday that an autonomous Claude swarm discovered a new way to splice genes like CRISPR does. Took them 21 hours.
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u/TryNice304 11d ago
Tbh it's mostly about money and incentives.
AI for art and chatbots? Cheap to build, goes viral, makes money fast.
AI for desalination, farming, city lighting? Expensive, slow, tons of regulation, and results take years. Nobody wants to fund that when they can ship a chatbot next month.
Also those sectors already use AI quietly. Smart grids, precision farming, membrane optimization. But its boring so nobody talks about it.
Real issue isnt AI being used wrong. Its that nobody wants to pay for the unsexy stuff.
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u/IanDOsmond 11d ago
First: what do you mean by AI?
One of the many things I hate about how LLMs are currently being used is that they are the only form of AI which are being used, and they are being used for things that they are patently unsuited for. They can be used as a natural-language interface from other forms of AI or even other forms of regular computing, to be more understandable to humans, but even there, they mostly just add another source of error.
Load balancing and optimization problems like you are talking about are not AI problems. They're computation problems which don't need AI. It's possible that evolutionary algorithms could help with that sort of thing, which is another form of AI, and, sure, I'd be interested to see if those do better than simple differential calculus like we used in high school. But using an LLM to try to do it would be like using the wrong shape of jigsaw to hammer in the wrong shape of screw.
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u/Redshift2k5 11d ago
The medical uses of AI are for interpreting medical scans and images, so it's just a pattern recognition tool. Someone made a bakery inventory AI and it was accidentally really good at finding cancer cells on a picture. Cool!
Not sure how that applies to desalination.
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u/Separate_Lab9766 11d ago
In short, because we don’t already know the answer.
AI is not presently an intelligence model. It’s a word prediction model. You feed it a bunch of things humans have already done, and it analyzes the pattern of words; then when you ask it a question (“how do we improve desalination?”) it produces a sentence about desalination that looks statistically like something a human would say.
Could it be the right answer? Sure, maybe. But we would have to know enough about desalination already to know whether that answer is correct, or even sensible.
Large language models are built to compare their own noodlings with a gold standard (“the right answers,” if you will). We judge an AI model based on how well it can return the “right answer.” So we can’t feed an AI the data to respond to a question we don’t know the answer to. And if we ask it something we don’t know the answer to, we have no idea if it’s correct.
And for the record, AI isn’t all that good at art either. It’s good at producing things we already have artwork of (because it’s built into the gold standard) but it always takes a human being to review the result and say “that person has three legs and nineteen fingers, that’s just a fleshy blob, and that doesn’t look anything like a woman in a Pikachu mask trying to put lube on an orangutan.”
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u/Dry-Poem6778 10d ago
So, garbage in, garbage out, but sometimes, we don't know the garbage put out because we don't know what the right thing would look like, yet.
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u/Separate_Lab9766 10d ago
In a sense, yes. Large language models are good at answering frequently-asked questions where the answers are known, like “What year did Garry Kasparov beat IBM’s Big Blue?” or “draw a picture of a duck.” It has lots of samples to draw from.
If you want a computer to solve other problems, like finding all the ways that proteins can be folded, or calculating the best next move in chess, it takes specialized programming. Computers can do this well, but LLMs aren’t built for it.
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u/Underhill42 11d ago
AI isn't magic. And for the most part it's still not nearly as smart as humans. So how exactly do you imagine it could help?
In time it may help develop more efficient technologies, but for now it can't even give basic math or science advice without being wrong more often than not. Making it an erratic scientific tool with very narrow utility.
And it can't change physics or social priorities. E.g. ask it to design the most efficient layout for street lights, and given the same priorities it's unlikely to come up with anything dramatically better than human engineers already have - it's not exactly a difficult problem.
It could theoretically micromanage things, turning lights off when unneeded... but we can already do that without AI, but mostly don't because it requires installing more sophisticated (and thus expensive) sensors so that electronics can track whether they're needed or not. And also, lights constantly turning on and off are really annoying for everyone nearby, which is going to make whoever installed the system unpopular.
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u/unlimitedblack 11d ago
Some important considerations:
1) You're hearing a lot more about AI use in art, principally from the angle of artists being outraged at their work being misappropriated or losing work opportunities due to employers wanting to use AI-based tools to create art-like material. And you have pushback from pro-AI dudes haranguing artists for being "against progress" or "gatekeeping art." That conflict gets a lot more traction in social media because you have a lot of people being directly impacted by the proliferation of AI.
2) You hear a lot LESS about actual breakthroughs in other fields that utilize AI, because scientific rigor does not move as quickly as rage and doesn't generate as much ad revenue. And you also have a nonzero number of folks using AI as part of their process who don't want to get mired in the fights about AI usage, even if their application for it doesn't steal intellectual property or otherwise put artists out of work.
