Peter GleickJul 12, 2023

I see everyoine is (rightly so) ripping on Musk's new all-male xAI effort to "understand the true nature of the universe."

But the real problem is AI can't tell us anything new beyond what scientists have already figured out. It doesn't do any "thinking" or actual research or anything new; it simply regurgitates re-formulated ideas based on the science of what we already know.

What is MIGHT produce, especially since Musk is leading this, is garbage speculation unsupported by evidence.

Show threadspaduf
@petergleick On the contrary, the same advances in AI that power ChatGPT also power the recent advanced in protein folding! This has huge benefits in medical research and is a significant leap in chemistry in it's own right.
Jul 13, 2023 at 2:59amWeb
Show threadspadufJul 13, 2023
@petergleick To expand in a way that you may find appealing, AI has a lot of potential for solving problems where scientists have come to the point where they've gone "Well anything beyond this point is simply too complex a system to model explicitly". This is why these systems are so useful in biotech. It is particularly important for me to impress that these problems likely could not be solved through other means.
Show threadspadufJul 13, 2023
@petergleick LLMs are the hot new thing among crypto bros but people should know that there will be objectively good advances that come out of this tech that will help a lot of people.