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Comment by biophysboy | Hacker News Reader

I have been kind of disappointed by AI science-wise. I was anticipating more advancement. Experiments do take time, so I suppose they could be pending.

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AI really struggles with "collision with reality". Computers suck at modeling the real world in a detailed enough way to make scientific progress, aside from small niches like drug discovery where you have a very well scoped problem. If any part of the try something -> test it -> look at the results loop requires hitting the real world, AI is going to struggle.

On the other hand, the areas where it doesn't need to hit the real world, progress is absolutely flying. I would not be surprised if AI is superhuman in math and physics in a year, considering we went from homework helper to IMO Gold to Millennium problem solving in a couple years time. I think we'll start to see more meaningful scientific progress in maybe 2-3 years when scientists have access to an oracle that can formulate theories and direct real-world research better than a human can.

I agree and I think the question is then, how much economically valuable work exists in a closed world? My hunch is less than people think. Finance can't rely on LLMs because its adversarial we can't all be listening to the same oracle and evidence of LLMs being any good at trading are nil. And then lawyers, as per usual, will simply regulate their job security into existence. Of course, AI feels amazing to Silicon Valley / Big Tech, software is the product. And often its software you sell to other people making software. But outside of that? Useful but lots of landmines.

People have to come to grips with the possibility that a technology can be extremely impressive but be a bust in utility. I'm not saying that's what AI is, I'm saying that nobody actually knows.

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