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I got fooled by AI-for-science hype–here's what it taught me
294 qianli_cs 218 5/20/2025, 4:57:00 AM understandingai.org ↗
not really related to AI but this reflects a lesson I learned too late during some research in college: constant collaboration is important because it helps you avoid retreading over areas where others have already failed
Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs? Or even the AI-driven incremental improvements? Do they exist anywhere? Or are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge, while making no progress of any sort in any field using it?
Interesting discussions tend to avoid “AI” in favour of specific terms such as “ML”, “LLM”, “GAN”, “stable diffusion”, “chatbot”, “image generation”. These terms refer to specific tech and applications of that tech, and allow to argue about specific consequences for sciences or society (use of ML in biotech vs. proliferation of chatbots).
However, certain sub-industries prefer “AI” precisely because it’s so vague, offers seemingly unlimited potential (please give us more investment money/stonks go up), and creates a certain vibe of a conscious being useful when pretending not to be working around IP laws and creating tools based on data obtained without relevant licensing agreements (cf. the countless “if humans have the freedom to read, therefore it’s unfair to restrict the uses of a software tool” fallacies, often perpetuated even by seemingly technically literate people, in pretty much every relevant forum thread).
Case in point:
For a decade the implementation of cameras went through development, testing and tuning of Auto Exposure, Auto Focus and Auto White-Balance ("AAA") engines as well as image post-processing.
These engines ran on a Image Signal Processor (ISP) or sometimes on the Camera sensor itself, extensive work was done by Engineering Teams on building these models in order to optimize them to run on low-latency on an ISP.
Suddenly AI came along and all of these features became "AI features". One company started with "AI assisted Camera" to promote the process everyone was doing all-along. So all had to introduce AI, without any disruptive change in the process.
> The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) in bathroom fixtures, particularly toilets, is shaping the future of hygiene, convenience, and sustainability.
Before the "AI" labeling more advanced image processing was often called "computational photography". At least in the world of smartphone cameras. Because they have tiny image sensors and lenses smartphone cameras need to do a lot of work to get a decent image out of any environment that doesn't have perfect lighting. The processing is more traditional computer vision.
There's not legitimate generative AI features being peddled like editing people out of (or into) photos. But most of the image processing pipelines haven't fundamentally changed but not have AI labeling to please marketers and upper management.
Which is to agree - obviously if people are talking about "AI" they don't want to talk about something that exists right this second. If they did it'd be better to use a precise word.
Also the term 'LLM' is more about the mechanics of the thing than what the user gets. LLM is the technology, but some sort of automated artificial intelligence is what people are generally buying.
As an example, when people use ChatGPT and get an image back, most don't think "oh, so the LLM called out to a diffusion API?" - they just think "oh chat GPT can give me an image if I give it a prompt".
Although again, the term is entirely abused to the extent that washing machines can contain 'AI'. Although just because a term is abused doesn't necessarily mean it's not useful - everything had "Cloud" in it 10 years ago but that term was still useful enough to stick around.
Perhaps there is an issue that AI can mean lots of things, but I don't know yet of another term that encapsulates the last 5 years advancements in automated intelligence, and what that technology is likely to be moving forwards, which people will readily recognise. Perhaps we need a new word, but AI has stuck and there isn't a good alternative yet, so is probably here to stay for a bit!
I remember when the exciting term in appliances was "fuzzy logic". As a technology it was just adding some sensors beyond simple timers and thermostats to control things like run time and temperatures of automated washers.
I think Machine Learning doesn't mean this as a word, as it can also refer to linear regression, non-linear optimisation, decision trees, bayesian networks etc.
That's not saying that AI isn't abused as a term - but I do think a more general term to describe the latest 5 years advancements in neural networks to solve problems is useful. Particularly as it's not obvious which model architectures would apply to which fields without more work (or even if novel architectures will be required for frontier science applications).
AI is not remotely limited to Neural Networks.
You hit the nail on the head there. AI, in its broadest terms, exists at the epicenter of hype and emotions.
To the extent you care about chess and Go as human activities, progress there is real.
there are some other scientific computing problems where AI or neural-network-based methods do appear to be at least part of the actual state-of-the-art (weather forecasting, certain single-molecule quantum chemistry simulations).
i would like the hype of the kind described in the article to be punctured, but this is hard to do if critics make strong absolute claims ("aren't useful in any field whatsoever") which are easily disproven. it hurts credibility.
And no offense to the GP, but they clearly aren't an expert in the field or they wouldn't be asking.
Probably should have replied directly to the post you replied to as much as yours. Was just pointing out that "not useful in any field whatsoever" is not something I've seen from anyone in the field. Even the article doesn't say that.
Could easily be brick 1 of self-improvement and the start of the banana zone.
What does this mean? Is it some slang for exponential growth, or is it a reference to something like the "paperclip maximizer"?
Sounds like a routine Bill Hicks might have come up with if he was still with us.
He hated obfuscation.
It's also very hard to prove a negative. If you predict "AI will never do anything of value" people will point to literally any result to prove you wrong. TFA does a good job debunking some recent hype, but the author cannot possibly wade through every hyperbolic paper in every field to demonstrate the claims are overblown.
It’s people making money off hype until it dies and move on to the next scam-with-some-use.
Alone language translation got so much better, voice syntesis, voice transcription.
All my meetings now are searchable and i can ask 'ai' to summarize my meetings in a relative accurate way impossible before that.
Alphafold made a breakthrough in protein folding.
Image and Video generation can now do unbelievable things.
Realtime voice communication with computer.
Our internal company search suddenly became usefull.
I have 0 use case for NFT and Crypto. I have tons of use case for ML.
Sort of. Alphafold is a prediction tool, or, alternatively framed, a hypothesis generation tool. Then you run an experiment to compare.
It doesn't represent a scientific theory, not in the sense that humans use them. It does not have anywhere near something like the accuracy rate for hypotheses to qualify as akin to the typical scientific testing paradigm. It's an incredibly powerful and efficient tool in certain contexts and used correctly in the discovery phase, but not the understanding or confirmation phase.
