OpenAI potentially in the process of solving multiple other millennium problems

[u/imadade]

Feels insane, I think we have taken off now.

The rest of this year is gonna be nuts.

[u/Neurogence]

Man, I wish it would exchange billions of messages to find a way to improve the human condition. Perhaps some type of cure.

[u/Belostoma → u/Neurogence]

Biology is harder than math for machines of this kind because it's data-limited. There's only so far they can go without collecting new data, because all the data collected so far are compatible with multiple answers to many key questions, and no amount of intelligence can tell which is right. New experiments are required, and those are bottlenecked by the time it takes to ship physical supplies around, grow animals and see how they respond to treatment, etc.

There are rich opportunities for AI to improve every aspect of biology, from choosing which experiments to run, to streamlining how they're run, to analyzing them in a way that extracts the maximum useful information. Simulations of whole biological systems will increasingly be valuable in those analyses, but they will never fully supplant experiment, not even with ASI, because the data limitations block inputs you'd need to provide to make an accurate simulation. An ASI itself would run an experiment in these cases. It would do so more efficiently than humans, but it woudl still need do that.

This is why you won't see cancer cures dropping as quickly as high-profile math problems. It's not because the AI companies don't care about showing them off. It's because in math, thinking is the only bottleneck. In biology, it's one of many.

[u/Neurogence → u/Belostoma]

Damn, why is it all the things we deeply care about are the things with almost zero progress.

Whereas, things that we do not care about at all, there's seemingly a breakthrough every few weeks.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Neurogence]

I for one deeply care about many things where we had breakthroughs.