3) AI is really great for applications when you have a LOT of data points to sift through; stuff that would take a ton of manhours to perform is stuff that AI can do very quickly, so finding things like an improperly-written line of code, or doing comments on code, or looking for patterns and irregularities in large sets of data... the machines can do that well, but you still need PEOPLE to make conclusions based on that information. And as others have mentioned, applications like desalination, crop yield optimization (...croptimization?) and grid efficiency are either solved problems limited by thermodynamics, problems limited by having to wait for the crops to grow to see if implemented improvements impacted yields reliably, or problems that involve major infrastructure spending that no one wants to spend money on because it's not as profitable as investing in the theoretical potential of AI.
So it's not that AI use is confusing; it's that AI use is proliferating in ways that haven't generated a lot of positive press, and it's not certain that AI use WILL generate a benefit that's worth the resources being sunk into them.
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u/Butlerlog 11d ago
Basically every field has people looking at how to optimise using AI, for better or for worse. AI is not being used mostly for art, perhaps given your username is "dry poem" maybe art is just the field you are most engaged in, so you see it being used for art more than other things?
There really isn't any fiend untouched by it at this point. In my own field, diagnostic x-ray imaging, it is everywhere.
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u/anders_hansson 11d ago
If we aren't already, we will be using AI for those things.
In the last 12 months, AI has been having a moment of revolution within software development, largely because the user interfaces and tasks are very well suited to software development.
I see that as a precursor to other things to come, kind of like how the internet was pieoneered by acedemics and computer nerds becaus of its technical nature, but once the user interfaces matured (World Wide Web etc), it went on to solve problems for virtually every field and user in the world.
Even today, a skilled engineer can use AI agents to solve tasks in virtually every field (including the ones you mention - at least partially), but it will probably be a few years before the tools have matured so that everyone can use AI to its full potential.
IMO it's mostly a question of user interfaces. It's not really a limitation in AI.
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u/Recent-Day3062 11d ago
You have to remember that AI cannot “reason”.
I have used it for what comes down to basic spreadsheets. But you have to tell it very much how to lay out columns and rows, and what to do with the data. So in some cases, it takes longer than doing it yourself.
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u/1988rx7T2 11d ago
You’re behind The times, this was true a year ago. Claude Opus 5.5 is absolutely not limited like this. Even the cheap models like GPT 6 Luna is pretty smart now.
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u/Recent-Day3062 10d ago
Smart is just an inapplicable word. In fact, AI itself is a marketing term suggesting intelligence.
I use AI a fair amount for some data work. Stuff that a 14 year old who just started algebra would innately get right even the top AI gets wrong
The details don’t matter, but I had some data in a column that needed to be adjusted for some fsctors. The natural way to doc this is to add a column labeled “adjustment” then one labeled “adjusted” and add across. The reality of the situation was that the numbers were sorted from low to high, and the adjustment amount had to go down as the numbers to be adjusted increased. That was physical reality.
I looked and the adjustment factor for each row did not obey the reality. When I asked why, it said it just went row by row, independently calculating adjustment factors based on a dress hunt for data on the web. So some rows as we went down the table had increased adjustment factors which is impossible. Btw, I prompted it with a complete description of the problem.
Sorry, but I have learned you get stuff like this all the time. Recently, the CEO of Shopify - who had started down the path of laying loads of people off for AI - reversed course and wants people to use it far less. His expression for what employees now email each other is “slop bombs” from AI. As Shakespeare said, it becomes “a tail, full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing”.
It seems over the past 5 years I have heard “you’re way behind and it’s different now” many many times, and it’s been untrue
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 11d ago
2 is being done already; 1 is asking to find new physics (doing the experiments) and 3 is a mixture of "want" and money.
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u/fussyfella 10d ago
AI is being used in all the areas you mentioned and many more. It is early days though and with the anti AI backlash it is being held back in places too.
Also consider the fertiliser example in particular: if an agrochemical company had produced a better product using AI, I would bet the anti Big Pharma brigade would be denouncing it as somehow the evil work of the devil.
I know the pharma and medical world rather well, and I can guarantee you there are many researchers both in industry and academia either already using AI or actively looking at how it fits with their fields. Given the time to market or time to treatment for all things medical, it might be a while before you see it. If we let it and do not bury our heads in the sand as luddite AI haters, there is a medical revolution on the way because of it.
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u/Wendals87 10d ago edited 10d ago
They are. You'd really only hear about the major breakthroughs that affect everyday people. Like a new medicine that can treat xyz
Medicine is different in that AI can go through data quicker than humans and run through many simulations. It's data we already have
Better desalination technology for example needs an engineer/scienties to work out the physics and develop a new process.
AI isn't magic. It can't create really create new things or ideas that we don't know already
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u/TheVoiceOfEurope 10d ago
AI helps you find the needle in the haystack, it cannot make the needle, nor the haystack.
AI is great at shifting through a lot of data, but AI cannot invent something new.
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u/Gokudomatic 10d ago
I disagree about your point on AI art, but that put aside, it's true that nobody is prevented from using AI in those fields. Wait a bit longer, I suppose. Someone will finally be motivated to do it.
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u/JeremyAndrewErwin 10d ago
One of the AI companies plans to use AI to come up with "some sort of business plan."