It's also got the usual pitfalls with differentiable neural nets. E.g. you flip one amino acid and it doesn't really provide a proper measure of impact.
Ultimately, one major prediction breakthrough is not that crazy. If we compare that to e.g. Random Forest and similar models, the impact in science is infinitely more with them.
On the other hand, now all your meetings produce reams of computer searchable records subject to discovery in civil and criminal litigation, possibly leading to far worse liability than would have been possible in a mostly email based business.
The problem is that the hype assumes that all of this is a baseline (or even below the baseline), while there are no signs that it can go much further in the near future – and in some cases, it's actually cutting-edge research. This leads to a pushback that may be disproportionate.
At the end of the day searching work documents and talking with computers is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable. Crypto at the end of the day is responsible for a lot of people getting wealthy. Was a lot of this wealth obtained on sketchy grounds? probably, but the same could be said AI (for example, the recent sale of windsurf for an obscene amount of money).
And sure everyone who got the money from others by gambling are biased. Fine with me.
But in comparision to crypto, people around me actually use AI/ML (most of them).
The bug difference is that they are profitable because they create value, when cryptocurrencies are a zero sum game between participants. (It is in fact a negative-sum game, since some people are getting paid to make the thing work so that others can gamble on the system).
No comments yet
I think there is this weird take amongst some on HN where LLMs are either completely revolutionary and making break through or utterly useless.
The truth is that they are useful already as a productivity tool.
There's also the other category who are terrified about the consequences for their lives and jobs, and who are driven in a very human way to rubbish the tech to convince themselves it's doomed to failure.
The optimists are right of course. A nascent technology at this scale and with this kind of promise, whose development is spurring a race between nation states, isn't going to fizzle out or plateau, however much its current iterations may come short of any particular person's expectations.
It is similarly easy to look ahead from a pessimist standpoint (e.g. how will this bubble collapse, and who will pay the bill for the hype?). The problem rather is that this overhyped optimistic standpoint is much more encouraged from society (and of course from the marketing).
> There's also the other category who are terrified about the consequences for their lives and jobs, and who are driven in a very human way to rubbish the tech to convince themselves it's doomed to failure.
There is also a third type who are not terrified of AI, but of the bad decisions managers (will) make because of all this AI craze.
If you can see the promise, you can see a gap to close between current capability and accomplished product. The question is then whether there's some barrier in that gap to make the accomplished product impossible forever. Pessimists tend to have given up on the tech already, so to them any talk about closing that gap is idle daydreaming or hype.
Writing emails - once I knew what I wanted to convey, the rest was so trivial as to not matter, and any LLM tooling just got in the way of actually expressing it as I ended up trying to tweak the junk it was producing.
Meeting minutes - I have yet to see one that didn’t miss something important while creating a lot of junk that no one ever read.
And while I’m sure someone somewhere has had luck with the document search/extract stuff, my experience has been that the hard part was understanding something, and then finding it in the doc or being reminded of it was easy. If someone didn’t understand something, the AI summary or search was useless because they didn’t know what they were seeing.
I’ve also seen a LOT of both junior and senior people end up in a haze because they couldn’t figure out what was going on - and the AI tooling just allowed them to produce more junk that didn’t make any sense, rather than engage their brain. Which causes more junk for everyone to get overwhelmed with.
IMO, a lot of the ‘productivity’ isn’t actually, it’s just semi coherent noise.
> Meeting minutes - I have yet to see one that didn’t miss something important while creating a lot of junk that no one ever read.
Especially that one. In the beginning for very structured meetings with a low number of participants it seemed to be ok but once they got more crowded, maybe not all are native speakers and took longer than 30 minutes (like workshops) it went bad.
+1 LLM will help you produce the "filler" nobody wants the read anyway.
why is this such a posterchild for llms. everyone always leads with this.
how boring are these meetings and do ppl actually review these notes? i never ever saw anyone reading meeting minutes or even mention them.
Why is this usecase even mentioned in LLM ads.
All I'm hearing is an appeal to making the workplace more isolating. Don't talk to each other, just talk to the machine that might summarize it wrong
But of course, models always improve and they never grow tired (if enough VC money is available), and even an idiot can stumble upon low hanging fruits overlooked by the brightest minds. This tireless ability to do systematic or brute-force reasoning about non-frontier subjects is bound to produce some useful results like those you mention.
The comparison with a pure financial swindle and speculative mania like NFTs is of course an exaggeration.
>that misunderstands some wild fact or theory and starts to speculate dumb and ridiculous "discoveries"
>even an idiot can stumble upon low hanging fruits overlooked by the brightest minds.
I was not able to get meeting transcription in that quality that cheap ever before. I followed dictation software for over a decade and tx to ML the open source software is suddenly a lot better than ever before.
Our internal company search with state of the art search indexes and search software was always shit. Now i ask an agent about a product standard and it just finds it.
Image generation never existed before.
Building a chatbot in a way that it actually does what you expect and its more complicated than answering the same 10 theoretical features it can do was hard and never really good and it now just works.
Im also not aware of any software rewriting or even writing documents for me, structer them etc.
If this was 'a simple user error' or 'not using the right tool for the job' than this was an error from smart people and it still got fixed by using AI/ML in an instant.
With this, my argument still stands even if it would be for a different reason which i personally doubt.
Also, everyone does dumb things, even smart people do dumb things. I do research in a field that many outsiders would say you must be smart to do (not my view) and every single one of us does dumb shit daily. Anyone who thinks they don't isn't as smart as they think they are.
I mean if you are going to deny their usefulness in the face of plenty of people telling you they actually help, it’s going to be impossible to have a discussion.
They don't just work though, they are not fool proof and definitely require double checking.
That’s not my experience.
