8 ms·

A conversation about AI for science with Jason Pruet

164 points by LAsteNERD 1y ago

LAsteNERD 1y ago
PR in here for sure, but some smart context on the scientific and nat security potentional the DOE and National Labs see in AI.
lp251 1y ago
wonder if they still train all of their models using Mathematica because it was impossible to get pytorch on the classified systems
- pphysch 1y ago
  AFAIK that was mostly due to a silly detail about MD5 hashing being restricted on FIPS compliant systems? Or something like that. I'm pretty sure there's an easy workaround(s).
  - lp251 1y ago
    there were a bunch of reasons. couldn’t bring compiled binaries onto the red, so you had to bring the source + all deps onto a machine with no external internet. it was unpleasant.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  Just have Hegseth run PyTorch for them
  - levocardia 1y ago
    >pip install *
andy99 1y ago
The real title is "Q&A with Jason Pruet"
hbartab 1y ago
> We certainly need to partner with industry. Because they are so far ahead and are making such giant investments, that is the only possible path. And therein lies the risk: research labs may become wholly dependent on companies whose agendas are fundamentally commercial. In exchange for access to compute and frontier models, labs may cede control over data, methods, and IP—letting private firms quietly extract value from publicly funded research. What begins as partnership can end in capture.
- quantified 1y ago
  WILL end in capture. Profit demands it.
  - hbartab 1y ago
    Indeed.
- mdhb 1y ago
  This is literally THE scam Elon, Thiel, Sacks and others are running as they gut the government. Sell assets like government real estate to themselves at super cheap rates and then set up as many dependencies as they can where the government has to buy services from them because they have nowhere else to turn. To give an example this missile dome bullshit they are talking about building which is a terrible idea for a bunch of reasons.. but there is talks at the moment of having this run by a private company who will sell it as a subscription service. So in this scenario the US military can’t actually fire the missiles without the explicit permission of a private company. This AI thing is the same scam.
  - FilosofumRex 1y ago
    Right on target, publicly funded research always ends up in the hands of private profiteers via private university labs. If LLM/AI is critical to national security, then it should be funded solely via the Dep of Defense budget, with no IP or copy right derivatives allowed.
  - mindslight 1y ago
tantalor 1y ago
I was a bit puzzled what "1663" is. Here's what I found: > The Lab's science and technology digital magazine presents the most significant research initiatives and accomplishments from national-security-related programs as well as projects that advance the frontiers of basic science. Our name is an homage to the Lab's historic role in the nation's service: During World War II, all that the outside world knew of the top-secret laboratory was the mailing address - P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. https://researchlibrary.lanl.gov/about-the-library/publications/ https://researchlibrary.lanl.gov/about-the-library/publicati...
zkmon 1y ago
I like how he says that AI is a general-purpose technology like electricity.
- KolibriFly 1y ago
  Whether it's hype or not, treating AI as a general-purpose tech isn't that wild when it's already touching code, writing, design, logistics, education (you name it)
newfocogi 1y ago
Another recent AI article out of LANL: https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/1269-earl-lawrence-ai https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/1269-earl-lawre... And discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765207 This does feel like a step change in the rate at which modern AI technologies and programs are being pushed out in their PR.
stonogo 1y ago
The actual reason is "because they're being told to." Before that, there was a massive public-cloud push DOE-wide. Nobody outside of ASCR is interested in computing, and there's a lot of money to be made if you can snag an eternal rent check for hosting federal infrastructure.
senderista 1y ago
Clearly AI is worthy of public investment, but given the capture of this administration by tech interests, how can we be sure that public AI funding isn't just handouts to the president's cronies?
- conradev 1y ago
  The DOE has been building supercomputers for a while now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge_Leadership_Computing_Facility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge_Leadership_Computi...
  - godelski 1y ago
    Even more importantly, they are GPU based. The US has 3 exascale computers (out of 3 in the world). I should stress that these measurements are based on LINPACK, and are at fp64 precision. This is quite a different measurement than others might be thinking of with recent announcements in AI (which are fp8) https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/ https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/
- b59831 1y ago
  [dead]
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  How about we fix global warming and switch 100% to clean energy, and then invest in AI?
  - ben_w 1y ago
