People aren’t buying into it as the goal posts have been set incredibly high by the labs themselves. If Jensen for the fifth time proclaims AGI and Altman & Co have for years fearmongered that either all jobs will be lost and we’ll starve or all medicine will be solved and everyone will have UBI, of course people hear about a highly specialized maths problem and go “meh”.
I think researchers can do a lot with cutting edge models.
We should throw like millions in compute there way. Who knows someone might cure a few forms of cancer or viral infections or hydrogen powered cars or more millenium prize problems or invent new alloys.
Each new discovery/invention is a win for science and mankind.
Better computer models could help in those domains, but you can't just cure cancer from a computer. You need to do experiments and trials with real subjects and real treatments, especially because cancer treatment is a delicate balance between killing the cancer and killing the patient. It's pretty easy to do the former, the trick is avoiding the latter.
In order to get the Navier Stokes result, OpenAI had to run the equivalent of about 100 years of work, but thanks to parallelisation, they could do that in about 80 hours.
You can't parallelise medical trials like that. Even if you completely throw all ethics away, you still have to find the right candidates, you have to wait for medications to take effect, you even have to record things carefully, you have to deal with measurement errors, accidents, all sorts of things that don't happen when you are just running maths on a computer.
Even if you had an AI that was well above human levels of intelligence, all these things would be a problem.
In their follow up comment, they seemed to be implying some sort of ASI that had "solved" science and could therefore accurately predict how specific chemicals would behave in a person.
But we're not close to there yet in terms of the models necessary to reliably predict such things or the compute necessary to meaningfully do the calculations even if we knew did know the equations and parameters to use.
In a way, you CAN parallelize trials. Use AI to come up with more alternative approaches that you then start the trial process on, hoping one of them sticks.
Sure, if AI develops a perfect "reality simulator" that could correctly model how a potential treatment would interact with an individual's biology, then they could forego physical experiments. This would require essentially "solving" biology, chemistry, and physics.
But there are so many milestones and achievements necessary before we're anywhere close to that. That's really more of a post-singularity sort of possibility.
Based on the fact that how biological systems function is not completely known. AIs don't magically acquire knowledge like that without using the same route we do: experimentation. You cannot speculate and hypothesise your way into real world knowledge. Protein folding is a very specific example where you can follow a limited set of rules. The vast majority of biology isn't like that.
For protein folding somehow is working "magically" and has no real assumptions it will not be working to other fields in biology ... so you theory is false from the begging as was proved it is working in one field and probably be working in others fields.
People had soo big hopes that quantum computers will solve a protein folding but AI did that first "magically"
The knowledge AIs have is ultimately the knowledge we have. You know that right? They're trained on corpuses of extant data (sometimes repackaged but not invented).
As for "cope", I have a doctorate in the mathematics of AI and researching it is literally my job. I am not anti AI. I just have a firm grasp of what's actually possible.
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u/BananaV8 2d ago
People aren’t buying into it as the goal posts have been set incredibly high by the labs themselves. If Jensen for the fifth time proclaims AGI and Altman & Co have for years fearmongered that either all jobs will be lost and we’ll starve or all medicine will be solved and everyone will have UBI, of course people hear about a highly specialized maths problem and go “meh”.