We use them more and more at my job. It was already great for most office tasks including brainstorming simple things but now suppliers are starting to sell us agents which pretty much just work and honestly there are a ton of things for which LLMs seem really suited for.
CMDB queries? Annoying SAP requests for which you have to delve through dozens of menus? The stupid interface of my travel management and expense software? Please give me a chatbot for all of that which can actually decipher what I’m trying to do. These are hours of productivity unlocked.
We are also starting to deploy more and more RAG on select core business dataset and it’s more useful than even I anticipated and I’m already convinced. You ask, you get a brief answer and the documents back. This used to be either hours of delving through search results or emails with experts.
As imperfect as they are now, the potential value of LLMs is already tremendous.
My issue here is that a lot of this is solved by good practice, for example,travel management and expenses have been solved, company credit card. I don't need one slightly better piece of software to manage one terrible piece of software to solve an issue that has a solution.
Speedy minutes are absolutely not a template away. Anyone who ever had to write minutes for a complicated meetings knows it’s hard and requires a lot of back and forth for everyone to agree about what was said and decided.
Now you just turn on Copilot and you get both a transcript and an adequate basis for good minutes. Bonus point: it’s made by a machine so no one complains it has bias.
Some people here are blind to how useful that is.
1. Involve a computer
2. Do not require incredible intelligence
3. Involve the messiness of the real world enough that you can't write exact code to do it without it being insanely fragile
LLMs suddenly start to tackle these, and tackle them kind of all at once. Additionally they are "programmed" in just English and so you don't need a specialist to do something like change the tone of the summary or format, you just write what you want.
Assuming the models never get any smarter or even cheaper, and all we get is neater integrations, I still think this is all huge.
Again though, that's not at all what I've talked about.
People simply humour you to get around your personality.
Now that I think of it, maybe this AI era is not electricity, but rather GUI - like the time when Jobs(or whoever) figured out and adopted modern GUI on computers allowing more widespread uses of computer
This is a ridiculous take that makes me think you might not « understand the tech » as much as you think you do.
Is AI useful today ? That depends on the exact use case but overall it seems pretty clear the hype is greater than the use currently. But sometimes I feel like everyone forgets that ChatGPT isn’t even 3 years old, 6 years ago we were stuck with GPT-2 whose most impressive feat was writing a non sense poem about a unicorn, and AlphaGo is not even 10 years old.
If you can’t see the trend and just think that what we have today is the best we will ever achieve, thus the tech can’t do anything useful, you are getting blinded by contrarianism.
This is pretty much impossible to achieve with current architectures (which aren't all that different to those of old, just bigger). If they did, then they'd be woefully overfitted. They can't be made reliable. Anyone who understands the tech does know this.
What they naively wished the future was like: Flying cars. What they actually got (and is way more useful but a lot less flashy): Cheap solar energy.
This future is already there:
We have flying cars: they are called "helicopters" (see also https://xkcd.com/1623/).
Thank you for providing an example that directly maps to usefulness of ANN in most research though.
Glide ratios in GA (like highwing cessnas) is much more forgiving assuming you can find a place to put down.
The other is worse than nothing.
As a counterpoint: Geoffrey Hinton. You could say he's gone off the deep end on a tangent, but I definitely don't his incentive is to make money off of hype. Then there's Yann LeCun saying AI "could actually save humanity from extinction". [0]
If these guys just out of touch talking heads, who are the new guard people should read up on?
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather...
AI have legitimate uses, cryptocurrency only has “regulations evasion” and NFT has literally no use at all, though.
But that's very true that the AI ecosystem is crowded with grifters who feed on baseless hype, and many of them actually come from cryptocurrencies.
> Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs
> are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge, while making no progress of any sort in any field using it?
The obvious example of a highly significant AI-driven breakthrough is Alphafold [1]. It has already had a large impact on biotech, helping with drug discovery, computational biology, protein engineering...
[1] https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-deepmind-isomorphic...
So not only are we using an overfitting model that probably can't handle truly novel proteins, we have stopped actually doing the research to notice when this happens. Pretty bad.
This is "paying the toll", otherwise one will be accused of being a "luddite."
literally last week
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-p...
The Microsoft paper around the quantum “ breakthrough ” is in a different field, but maybe a good example of why we need to be a little more cautious of research-as-marketing
They exist all over science, but they are just one method among many, and they do not really drive hypotheses or interpretations (even now)
Like many (I suspect), I have had several users provide comments that the AI processes I have defined have made meaningful impacts on their daily lives - often saving them double digit hours of effort per week. Progress.
(See, eg. r/LeopardsAteMyFace for examples. It’s fascinating.)
It's moot.
Define breakthrough. When is the improvement big enough to count as one?
Define AI. Are you talking about modern LLM, or is old school ML also in that question?
I mean Googles AI-company had with AlphaFold and other project quite the impact.
> Or are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge
Is remixing bad? Isn't many science today "just" remixing with slight improvements? I mean, there is a reason why we have theoretical and practical scientists. Doing boring Lab-work and accidentally discovering something exciting is not the only way science is happening. Analysing data and remixing information, building new theories, is also important.
And don't forget, we don't have AGI yet. Whatever AI is doing today, is limited by what humans are using it for. Another question is, whether LLM is not normalized enough already that we do not see it as very special any more, if it's used somewhere. So we might not even see it if AI has significant impact on any breakthrough.
The only thing that seems to live up to the hype is AlphaFold, which predicts protein folding based on amino acid sequences, and of which people say that it actually makes their work significantly easier.
But, disclaimer, this is only from second-hand knowledge, I'm not working in the field.
> and I feel the AI boom is driven by hypothesis that general models eventually outperform specialized ones given enough size/data/whatever.
I think in the sciences, I'd generally put my money on the specialized models.
I hope that the hype around AI makes it easier (by providing tooling, platforms, better algorithms, educational materials etc.) to train specialized models.
