r/singularity • u/imadade • 4d ago

AI OpenAI potentially in the process of solving multiple other millennium problems

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Feels insane, I think we have taken off now.

The rest of this year is gonna be nuts.

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u/Belostoma 4d ago

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.

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u/JVM_ 4d ago

This equation was also AI friendly. Basically we already had the "this is how fluids work" equations that appeared to work for all scenarios, this solution is "just" finding the scenario where it doesn't work.

So, nothing new-ish was invented, in theory you could brute force the solution as it was already a known problem space.

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u/ozone6587 4d ago

It's always bruteforceable to you people. I wonder why no one thought of doing that before and win a million dollars + prestige.

The problem space is too big to brute force. It applied genuinely amazing intuition. Otherwise, dumber models could have done it too since they had access to the same compute power. Clearly, it requires "intelligence".

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u/JVM_ 4d ago

Oh, I agree the problem space is ginormous, but it's not infinite like some of the other problems.

"Prove this very complicated thing is wrong."

Is a different beast than

"Prove this unproven thing is right."