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Aside from the gossips about Sam Altman hubris, the failed launch of GPT5 is likely a significant event and potentially a turning point regarding the hype and e

Aside from the gossips about Sam Altman hubris, the failed launch of GPT5 is likely a significant event and potentially a turning point regarding the hype and expectations around LLMs based tech. The limitations of what was believed to be by many as a path to AGI/ASI are becoming more clearly apparent. Difficult to say how much room for improvement there is, or to have a definite answer regarding the usefulness and economic impact of those models, but what we're seeing now is not exponential improvement. This is not going to rewrite and improve itself, or to cure cancer, unify physics or any kind of scientific or technological breakthrough. For coders is is merely a dispensable QoL improvement.

lurking_swe 1y ago
“no scientific breakthrough” careful. I too am pessimistic on the generative AI hype, but you seem even more so, to the point where it’s making you biased and possibly uninformed. Today’s news from BBC, 6 hours ago. “AI designs antibiotics for gonorrhoea and MRSA superbugs” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr94xxye2lo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr94xxye2lo > Now, the MIT team have gone one step further by using *generative AI* to design antibiotics in the first place for the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhoea and for potentially-deadly MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). … > "We're excited because we show that generative AI can be used to design completely new antibiotics," Prof James Collins, from MIT, tells the BBC.
- MerrimanInd 1y ago
  I don't think that BBC article is technically detailed enough to make that case. The actual study may be, so I'm not saying you're wrong, but "generative AI" is far too large of an umbrella term that encompasses two very different views. The common thesis here is that AI is a wildly powerful tool to do fundamental science, and I think most technologists with any knowledge of neural networks would agree that's true. But the problem is that the Sam Altmans of the world are applying that thesis to the promise that GPT5 is on the path to AGI and they just need to keep scaling and pouring more billions of dollars into these massive models to get there. When I see actually interesting applications of AI in fundamental science the studies are usually of custom programs starting with smaller or more purpose-built foundational models, being hand tuned by knowledgeable researchers with deterministic/testable validation feedback loops. So what you're saying can be true while what Altman is promising can also be absolutely false. But it's hard to say without actually reading that MIT study.
  - lurking_swe 1y ago
    I agree with you. I’m eager to see the details once MIT releases it. Generative AI is a lot of things. LLM’s in particular (subset of generative AI) are somewhat useful, but nowhere near as useful as what Sam claims. And i guess LLM’s specifically - if we focus on chatgpt, will not be solving cancer lol. So we agree that Sam is selling snake oil. :) Just wanted to point out that a lot of the fundamental “tech” is being used for genuinely useful things!
    - mcswell 1y ago
      The details were released previously in the Cell paper I link to a couple posts above this. It is behind a paywall (my university allowed me access).
      - lurking_swe 1y ago
        thanks for the tip!
- stephc_int13 1y ago
  To be clear, I was referring to LLMs, not other types of neural nets.
- mcswell 1y ago
  Hold on, you're talking about something entirely different from what stephc (the person you are responding to) was talking about. He (or she) was talking about LLMs, and GPT5 in particular. The MIT article you're referring to is talking about two generative AI programs which are not LLMs. From the MIT article (https://news.mit.edu/2025/using-generative-ai-researchers-design-compounds-kill-drug-resistant-bacteria-0814 https://news.mit.edu/2025/using-generative-ai-researchers-de...), of which the BBC article you reference appears to be an excerpt: ---------- One of those algorithms, known as chemically reasonable mutations (CReM), works by starting with a particular molecule containing F1 and then generating new molecules by adding, replacing, or deleting atoms and chemical groups. The second algorithm, F-VAE (fragment-based variational autoencoder), takes a chemical fragment and builds it into a complete molecule. It does so by learning patterns of how fragments are commonly modified, based on its pretraining on more than 1 million molecules from the ChEMBL database. ---------- (The technical article about the MIT work is here: https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00855-4 https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00855-4) Both the MIT programs and GPT5 use "generative AI", but with entirely different training sets and perhaps very different training methods, architectures etc. Indeed, the AI systems used in the MIT work were described in conference papers in 2018 and 2020 (citations in the Cell paper), meaning that they preceded by quite a bit the current generations of GPT-5. In sum, the fact that the MIT model (reportedly) works well in developing antibiotics does not in any way imply that GPT-5 is a "scientific breakthrough", much less that LLMs will lead to AI that is able to "rewrite and improve itself, or to cure cancer, unify physics or any kind of scientific or technological breakthrough" (quoting the OP).
- tom_m 1y ago
  AI wouldn't be responsible for any breakthroughs, a human using AI is. They are the ones prompting and guiding and in control. AI doesn't care about our cancer. It doesn't have cancer.