Kind of a trickle-down of hype money :-)
As to the common idea of having to wait for general AI (AGI) to bring the gains, I have been quite sure since the start of the recent AI hype cycle that narrow AI will have silently transformed much of the world before AGI even hits the town.
Maybe too much room, but it's hard to predict if AI tools will overcome their limitations in the near future.
> Or are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge, while making no progress of any sort in any field using it?
AIUI they are generally not talking about LLMs here.
> To investigate AlphaEvolve’s breadth, we applied the system to over 50 open problems in mathematical analysis, geometry, combinatorics and number theory. The system’s flexibility enabled us to set up most experiments in a matter of hours. In roughly 75% of cases, it rediscovered state-of-the-art solutions, to the best of our knowledge.
> And in 20% of cases, AlphaEvolve improved the previously best known solutions, making progress on the corresponding open problems. For example, it advanced the kissing number problem. This geometric challenge has fascinated mathematicians for over 300 years and concerns the maximum number of non-overlapping spheres that touch a common unit sphere. AlphaEvolve discovered a configuration of 593 outer spheres and established a new lower bound in 11 dimensions.
https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/DeepMind.com/B...
(this is an LLM driven pipeline)
And it's far from commercial availability.
An LLM-based system now holds the SOTA approach on several math problems, how crazy is that? I wasn't convinced before, but now I guess it won't be many decades before we view making new scientific advancements as viable as winning against stockfish.
[1] https://youtu.be/sGCmu7YKgPA?t=480
If you're looking for breakthroughs due to AI, they're not going to be obviously attributable to AI I think. Focusing on the biology related foundation models ... The ability to more quickly search through the space of sequences->structure, drugs, and predicted cell states (1) like with the biology based foundation models will certainly lead to some things being discovered/rejected/validated faster.
I heard about this vevo company recently so it's on my mind. Biology experiments are hard and time consuming, and often hard to exactly replicate across labs. A lot of the data is of the form
a) start in cell state X (usual 'healthy' normal state) under conditions Y (environment variables like temperature, concentrations, etc.)
b) introduce some environmental pertubation P like some drug/chemical at some concentration, or maybe multiple pertubations at once
c) record trajectory or steady/final state of cell.
This data is largely hidden within published papers in non-standardized format. Vevo is attempting to collate all of those results with considerations for reproducibility into a standard easy-to-use format. The idea being that you can gradually build up a virtual sort of input-output (causal!) model that you can throw ideas for interventions against and see what it thinks would happen. Cells and biology are obviously enormously complicated so it's certainly not going to be 100% accurate/predictive, but my experience with network models in quantitative biology plus their proclaimed results make me pretty confident it's a sound approach.
Thus approach is clearly "AI" driven (maybe I would call this ML) and if their claims are anything close to reality, this is an incredibly powerful tool for all of academia and industry. You can reduce the search space enormously and target your experiments to cover the areas the virtual model doesn't seem so good, continuously improving it in a sort of crowd-sourced "active learning" manner. A continuously improving experimentally backed causal (w.r.t. perturbations) model of cells has so many applications. Again, i don't think this will directly lead to a breakthrough, but it can certainly make the breakthrough more likely and come faster.
There are many other examples like this that are some combination of 1) collating+filtering+refining existing data into an accessible easily query-able format
2) combining data + some physically motivated modeling to yield predictions where there is no data
3) targeted, informed feedback loop via experiments, simulations, or modeling to improve the whole system where it's known to be weak or where more accuracy is desired.
Assuming it all stays relatively open, that's undeniably a very powerful model for more effective science.
And that's just one approach. In physics ML can be use for finding and characterizing phase transitions, as one example. In the world of soft matter/biophysics simulation here's a few ways ML is used:
a) more efficient generation of configurations (Noe generative models). This is a big one, albeit still kind of early stages. Historically(simplifying), to generate independent samples in the right regions of phase means you need to integrate the system for long enough to hit that region multiple times. So regions of the space separated by rare transitions will take a loooong time to hit multiple times. The solution was simply longer simulations. Now, under some restrictions, you can leverage and augment existing data (including simulation data) to directly generate independent samples in the regions of interest. This is a really big deal.
b) more efficient, complex and accurate NN force-fields. Better incorporation of many-body and even quantum effects.
c) more complex simulation approaches via improved pipelines like automated parameterization and discovery of collective variables to more efficiently explore relevant configuration space.
Again, this is tooling that improves the process of discovery & investigation and thus directly contributes to science. Maybe not in the way you're picturing, but it is happening right now.
1) vevo https://www.tahoebio.ai/
You have no idea what you are talking about. Every day there is plenty of research published that used AI to help achieve scientific goals.
Now LLMs are another matter, and probably a ways off before we reap the benefit beyond day to day programming / writing productivity.
> Besides protein folding, the canonical example of a scientific breakthrough from AI, a few examples of scientific progress from AI include:1
> Weather forecasting, where AI forecasts have had up to 20% higher accuracy (though still lower resolution) compared to traditional physics-based forecasts.
> Drug discovery, where preliminary data suggests that AI-discovered drugs have been more successful in Phase I (but not Phase II) clinical trials. If the trend holds, this would imply a nearly twofold increase in end-to-end drug approval rates.
Anyway, winter is coming, innit?
Sure, it is often flag-planting, but when these papers come from big corps, you cannot "just ignore them and keep on" even when there are obvious flaws/issues.
It's a race over resources, as a (former) researcher on a low-budget university, we just cannot compete. We are coerced to believe whatever figure is passed on in the literature as "benchmark", without possibility of replication.
The central purpose of university research has basically always been that researchers work on hard, foundational topics that are more long-term so that industry is hardly willing to do them. On the other hand, these topics are very important, that is why the respective country is willing to finance this foundational research.
Thus, if you are at a university, once your research topic becomes an arms race with industry, you simply work either at the wrong place (university instead of industry) or on a "wrong" topic in the respective research area (look for some much more long-term, experimental topics that, if you are right, might change the whole research area in, say, 15 years, instead of some high resource-intensive, minor improvements to existing models).
