How long until we see similar announcements for (wet lab) chemistry, medicine or material science? Months? Years? Never?
(Never would mean AI will be used in future labs like a fancy calculator, but not much more changes)
(Never would mean AI will be used in future labs like a fancy calculator, but not much more changes)
Also, fwiw I have a personal test problem I give to every frontier model on release, which is to ask it to final a realatively obvious solution (in hindsight) to a minorly important open problem in my field. I know the answer, but havent gotten around to writing it up yet (it's really not that important). Every frontier model (so far) just regurgitates existing solutions.
Edit: to be clear, I completely believe your experience - just pointing out that it might be interesting for you to actually “try” to solve it thoroughly with the tools, though it is obviously hard to do that in a fair way when you know the solution.
I think the solution is easy enough that any competent colleague would come up with it. Some variant on it has probably even been published (hence why I'm not chomping at the bit to publish). I think it comes down to the models being extremely spiky, and the problems they're trying to solve being easily verifiable in code.
However current frontier models got good enough at websearch and thinking through the problem, that they can finally piece together the answer from my own public writing (eg on stackoverflow). And recently someone wrote up an answer to the problem and put it on Arxiv.
"Forebears" is a site that ranks the popularity of names. They rank the name I used at 324,668.
This is why I believe the AI can be significantly influenced by a single person.
I'm pretty sure the name has moved to different AIs somehow too. I've seen the name used on Grok, and also on NovelAI. I've forgotten the exact details.
Fission hasn't exactly taken the world by storm.
There are a few nice advantages fusion has, but they are more important once we want to reach the stars as far as I can tell; not this century on this planet.
But I'm just an armchair analyst. You probably have a much better understanding.
I just find it to be an interesting problem! My hope is it happens before I die. My rule of thumb is anyone who says energy on the grid in < 10 years is a blatant liar.
It's just probably not economically feasible, ie it would be a waste of resources to rush fusion so much.
> I just find it to be an interesting problem!
Ha, that's why I was working Zero Knowledge Proofs for quite a while. I don't even hold any cryptocurrency or other crypto assets.
Therefore, most credible folks are talking a 2-3 facility staged approach. And probably 5 years per facility to build, and 5 years per to test.
Also, remember that even with huge cash pools, you have supply chain problems. Some of the nonlinear optics takes a fixed amount of time to fabricate.
A giant water tank that you detonate H-bombs in should work, and even be energy positive. :)
So effectively, you would spend the first 1000 experiments inside a computer simulation and move to the physical world only when you had enough confidence.
But agents are really useful for doing some of the really boring stuff, like convergence checks or setting up meshes or whatever.
..or can we?
Humour me for a moment. Maybe simulating to the degree that was necessary for cutting edge work was not possible earlier, when humans had to program each and every thing in the system that could affect the result. But with current gen petaflop-on-your-desk level compute + swarms of agents that can work tirelessly to account for every known thing to humanity, maybe the threshold has been pushed far enough to produce some more meaningful discovery work in simulation?
Let's put it this way - a first year graduate student can ignite a fusion target in simulations. It took thousands of scientists the better part of three decades to do that in experiments. I think agents could do the former really efficiently and at scale, but I'm skeptical that agents could do the latter. Oh, and btw, fusion simulations of the kind you're talking are in exa-zettaflop territory ;)
Haha, thanks for humouring me!
Also, goes without saying, but put Sam Altman in jail, obviously.
I wonder how many of those founder at the "paper" to formalization step, or at earlier or later steps (e.g., proof doesn't turn out to prove what the paper said, hits a bug in the kernel, etc.).
I'm kinda hoping they are investing just as much into that type of research. Its their money but man... I'd say 999/1000 people are unaffected by all these breakthroughs. They probably have no idea tons of legendary math/CS conjectures were proven true/false. If a breakthrough in cancer research were to be made, it would very quickly start effecting everyone on earth.
> I'm kinda hoping they are investing just as much into that type of research.
The money would be better spent trying to breed a flying unicorn, because that's remotely possible.
"Cancer" is not "a" disease. It's a symptomatic description: cells in your body multiplying beyond a limit that is healthy for you.
What you are asking for would be like asking for a universal cure for headaches. What if your headache is caused by a tumor? Or a nailgun injury? Or psychotic hallucination?