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Comment by gizajob | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, Sam Altman’s recent one saying that his LLMs would “cure cancer” if they built enough data centres was also a winner.

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And create a theory of quantum gravity.

i have to say I'm a little disgusted by these statements. LLMs are useful for many problems, but is there really a conceivable path of them making progress into fighting the countless cancers tormenting humanity?

My framing device: if you had LLMs in the 1500s, how would that help Copernicus determine the orbits of the planets? Maybe through dumb chance, but creating a well reasoned model of the universe required new observations and the ability to interpret the data from a different point of view.

More likely the LLM would condescendingly tell him that he was wrong and that the earth was clearly at the centre of the universe.

Depending on the time of creation, it might be impossible for the LLM NOT to tell him he's wrong and the earth is the center of the universe.

Interesting framing. Although I assume all the observations had been done already. It was more about being bold enough to investigate a line of thought that wasn't obvious or popular at the time and proving it convincingly.

They already had many "explanations" and models for why the planets were seemingly moving back and forth in the sky during the year. Their models were more complicated than necessary simply because they didn't want to consider the different premise.

All the 1500s and earlier data that such an LLM would have to have been trained on would lead to an LLM that wouldn’t ever suggest a heliocentric solar system. That LLM might even say he was heretical or refuse to give an answer to anything that led to it saying that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. So no help at all.

Without those sorts of revolutionary claims, would they still be receiving enough funding to keep the lights on?

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