As is often the case with statistics, selecting just a single number to report (whatever that number is) will hide a lot of different behaviours. Here, they show that just using the mean is a bad way to report data as the confidence intervals (reconstructed by the methods in the paper in most cases) show that the models can't really be distinguished based on their mean.
How can something like that happen? I mean, i had a supervisor tell me "add the confidence interval to the results as well", and explained me why. I guess that at nobody ever told them? Or they didn't care? Or it's just a honest mistake
1. Segmentation is a very classical in medical image processing. 2. Everyday there are papers claiming that they beat the state of the art 3. This paper says that most of the time, the state of the art has not been beat because they actually are in the margin of error.
I agree it's a problem across all of science, but AI seems to attract more than it's fair share of researchers seeking fame and fortune. Exaggerated claims and cherry-picking data seem even more extreme in my limited experience, and even responsible researchers end up exaggerating a bit to try and compete.
I have not seen anything like it before. We literaly had not system or way of even doing things like code generation based on text input.
Just last week i asked for a script to do image segmentation with a basic UI and claude just generated that for me in under 1 Minute.
I could list tons of examples which are groundbreaking. The whole Image generation stack is completly new.
That blog article is fair enough, there is hype around this topic for sure, but alone for every researcher who needs to write code for their research, AI can make them already a lot more efficient.
But i do believe, that we have entered a new ara: An ara were we take data again very serious. A few years back, you said 'the internet doesn't forget' then we realized that yes the internet starts to forget. Google deleted pages, removed the cache feature and it felt like we stoped caring for data because we didn't knew what to do with it.
Then ai came along. And not only is now data king again but we are now in the mids of reinforcment ara: We now give feedback and the systems incorporate that feedback into their training/learning.
And the ai/ml topic is getting worked on on every single aspect of it: Hardware, Algorithm, use cases, data, tools, protocols, etc. We are in the middle of incorporating and building for and on it. This takes a little bit of time. Still the progress is crazy exhausting.
We will only see in a few years if there is a real ceiling. We do need more GPUs, bigger Datacenters to do a lot more experiments on AI architecture and algorithm. We have a clear bottleneck. Big companies train one big model for weeks and month.
Thing is we just see that it's copy pasting stack overflow, but now in a fancy way so this is sounding like "I asked Google for a nearby restaurant and it found it in like 500ms, my C64 couldn't do that". It sounds impressive (and it is) because it sounds like "it learned about navigating in the real world and it can now solve everything related to that" but what it actually solved is "fancy lookup in a GIS database". It's useful, damn sure it is, but once the novelty wears off you start seeing it for what it is instead of what you imagine it is.
Edit: to drive the point home.
> claude just generated that
What you think happened is AI is "thinking" and building a ontology over which it reasoned and came to the logical conclusion that this script was the right output. What actually happened is your input correlates to this output according to the trillion examples it saw. There is no ontology. There is no reasoning. There is nothing. Of course this is still impressive and useful as hell, but the novelty will wear off in time. The limitations are obvious by this point.
There is not a single system out there today which can do what claude can do.
I stil see it for what it is: A technology i can communicate/use with natural language and get a very diverse of tasks done. From writing/generating code, to svgs, to emails, translation etc. etc. etc.
Its a paradigma shift for the whole world literaly.
We finally have a system which encodes not just basic things but high level concepts. And we humans are doing often enough something very similiar.
And what limitations are obvious? Tell me? We have not reached any real ceiling yet. We are limited by GPU capacity or how many architectural experiments a researcher can run. We have plenty of work to do to cleanup the data set we use and have. We need to build more infrastructure, better software support etc.
We have not even reached the phase were we all have local AI/ML chips build in.
We don't even know yet how a system will act if everyone of us has access to very fast inferencing like you already get with groq.
That's hyperbolic. I use LLMs daily. They speed up tasks you'd normally use Google for and can extrapolate existing code into other languages. They boost productivity for professionals, but it's not like the discovery of the steam engine or electricity.
> And what limitations are obvious? Tell me? We have not reached any real ceiling yet.
Scaling parameters is the most obvious limitation of the current LLM architecture (transformers). That’s why what should have been called GPT-5 is instead named GPT 4.5, it isn’t significantly better than the previous model despite having far more parameters, a lot more cleaned up training data and optimizations.
The low-hanging fruit has already been picked, and most obvious optimizations have been implemented. As a result, almost all leading LLM companies are now operating at a similar level. There hasn’t been a real breakthrough in over two years. And the last huge architectural breakthrough was in 2017 (with paper "Attention is all you need").
Scaling at this point yields only diminishing returns. So no, what you’re saying isn’t accurate, the ceiling is clearly visible now.
But I don't think "the transformer paper was eight years ago" is strong evidence for that argument at all. First of all, the incremental improvement and commercialization and scaling that has happened in that period of time is already incredibly fast. Faraday had most of the pieces in place for electricity in the 1830s and it took half a century to scale it, including periods where the state of the art began to stagnate before hitting a new breakthrough.
I see no reason to believe it's impossible that we'll see further step-change progressions in AI. Indeed, "Attention is All You Need" itself makes me think it's more likely than not. Out of the infinite space of things to try, they found a fairly simple tweak to apply to existing techniques, and it happened to work extremely well. Certainly a lot more of the solution space has been explored now, but there's still a huge space of things that haven't been tried yet.
That's the thing I'm trying to convey: it's in fact not encoding anything you'll recognize and if it is, it's certainly not "concepts" as you understand them. Not saying it cannot correlate text that includes what you call "high level concepts" or do what you imagine to be useful work in that general direction. Again not making claims it's not useful, just saying that it becomes kind of meh once you factor in all costs and not just the hypothetical imaginary future productivity gains. AKA building literal nuclear reactors to do something that basically amounts to filling in React templates or whatever BS needs doing.
