Ask HN: Do you think LLMs will rapidly accelerate "hard" fields? Why / why not
1jb240318/21/2025, 9:28:15 PM
Comments (1)
PaulHoule · 1h ago
Mostly no. In physics the problem is not that we can’t make up theories, it’s that we need a 1000x or more bigger particle accelerator to settle them. In space travel I don’t see AI making some radical new engine that makes it easy to go to the moon or mars.
keeps making progress that could be radical but it seems to be pattern matching proteins that occur in nature and won’t unlock access to a huge space of possible proteins that don’t occur in nature. Could it help in drug discovery, yeah, but it is not a god, you will still have to do clinical trials. I think the big problem in space travel is “How can a small number of Mars colonist make 100% of what they need to sustain themselves?” and that’s a huge systems engineering problem which that advanced biotech could take a big chunk out of —- maybe AI combining the LLM ideas with systematic search could take a chunk out of it
but you need to solve 100% and there will be a huge amount of “blue collar” work to manifest it. So maybe AI doubles the speed you can get things done, maybe it speeds up things 10%.
Biotechnology could be a counterexample, if
https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/
keeps making progress that could be radical but it seems to be pattern matching proteins that occur in nature and won’t unlock access to a huge space of possible proteins that don’t occur in nature. Could it help in drug discovery, yeah, but it is not a god, you will still have to do clinical trials. I think the big problem in space travel is “How can a small number of Mars colonist make 100% of what they need to sustain themselves?” and that’s a huge systems engineering problem which that advanced biotech could take a big chunk out of —- maybe AI combining the LLM ideas with systematic search could take a chunk out of it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero
but you need to solve 100% and there will be a huge amount of “blue collar” work to manifest it. So maybe AI doubles the speed you can get things done, maybe it speeds up things 10%.