Yes and no. Putting Sam Altman, OpenAI and even LLMs in general aside for a moment, one doesn't need to look too hard to uncover the failure modes of human mind

Yes and no. Putting Sam Altman, OpenAI and even LLMs in general aside for a moment, one doesn't need to look too hard to uncover the failure modes of human minds when it comes to research. Here are some from my personal experience: - mathematical complexity. This hits hard anybody wanting to understand quantum mechanics, even the parts of it which are many decades old. But one is not going to be making a great many things without that understanding. Right, one may come back and say "but who needs new toys? Let's all go to Church instead!" which is indeed the only valid counterargument one can make, read below if you don't believe me. - biological complexity. One needs a needle smaller than the size used to pin Drosophila flies to poke a biologist and get them to raise their hands in the air and say "it's all too complex. Nobody can really understand all of that. We know nothing of those systems. We are but humble observers trying to grasp at straws". If said biologists really wanted to understand everything, the majority of them would follow the tiny minority who are trying to simulate biological systems at a quantum level, but see my point above. And that simulation effort is perhaps even more complicated than the biological systems under study, even if it has the potential to scale orders of magnitude better. Without any of it, cancer will get one in eight people before the age of 65, and ageing and other diseases will eat the rest of us. Which is okay of one believes in God, ofc. Sam Altman and his chummies probably don't believe in the Almighty. In so far as I'm concerned, if they want to fuck cancer, they have my blessing to boil the oceans.