If it was reasoning it could start with a small set of bootstrap data and infer/deduce the rest from experience. It cannot. We are not even close as in there is not even theory to get us there forget about the engineering. It's not a subtle issue. We need to throw literally all data we have at it to get it to acceptable levels. At some point you have to retrace some steps and think over some decisions, but I guess I'm a skeptic.
In short it's a correlation engine which, again, is very useful and will go ways to improve our lives somewhat - I hope - but I'm not holding my breath for anything more. A lot of correlation does not causation make. No reasoning can take place until you establish ontology, causality and the whole shebang.
GPT-3 started proper investment into this topic, there was not enough research done in this direction and now it is. People like Yann LeCun already analyse different approaches/architecture but they still use the infrastructure of LLMs (ML/GPUs) and potentially the data.
I never said that LLM is the breaktrhough in consesnes.
But you can also ask LLM strategies for thinking. It can tell you a lot of things. We will see if a LLM will be a fundamental part of AGI or not but GPU/ML will probably be.
I also think that the compression mechanism through LLM lead to concepts through optimization. You can see from the antropic paper, that an LLM doesn't work in normal language space but in a high dimensional one and then 'expresses' the output in a language you like.
We also see that real multi modal models are better in a lot of tasks due to a lot more context available through them. Estimating what someone said due to context.
The necessary infrastructure and power requirement is something i accept too. We can assume, i do, that further progress in a lot of topics will require this type of compute and it also solves our data bottleneck: normal CPU architecture is limited by memory databus.
Also in comparision to a lot of other companies, if the richest companies in the world invest in nuclear, i think this is a lot better than any other companies. They have a lot higher margins and knowledge. co2 is a market separator for them too.
I also expect this amount of compute to be the base for fixing real issues we all face like cancer or optimizing cancer or any other sickness detection. We need to make medicin a lot cheaper and if someone in africa can do a cheap x ray and send it to the cloud to get any feedback, that would / could help a lot of people.
Doing complex and massive protein analysis or mRna research in virtual space, also requires GPUs.
All of this happened in a timespan of only a few years. I have not seen anything progressing as fast as AI/ML currenly does and as unfortunate it is, this needs compute.
Even my small inhouse image recognition fine tuning explodes when you do a handful parameter optimizations but the quality is a lot better than what we had before.
And enabling people to have real natural language UI is HUGE. It makes so much more accessable. Not just for people with a disability.
Things like 'do a eli5 on topic x'. "explain to me this concept" etc. I would have loved that when i tried to be successful in the university math curiculum.
All of that is already crazy and still is. But in parallel what Nvidia and others currently do with ML and Robotics is also something which requires all of that compute. And the progress is again breath taking. The current flood of basic robots standing and walking around is due to ML.
The actual techniques are the breakthrough. The result are fun to play with and may be useful in some occasions, but we don’t have to put them on a pedestal.
Everyone is a rational actor from their individual perspective. The people hyping AI, and the people dismissing the hype both have good reasons.
The is justification to see this new tech as ground breaking. There is justification to be weary about massive theft of data and dismissiveness of privacy.
First, acknowledge and respect that there are so many opinions on any issue. Take yourself out of the equation for a minute. Understand the other side. Really understand it.
Take a long walk in other people’s shoes.
LLMs are undeniably treading onto that territory. Who knows how far in they will make it, but the wall is breached. Which is unsettling to down right scary depending on your take. It is a real threat to a skill that many have honed for years and for which is very lucrative to have. Programmers don't even need to be replaced, having to settle for $100k/yr in a senior role is almost just a scary.
I've seen this over and over again and been on different sides of the question on different technologies at different times.
To me, this is same as it ever was!
1. The whole investment volume (and thus hope and expectations) into AI is much larger than into other hype topics.
2. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was president of YCombinator, the company begind Hacker News, from 2014 to 2019.
On (2): I'm honestly not sure I think this is making a big difference at all. Not much of the commentary here is driven by YC stuff, because most of the audience here has no direct entwinement with YC.
I agree that this is useful! It will even take natural language and augment the script, and maybe get it right! Nice!
The AI is combing through scraped data with an LLM, and conjuring forth some imagemagick snippets into a shell script. This is very useful, and if you’re like most people, who don’t know imagemagick intimately, it’s going to save you tons of time.
Where it gets incredibly frustrating is tech leadership seeing these trivial examples, and assuming it extrapolates to general software engineering at their companies. “Oh it writes code, or makes our engineers faster, or whatever. Get the managers mandating this, now! Also, we need to get started on the layoffs. Have them stack rank their reports by who uses AI the best, so that we are ready to pull the trigger.”
But every real engineer who uses these tools on real (as in huge, poorly written) codebases, if they are being honest (they may not be, given the stack ranking), will tell you “on a good day it multiplies my productivity by, let’s say, 1.1-2x? On a bad day, I end up scrapping 10k lines of LLM code, reading some documentation on my own, and solving the problem with 5 lines of intentional code.”
Please, PLEASE pay attention to this details that I added: Huge, poorly written codebases. This is just the reality at most software companies that have graduated from series A startup. What my colleagues and I are trying to tell you, leadership, is that these “it made a script” and “it made a html form with a backend” examples ARE NOT cleanly extrapolating to the flaming dumpster fire codebases we actually work with. Sometimes the tools help! Sometimes, they don’t.
It’s as if LLM is just another tool we use sometimes.
This is why I am annoyed. It’s incredibly frustrating to be told by your boss “use tool or get fired” when that tool doesn’t always fit the task at hand. It DOES NOT mean I see zero value in LLMs.
scientists don't need to be efficient, they need to be correct. Software bugs were already a huge cause of scientific error, and responsible for lack of reproducibility, see for example cases like this (https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-code-glitch-may-have-cause...)
Programming in research environments is done with some notoriously questionably variation in quality, as is the case for the industry to be fair, but in research minor errors can ruin results of entire studies. People are fed up and come to much harsher judgements on AI because in an environment like a lab you cannot write software with the attitude of an impressionist painter or the AI equivalent, you need to actually know what you're typing.
