I don't mean to be disparaging to the original author, but I genuinely think a good litmus test today for the calibre of a human researcher's intelligence is wh

I don't mean to be disparaging to the original author, but I genuinely think a good litmus test today for the calibre of a human researcher's intelligence is what they are able to get out of the current state of the art AI with all of its faults. Contrasting any of Terrance Tao's comments over the last year to the comments above are telling. Perhaps it seems unfair to contrast such a celebrated mathematician to a popular science author, but in fact one would a priori expect that AI ought to be less helpful for the most talented mind in a field. Yet we seem to find exactly the opposite: this cottage industry of "academics" who, now more than a year since LLMs entered popular consciousness, seem to do nothing but decry "AI hype" - while both everyday people and seemingly the most talented researchers continue to pursue what interests them at a higher level. If I were to be cynical, I think we've seen over the last decade the descent of most of academia, humanities as much as natural sciences, to a rather poor state, drawing entirely on a self-contained loop of references without much use or interest. Especially in the natural sciences, one can today with little effort obtain an infinitely more insightful and, yes, accurate synthesis of the present state of a field from an LLM than 99% of popular science authors.