    To the extent that further improvements to AI remain economically useful, "let's do these other things first" means your economy trails behind those of whoever did work on the AI. To the extent that further improvements to AI are either snake oil or just hard to monopolise on, doing everything else first is of course the best idea. Even though I'm more on the side of finding these things impressive, it's not at all clear to me that the people funding their development will be able to monopolise the return on the investment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus etc. Also: the way the biggest enthusiasts are talking about the sectoral growth and corresponding electrical power requirements… well, I agree with the maths for the power if I assume the growth, but they're economically unrealistic on the timescales they talk about, and that's despite that renewables are the fastest %-per-year-growth power sector and could plausibly double global electrical production by the early 2030s.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
quakeguy 1y ago
They should invest in natural intelligence first.
zzzeek 1y ago
> Over the last two years, we’ve more or less run out of benchmarks where AI isn’t better than humans. this whole "benchmarks" thing is laughable. I've been using Gemini all week to do code assist, review patches, etc. Such impressive text, lists of bullets, suggestions, etc., but then at the same time it makes tons of mistakes, which you then call it on, and it predictably is like "oh sorry! of course!" yes of COURSE. because all it does is guess what word is most likely to come after the previous word. is there a "benchmark" for "doesn't hallucinate made up BS?" because humans can do very well on such a benchmark.
ArthurStacks 1y ago
[flagged]
bawana 1y ago
When will we get AI CEOs? I am tired of seeing corporate decisions driven by quarterly bonuses.
- falcor84 1y ago
  How is this related to TFA which focuses on national (public) labs? In any case, if you want to take a stab at it, feel free to go ahead and start a company whereby you as the owner would assign the CEO responsibilities to an AI.
  - th0ma5 1y ago
    No they probably meant existing companies... when are AI companies going to get rid of their CEOs?
    - falcor84 1y ago
      Well, if you were to ask me, I would say that the biggest bottle-neck is the productive time horizon for AIs, which is currently at about 1h before SoTA agents go off-rails, based on the METR report[0]. As the report models, this time horizon doubles approximately every 7 months (R² = 0.98 on a log-scale), and thus if we assume that a CEO's work requires a time horizon of e.g. 10,000 hours to effectively plan and implement a long-term strategy, then we could expect companies to be able to replace CEOs by around 2033. There are of course other factors at play, but knowing companies' propensity to move fast and break things, I would indeed put some money that by the end of 2033, we'll see at least one mid-sized tech company delegate most (if not all) of its CEO decision-making to an AI agent. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499
paradox460 1y ago
Fwiw, LANL saw some of it's heaviest layoffs this year, even heavier than those that happened under Nanos in the post Cerro Grande investigation. From what I gather, the feeling up on the hilltop is one of anxiety
Quenby 1y ago
[dead]
fumeux_fume 1y ago
> If you’ve played with the most recent AI tools, you know: They’re very good coders, very good legal analysts, very good first drafters of writing, very good image generators. They’re only going to get better. Most of the bullshitters will tip their hand pretty early that they're just hype men for AI. Right off the bat, the fact that AI is disruptive and transforming society is apparently self-evident because they never cite a single premise or event to back this up. In the quote above, the phrase "if you've played" stuck out to me. Yes if you play around with them a little it's easy to believe they're really good at so many things. When you stringently evaluate them, you begin to see they make a lot of mistakes and perform inconsistently on even trivial tasks.
- saretup 1y ago
  You sound more prejudiced against AI than they seem to be hyping AI in that sentence. Yes, they’re very good coders; no, they aren’t perfect. Sometimes they make trivial mistakes or hallucinate, and other times they have unique insights about difficult problems or one-shot a lot of complex tasks. If you don’t see the value of AI even at this point, you’re either lacking imagination and/or just too stuck in your own ways.
  - sampullman 1y ago
    I appreciate the value of AI in my own work, but "they’re very good coders" and "they make trivial mistakes or hallucinate" seems incongruous. For me, AI tools shine when I know enough about a topic to quickly error check, but not enough where I can code fluently without documentation. I'm sure it will get more useful over time, but that's where it's been for me for the last year or so.
    - saretup 1y ago
      > "they’re very good coders" and "they make trivial mistakes or hallucinate" seems incongruous. It seems that way if you judge them the same way you would human coders, but they’re different. They might be able to do things that veteran coders can’t without spending days on it, and fail at things that beginners can do in half an hour. A car might not be able to traverse difficult terrain as well as a horse, but it doesn’t mean the car is not a good mode of transportation.
KolibriFly 1y ago
Feels like we're either on the verge of a renaissance or a breakdown, and no one really knows which way it'll tilt
Zoethink 1y ago
[dead]
kristel100 1y ago
[dead]
Zorass 1y ago
Whether AI is a “good programmer” really depends on what you mean by programming. If it means being fluent in syntax, quickly generating prototypes, and recalling large amounts of code patterns, then yes, it's surprisingly strong. But if being a programmer includes debugging intuition, tracking context over multiple sessions, and knowing when not to write code, it's still not there yet.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
gitroom 1y ago
Man, reading all this makes me glad I just write my own scripts when I get stuckAI's cool til it isn't.