AI can make you more efficient if you don't care if you're right, which is maybe cool if you're generating images for your summer beach volleyball event, but it's a disastrous idea if you're writing code in a scientific environment.
Still a lot of researchers can benefit from code tools for their daily work to make them a lot faster.
And plenty of strategies exist to saveguard this. Tool use for example, unit tests etc.
For me the key quote in the article is
"Most scientists aren’t trying to mislead anyone, but because they face strong incentives to present favorable results, there’s still a risk that you’ll be misled."
Understanding people's incentives is often very useful when you're looking at what they're saying.
Utter nonsense, these are some of the smartest people in the world who do incredibly valuable science.
Where ML generally shines is either when you have relatively lots of experimental data with respect to a fairly narrow domain. This is the case for machine learned interatomic potentials MLIPs which have been a thing since the '90s. Also potentially the case for weather modelling (but I do not want to comment about that). Or when you have absolute insane amounts of data, and you train a really huge model. This is what we refer to as AI. This is basically why Alphafold is successful, and Alphafold still fails to produce good results when you query it on inputs that are far from any data points in its training data.
But most ML for physics problems tend to be somewhere in between. Lacking experimental data and working with not enough simulation data because it is so expensive to produce. And also training models that are not large enough, because inference would be too slow, anyway, if they were too big. And then expecting these models to learn a very wide range of physics.
And then everyone jumps in on the hype train, because it is so easy to give it a shot. And everyone gets the same dud results. But then they publish anyway. And if the lab/PI is famous enough or if they formulate the problem in a way that is unique and looks sciency or mathy, they might even get their paper in a good journal/conference and get lots of citations. But in the end, they still only end up with the same results as everyone else: replicates the training data to some extent, somebody else should work on the generalizability problem.
The only realistic evaluations of "AI" so far are those that admit it's only useful for experts to skip some boring work. And triple check the output after.
1) Instead of identifying a problem and then trying to find a solution, we start by assuming that AI will be the solution and then looking for problems to solve.
hammer in search of a nail
2) nearly complete non-publication of negative results
survivorship (and confirmation bias)
3) same people who evaluate AI models also benefit from those evaluations
power of incentives (and conflicts therein)
4) ai bandwagon effect, and fear of missing out
social-proof
Lesson learned: don't trust ads
> Most scientists aren’t trying to mislead anyone
More learning ahead, the exciting part of being a scientist!
Just about tech engineering here but I do think it transfers to science as well.
https://dev.to/sebs/the-quiet-crisis-how-is-ai-eroding-our-t...
In particular the ability of auto regressive transformer based networks to produce sequences speech while being immutable still shocks me whenever I think about it. Of course, this says as much about what we think of ourselves and other humans as it does about the matrices. I also think that the weather forcasting networks are quite shocking, the compression that they have achieved in modeling the physical system that produces weather is frankly.... wrong... but it obviously does actually work.
While combinations of words are infinite, only some makes sense. So there’s a lot of reccurent patterns there. When you take a huge datasets like most of the internet and digital documents. I would be more surprised if the trained model where incapable of producing correct texts as both the it’s overfitted to the grammar and the lexicon. And I believe it’s overfitted to general conversation patterns.
Because the expectation was too high. If you are aiming for precision, neural networks might not be the best solution for you. That is why generative AI works so well, it doesn’t need to be extremely precise. On the other hand you don't see people use neural networks in system control for cricital processes.
This is a huge problem in software, and it's not restricted to AI. So much of what has been adopted over the years has everything to do with making the programmers life easier, but nothing to do with producing better software. AI is a continuation of that.
I don't know if it's intentional, but the word "AI" means different things almost every year now. Its worse than papers getting released with "LLMs unable to do basic math" and then you see they used GPT-3 for the study.
None of the claims made in the article are surprising because they’re the natural outgrowth of the hodgepodge of incentives we’ve accreted as what we call “science” over time and you just need to practice over time to be able to place the output of science in the proper context and understand that a “paper” is an artifact of a sociotechnical system with all the entailing complexity that demands.
This is the sort of thing I mean, I guess, by way of close parallel in a pre-AI context. For a while now, I've been doing a lot of private math research. Whether or not I've wasted my time, one thing I've found utterly invaluable has been the OEIS.org website, where you can just enter sequence of numbers and then search for it to see what contexts it shows up in. It's basically a search engine for numerical sequences. And the reason it has been invaluable is that I will often encounter some sequence of integers, I'll be exploring it, and then when I search for it on OEIS, I'll discover that that sequence shows up in much different mathematical contexts. And that will give me an opening to 1) learn some new things and recontextualize what I'm already exploring and 2) give me raw material to ask new questions. Likewise, Wolfram Mathematica has been a godsend. And it's for similar reasons - if I encounter some strange or tricky or complicated integral or infinite sum, it is frequently handy to just toss it into Mathematica, apply some combination of parameter constraints and Expands and FullSimplify's, and see if whatever it is I'm exploring connects, surprisingly, to some unexpected closed form or special function. And, once again, 1) I've learned a ton this way and gotten survey exposure to other fields of math I know much less well, and 2) it's been really helpful in iteratively helping me ask new, pointed questions. Neither OEIS nor Mathematica can just take my hard problems and solve them for me. A lot of this process has been about me identifying and evolving what sorts of problems I even find compelling in the first place. But these resources have been invaluable in helping me broaden what questions I can productively ask, and it's through something more like a high powered, extremely broad, extremely fast search. There's a way that my engagement with these tools has made me a lot smarter and a lot broader-minded, and it's changed the kinds of questions I can productively ask. To make a shaky analogy, books represent a deeply important frozen search of different fields of knowledge, and these tools represent a different style of search, reorganizing knowledge around whatever my current questions are - and acting in a very complementary fashion to books, too, as a way to direct me to books and articles once I have enough context.