lurking_swe 1y ago

“no scientific breakthrough” careful. I too am pessimistic on the generative AI hype, but you seem even more so, to the point where it’s making you biased and possibly uninformed. Today’s news from BBC, 6 hours ago. “AI designs antibiotics for gonorrhoea and MRSA superbugs” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr94xxye2lo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr94xxye2lo > Now, the MIT team have gone one step further by using *generative AI* to design antibiotics in the first place for the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhoea and for potentially-deadly MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). … > "We're excited because we show that generative AI can be used to design completely new antibiotics," Prof James Collins, from MIT, tells the BBC.

MerrimanInd 1y ago
I don't think that BBC article is technically detailed enough to make that case. The actual study may be, so I'm not saying you're wrong, but "generative AI" is far too large of an umbrella term that encompasses two very different views. The common thesis here is that AI is a wildly powerful tool to do fundamental science, and I think most technologists with any knowledge of neural networks would agree that's true. But the problem is that the Sam Altmans of the world are applying that thesis to the promise that GPT5 is on the path to AGI and they just need to keep scaling and pouring more billions of dollars into these massive models to get there. When I see actually interesting applications of AI in fundamental science the studies are usually of custom programs starting with smaller or more purpose-built foundational models, being hand tuned by knowledgeable researchers with deterministic/testable validation feedback loops. So what you're saying can be true while what Altman is promising can also be absolutely false. But it's hard to say without actually reading that MIT study.
- lurking_swe 1y ago
  I agree with you. I’m eager to see the details once MIT releases it. Generative AI is a lot of things. LLM’s in particular (subset of generative AI) are somewhat useful, but nowhere near as useful as what Sam claims. And i guess LLM’s specifically - if we focus on chatgpt, will not be solving cancer lol. So we agree that Sam is selling snake oil. :) Just wanted to point out that a lot of the fundamental “tech” is being used for genuinely useful things!
  - mcswell 1y ago
    The details were released previously in the Cell paper I link to a couple posts above this. It is behind a paywall (my university allowed me access).
    - lurking_swe 1y ago
      thanks for the tip!
stephc_int13 1y ago
To be clear, I was referring to LLMs, not other types of neural nets.
mcswell 1y ago
Hold on, you're talking about something entirely different from what stephc (the person you are responding to) was talking about. He (or she) was talking about LLMs, and GPT5 in particular. The MIT article you're referring to is talking about two generative AI programs which are not LLMs. From the MIT article (https://news.mit.edu/2025/using-generative-ai-researchers-design-compounds-kill-drug-resistant-bacteria-0814 https://news.mit.edu/2025/using-generative-ai-researchers-de...), of which the BBC article you reference appears to be an excerpt: ---------- One of those algorithms, known as chemically reasonable mutations (CReM), works by starting with a particular molecule containing F1 and then generating new molecules by adding, replacing, or deleting atoms and chemical groups. The second algorithm, F-VAE (fragment-based variational autoencoder), takes a chemical fragment and builds it into a complete molecule. It does so by learning patterns of how fragments are commonly modified, based on its pretraining on more than 1 million molecules from the ChEMBL database. ---------- (The technical article about the MIT work is here: https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00855-4 https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00855-4) Both the MIT programs and GPT5 use "generative AI", but with entirely different training sets and perhaps very different training methods, architectures etc. Indeed, the AI systems used in the MIT work were described in conference papers in 2018 and 2020 (citations in the Cell paper), meaning that they preceded by quite a bit the current generations of GPT-5. In sum, the fact that the MIT model (reportedly) works well in developing antibiotics does not in any way imply that GPT-5 is a "scientific breakthrough", much less that LLMs will lead to AI that is able to "rewrite and improve itself, or to cure cancer, unify physics or any kind of scientific or technological breakthrough" (quoting the OP).
tom_m 1y ago
AI wouldn't be responsible for any breakthroughs, a human using AI is. They are the ones prompting and guiding and in control. AI doesn't care about our cancer. It doesn't have cancer.