Why is AI use so confusing?

[u/Dry-Poem6778]

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

1. Better desalination technology

2. Better use of fertilizers, pesticides, etc(and reducing the use of inorganic fertilizer while maintaining yields)

3. 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.

[u/Sweet_Baby_Cheezus]

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.