164 points by LAsteNERD 1y ago

PR in here for sure, but some smart context on the scientific and nat security potentional the DOE and National Labs see in AI.

lp251 1y ago

wonder if they still train all of their models using Mathematica because it was impossible to get pytorch on the classified systems

pphysch 1y ago
AFAIK that was mostly due to a silly detail about MD5 hashing being restricted on FIPS compliant systems? Or something like that. I'm pretty sure there's an easy workaround(s).
- lp251 1y ago
  there were a bunch of reasons. couldn’t bring compiled binaries onto the red, so you had to bring the source + all deps onto a machine with no external internet. it was unpleasant.
candiddevmike 1y ago
Just have Hegseth run PyTorch for them
- levocardia 1y ago
  >pip install *

andy99 1y ago

The real title is "Q&A with Jason Pruet"

hbartab 1y ago

> We certainly need to partner with industry. Because they are so far ahead and are making such giant investments, that is the only possible path. And therein lies the risk: research labs may become wholly dependent on companies whose agendas are fundamentally commercial. In exchange for access to compute and frontier models, labs may cede control over data, methods, and IP—letting private firms quietly extract value from publicly funded research. What begins as partnership can end in capture.

quantified 1y ago
WILL end in capture. Profit demands it.
- hbartab 1y ago
  Indeed.
mdhb 1y ago
This is literally THE scam Elon, Thiel, Sacks and others are running as they gut the government. Sell assets like government real estate to themselves at super cheap rates and then set up as many dependencies as they can where the government has to buy services from them because they have nowhere else to turn. To give an example this missile dome bullshit they are talking about building which is a terrible idea for a bunch of reasons.. but there is talks at the moment of having this run by a private company who will sell it as a subscription service. So in this scenario the US military can’t actually fire the missiles without the explicit permission of a private company. This AI thing is the same scam.
- FilosofumRex 1y ago
  Right on target, publicly funded research always ends up in the hands of private profiteers via private university labs. If LLM/AI is critical to national security, then it should be funded solely via the Dep of Defense budget, with no IP or copy right derivatives allowed.
- mindslight 1y ago

tantalor 1y ago

I was a bit puzzled what "1663" is. Here's what I found: > The Lab's science and technology digital magazine presents the most significant research initiatives and accomplishments from national-security-related programs as well as projects that advance the frontiers of basic science. Our name is an homage to the Lab's historic role in the nation's service: During World War II, all that the outside world knew of the top-secret laboratory was the mailing address - P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. https://researchlibrary.lanl.gov/about-the-library/publications/ https://researchlibrary.lanl.gov/about-the-library/publicati...

zkmon 1y ago

I like how he says that AI is a general-purpose technology like electricity.

KolibriFly 1y ago
Whether it's hype or not, treating AI as a general-purpose tech isn't that wild when it's already touching code, writing, design, logistics, education (you name it)

newfocogi 1y ago

Another recent AI article out of LANL: https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/1269-earl-lawrence-ai https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/1269-earl-lawre... And discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765207 This does feel like a step change in the rate at which modern AI technologies and programs are being pushed out in their PR.

stonogo 1y ago

The actual reason is "because they're being told to." Before that, there was a massive public-cloud push DOE-wide. Nobody outside of ASCR is interested in computing, and there's a lot of money to be made if you can snag an eternal rent check for hosting federal infrastructure.

senderista 1y ago

Clearly AI is worthy of public investment, but given the capture of this administration by tech interests, how can we be sure that public AI funding isn't just handouts to the president's cronies?

conradev 1y ago
The DOE has been building supercomputers for a while now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge_Leadership_Computing_Facility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge_Leadership_Computi...
- godelski 1y ago
  Even more importantly, they are GPU based. The US has 3 exascale computers (out of 3 in the world). I should stress that these measurements are based on LINPACK, and are at fp64 precision. This is quite a different measurement than others might be thinking of with recent announcements in AI (which are fp8) https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/ https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/
b59831 1y ago
[dead]
candiddevmike 1y ago
How about we fix global warming and switch 100% to clean energy, and then invest in AI?
- ben_w 1y ago
  To the extent that further improvements to AI remain economically useful, "let's do these other things first" means your economy trails behind those of whoever did work on the AI. To the extent that further improvements to AI are either snake oil or just hard to monopolise on, doing everything else first is of course the best idea. Even though I'm more on the side of finding these things impressive, it's not at all clear to me that the people funding their development will be able to monopolise the return on the investment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus etc. Also: the way the biggest enthusiasts are talking about the sectoral growth and corresponding electrical power requirements… well, I agree with the maths for the power if I assume the growth, but they're economically unrealistic on the timescales they talk about, and that's despite that renewables are the fastest %-per-year-growth power sector and could plausibly double global electrical production by the early 2030s.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

quakeguy 1y ago

They should invest in natural intelligence first.