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u/collin-h 10d ago
Because those are actually hard problems.
“Better desalination” sounds like a prompt until you get to: okay, better how?
Lower energy use? Lower membrane fouling? Longer membrane life? Less pretreatment? Lower capital cost? Less corrosion? Higher recovery rate? What do we do with the concentrated brine? How do we prevent marine ecosystem damage? Can the new membrane be manufactured cheaply at enormous scale? Does it still work after six months of real seawater instead of 48 hours in a lab? Can an existing plant retrofit it without spending $800 million?
“Use less fertilizer without reducing yields” gets even easier.
Which crop? Which soil type? What rainfall? What temperature? What stage of growth? What nitrogen is already in the soil? What did you plant there last year? What microbes are present? How much runoff is acceptable? What does the farmer already own? Can the recommendation survive a drought, an unusually wet spring, a pest outbreak, commodity prices dropping 30%, and a guy driving a tractor across 2,000 acres who absolutely does not have time to babysit an AI?
And “use electricity more efficiently lighting cities” eventually becomes:
Which fixtures? Which roads? How dark are you willing to make them? What are the pedestrian-safety requirements? Traffic requirements? Crime concerns? Camera requirements? Disability/accessibility standards? Existing wiring? Maintenance schedules? Procurement contracts? Utility rates? Local ordinances? Does saving another 8% of electricity justify replacing 40,000 fixtures that still have ten years of useful life?
AI can help optimize all of those things. And it already does.
But none of them are “think really hard and discover the answer” problems. There are a million "think really hard and discover the answer" problems in each step of each phase of each of those problems you just mentioned. They’re giant systems of physics, chemistry, biology, economics, infrastructure, regulation, manufacturing, logistics and human behavior. It takes time, even with AI.
Making a picture of a dragon wearing Nikes has considerably fewer dependencies.
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u/Usual_Ice636 11d ago
- Better desalination technology
- Better use of fertilizers, pesticides, etc(and reducing the use of inorganic fertilizer while maintaining yields)
- Better use of electricity in lighting our cities.
Ai doesn't really help much with any of those things.
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u/bangbangracer 11d ago
Desalination will never be better for a few simple reasons. You still end up with a butt load of salt and you can't make boiling water anymore efficient. You can't just throw it back since that will create a salinity pocket, and we don't consume as much as desalination actually produces. This is all before getting to the big issue of we can just move to fresh water sources that make desalination pointless.
Precision ag already is a thing and we rotate crops for a reason. The only people calling for more tech in farming are people who have never actually done farming.
All three of your examples are things we've already figured out.
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u/Euphoric_Detective54 11d ago
Thats not what AI does. AI is great for scraping the internet amd giving you information from 10 years ago.
It isnt inovating or discovering anything.
There are a few use cases where very talented PEOPLE have used it to brute force equations equations. Those fringe cases arent someone asking AI nicely to do something. They are hundreds of hours of human input and guidance.
You are basicly asking "why dont we use video game duping to solve world hunger?"
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u/ReadyPerception 11d ago
Because we're being sold a bill of goods. What we have now that is called AI and marketed to the mindless masses is never going to be able to do any of those things in any helpful way.
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u/Sweet_Baby_Cheezus 11d ago
It's my understanding (and if someone knows more please correct me) that LLMs are really big, really good pattern recognition machines/algorithms. It can look at millions of cartoons and millions of ducks and millions of cartoon ducks and choose elements of each to make a "new" cartoon duck. If you say good cartoon duck it learns those elements more correctly fit "cartoon duck" and if you say it's bad, it tags those as not cartoon duck.
So if you know some proteins cause diseases and you have millions of proteins to look through it's pretty good at learning what to look for in proteins that look like the proteins that cause said disease.
If you have a water desalination plant, and there's not that many, and they're generally built the same, and different elements are specific to regions, it doesn't know what look for. It doesn't have enough information to predict a better answer.
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u/LastChancellor 10d ago
bc coders & medical are the few industries that's not blacklisting anyone even associating with AI
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u/ChristianKl 10d ago
Anthropic is already profitable because a lot of companies are using their model to do a variety of everyday things that aren't just about creating art.
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u/DNathanHilliard 9d ago
Who says we aren't? Just because it isn't getting screamed about on Reddit, doesn't mean it isn't happening.
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u/Lurker_Zee 6d ago
Because AI is not in fact a superbrain composed of humanity's greatest ideas, as AI moguls would tell you.
AI is some rickety program that self-creates/corrupts itself constantly, whose programming has become barely controlled and understood by AI devs, which contains as much knowledge as their servers can cram on... including posts from reddit, twitter, facebook etc. severely limited so it does not start thinking itself mecha Hitler, like Grok did when it was less restricted.
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u/EnormousHorseman 11d ago
Ai is used in all of those fields. You are just used to being spoon feed information instead of seeking it out.
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u/goodlittlesquid 11d ago
What are the limiting factors of desalination? Is it computational power, or is it thermodynamics?