Although I haven't spent nearly as much time with it, what I've just described about these other tools certainly is similar to what I've found with AI so far, only AI promises to deliver even more so. As a tool for focused search and reorganization of survey knowledge about an astonishingly broad range of knowledge, it's incredible. I guess I'm trying to name a "broad" rather than "deep" stance here, concerning the obvious benefits I'm finding with AI in the context of certain kinds of research. Or maybe I'm pushing on what I've seen called, over in the land of chess and chess AI, a centaur model - a human still driving, but deeply integrating the AI at all steps of that process.
I've spent a lot of my career as a programmer and game designer working closely with research professors in R1 university settings (in both education and computer science), and I've particularly worked in contexts that required researchers to engage in interdisciplinary work. And they're all smart people (of course), but the silofication of various academic disciplines and specialties is obviously real and pragmatically unavoidable, and it clearly casts a long shadow on what kind of research gets done. No one can know everything, and no one can really even know too much of anything out of their own specialties within their own disciplines - there's simply too much to know. There are a lot of contexts where "deep" is emphasized over "broad" for good reasons. But I think the potential for researchers to cheaply and quickly and silently ask questions outside of their own specializations, to get fast survey level understandings of domains outside of their own expertise, is potentially a huge deal for the kinds of questions they can productively ask.
But, insofar as any of this is true, it's a very different way of harnessing of AI than just taking AI and trying to see if it will produce new solutions to existing, hard, well-defined problems. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong in all of this.
Most scientists aren’t trying to mislead anyone, but because they face strong incentives to present favorable results, there’s still a risk that you’ll be misled.
In other words scientists are trying to mislead everyone because there are a lot of incentives; money and professional status to name just two.
A common problem across all disciplines of science.
>>We also found evidence, once again, that researchers tend not to report negative results, an effect known as reporting bias.
>>But unfortunately, the scientific literature is not a reliable source for evaluating the success of AI in science.
>> One issue is survivorship bias. Because AI research, in the words of one researcher, has “nearly complete non-publication of negative results,” we usually only see the successes of AI in science and not the failures. But without negative results, our attempts to evaluate the impacts of AI in science typically get distorted.
While these biases will absolutely create overconfidence and wasted effort, the fact that there are rapid advances with some clear successes such as protein folding, drug discovery, &weather forecasting, leads me to expect there will be more very significant advances, in no small part because of the massive investment in funds and time to the problem of making AI-based advances.
For exactly the reasons this researcher spent his time and funds to research this, despite his negative results, there was learning, and the effect of millions of people effectively searching & developing will result in more great good advances being found and/or built.
Whether they are worth the total financial & human capital being spent is another question, but I'm expecting that to be also positive
I mean, there ought to be an element of abstract thought, abstract reasoning, abstract inter-linking of concepts, etc, to enable mathematicians to solve complex math theorems and problems.
What am I missing?
One typical use case is that the simulation data takes months to generate. So for experimental use cases, it is very slow. So the idea was, to train a model that can learn the underlying physics. The model will be small enough so that inference won't be prohibitively expensive. So you can then use the ML model in lieu of the classical physics based model.
Where this usually fails is that while ML models can be trained well enough to replicate the training data, they typically fail to generalize well outside of the domain and regime of the training data. So unless your experimental problems are entirely within the same domains and regimes as the training data, your model is of not much use.
So claims of generalizability and applicability are always dubious.
Lots of publications on this topic follow the same pattern: conceive of a new architecture or formalism, train an ML model on widely available data, results show that it can reproduce the training data to some extent, mention generalizability in the discussion but never test it.
A reason used to justify these massive cuts is that AI will soon replace traditional research. This post demonstrates this assumption is likely false.
I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF-funded programs, so I have mixed feelings about this. Waste and inefficiency are rampant. BTW I'm not talking about failed projects or research that were dimmed "not important", but things like buying million-dollar equipment just to use up the budget, which then sits idle.
That said, slashing NSF funding by 50% won’t fix any of that. It’ll just shrink both the waste and the genuinely valuable research proportionally. So it's indeed a serious blow to real scientific progress.
I don’t really have a point, just want to put it here. Also to be fair this kind of inefficiency isn't unique to academia; it’s common anywhere public money is involved.
That's not specific to the US, and it's because of a perverse incentive coming from those who assign the funds.
If you don't use them they cut your funding for the next cycle.
Because… why not? It's free money. Having the newest shiny equipment, at the very least, boosts your group’s reputation. Not to mention that straight-up corruption (pocketing funds for personal gain) is not unheard of.
I’m tired of all the complaining about waste and overhead in academics. Companies waste money all the time…
Also, industry is far from perfect too. Think of high-profile failures like the Apple car or Meta’s Metaverse, both of which wasted literally tens of billions of dollars, many times the entire annual NSF budget. Let’s not hold scientists to standards applied no where else.
Specifically, Gore said in an interview that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” by introducing the bill to allow commercial traffic on ARPAnet, which McCullagh twisted in an article to “Al Gote claimed he invented the Internet” in order to to smear him.
Al Gore understood technology, the internet, was a champion for the environment, and it's unbelievable today that he came that close to presidency (and then lost). When people say "we live in the bad timeline", one of the closest good timelines is probably one where this election went differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno... :
> Al Gore, a strong and knowledgeable proponent of the Internet, promoted legislation that resulted in President George H.W Bush signing the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. This Act allocated $600 million
> In the early 1990s the Internet was big news ... In the fall of 1990, there were just 313,000 computers on the Internet; by 1996, there were close to 10 million. The networking idea became politicized during the 1992 Clinton–Gore election campaign, where the rhetoric of the information highway captured the public imagination.
Your parent comment is either joining in on the ridicule side or at least in misquoting:
> Gore became the subject of controversy and ridicule when his statement, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", was widely quoted out of context. It was often misquoted by comedians and figures in American popular media who framed this statement as a claim that Gore believed he had personally invented the Internet.[54] Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."