zzzeek 1y ago

> Over the last two years, we’ve more or less run out of benchmarks where AI isn’t better than humans. this whole "benchmarks" thing is laughable. I've been using Gemini all week to do code assist, review patches, etc. Such impressive text, lists of bullets, suggestions, etc., but then at the same time it makes tons of mistakes, which you then call it on, and it predictably is like "oh sorry! of course!" yes of COURSE. because all it does is guess what word is most likely to come after the previous word. is there a "benchmark" for "doesn't hallucinate made up BS?" because humans can do very well on such a benchmark.

ArthurStacks 1y ago

[flagged]

bawana 1y ago

When will we get AI CEOs? I am tired of seeing corporate decisions driven by quarterly bonuses.

falcor84 1y ago
How is this related to TFA which focuses on national (public) labs? In any case, if you want to take a stab at it, feel free to go ahead and start a company whereby you as the owner would assign the CEO responsibilities to an AI.
- th0ma5 1y ago
  No they probably meant existing companies... when are AI companies going to get rid of their CEOs?
  - falcor84 1y ago
    Well, if you were to ask me, I would say that the biggest bottle-neck is the productive time horizon for AIs, which is currently at about 1h before SoTA agents go off-rails, based on the METR report[0]. As the report models, this time horizon doubles approximately every 7 months (R² = 0.98 on a log-scale), and thus if we assume that a CEO's work requires a time horizon of e.g. 10,000 hours to effectively plan and implement a long-term strategy, then we could expect companies to be able to replace CEOs by around 2033. There are of course other factors at play, but knowing companies' propensity to move fast and break things, I would indeed put some money that by the end of 2033, we'll see at least one mid-sized tech company delegate most (if not all) of its CEO decision-making to an AI agent. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499

paradox460 1y ago

Fwiw, LANL saw some of it's heaviest layoffs this year, even heavier than those that happened under Nanos in the post Cerro Grande investigation. From what I gather, the feeling up on the hilltop is one of anxiety

Quenby 1y ago

[dead]

fumeux_fume 1y ago

> If you’ve played with the most recent AI tools, you know: They’re very good coders, very good legal analysts, very good first drafters of writing, very good image generators. They’re only going to get better. Most of the bullshitters will tip their hand pretty early that they're just hype men for AI. Right off the bat, the fact that AI is disruptive and transforming society is apparently self-evident because they never cite a single premise or event to back this up. In the quote above, the phrase "if you've played" stuck out to me. Yes if you play around with them a little it's easy to believe they're really good at so many things. When you stringently evaluate them, you begin to see they make a lot of mistakes and perform inconsistently on even trivial tasks.

saretup 1y ago
You sound more prejudiced against AI than they seem to be hyping AI in that sentence. Yes, they’re very good coders; no, they aren’t perfect. Sometimes they make trivial mistakes or hallucinate, and other times they have unique insights about difficult problems or one-shot a lot of complex tasks. If you don’t see the value of AI even at this point, you’re either lacking imagination and/or just too stuck in your own ways.
- sampullman 1y ago
  I appreciate the value of AI in my own work, but "they’re very good coders" and "they make trivial mistakes or hallucinate" seems incongruous. For me, AI tools shine when I know enough about a topic to quickly error check, but not enough where I can code fluently without documentation. I'm sure it will get more useful over time, but that's where it's been for me for the last year or so.
  - saretup 1y ago
    > "they’re very good coders" and "they make trivial mistakes or hallucinate" seems incongruous. It seems that way if you judge them the same way you would human coders, but they’re different. They might be able to do things that veteran coders can’t without spending days on it, and fail at things that beginners can do in half an hour. A car might not be able to traverse difficult terrain as well as a horse, but it doesn’t mean the car is not a good mode of transportation.

KolibriFly 1y ago

Feels like we're either on the verge of a renaissance or a breakdown, and no one really knows which way it'll tilt

Zoethink 1y ago

[dead]

kristel100 1y ago

[dead]

Zorass 1y ago

Whether AI is a “good programmer” really depends on what you mean by programming. If it means being fluent in syntax, quickly generating prototypes, and recalling large amounts of code patterns, then yes, it's surprisingly strong. But if being a programmer includes debugging intuition, tracking context over multiple sessions, and knowing when not to write code, it's still not there yet.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

gitroom 1y ago

Man, reading all this makes me glad I just write my own scripts when I get stuckAI's cool til it isn't.