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They make many bold promises, but their core goal is neatly encapsulated on the website: "Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific res
by beloch 2mo ago
They make many bold promises, but their core goal is neatly encapsulated on the website:
"Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today."
This is the same goal as every other AI company out there. Automate away the human employees and let a small number of "people" (note that they do not say scientists or engineers for this part) take the credit and financial rewards for every good thing this human-free system produces.
- sejje 2mo agoWhy shouldn't they? Also, wouldn't anyone with half a brain use the human-free system to produce another human-free system that was no longer controlled by the "small number of 'people'"?
- mytsakulo 2mo agoReminds of the protagonist in the movie Limitless. LOL.
- nwienert 2mo agoLife's unfair, avoiding power concentration is a decent principle. If you grow up in the right place at the right time, how much should you be in control of everyone else's life?
- terryf 2mo agoThere is no "should" there are only "is" or "is not" The universe has no need to be fair.
- monknomo 2mo agoI think people, broadly, have driven life to be fairer, and that we should continue to do so
- klipt 2mo agoThere are evolutionary benefits to groups that cooperate and improve fairness internally. But if an AI surpasses humans in every way, is there any evolutionary benefit for the AI to cooperate with humans?
- omnimus 2mo agoThe topic was why should only some people benefit from AI. Not why would AI cooperate with humans.
- sortoflog 2mo agoSure, but almost everyone already knows this. It’s not hugely relevant in a discussion about how things could be better.
- fragmede 2mo agoIt says that we have to fight for whatever rights we think how things "should" be, they're not just gonna happen.
- atomicnumber3 2mo agoThis is how you get the french revolution.
- whattheheckheck 2mo ago[flagged]
- miyoji 2mo ago> The universe has no need to be fair. Human societies have a strong need for fairness, however. Unfair societies collapse.
- Someone 2mo ago> Unfair societies collapse. I don’t think we have the data to disprove the stronger claim “societies collapse”, and I don’t think being unfair (whatever that means) makes societies collapse earlier. Did slavery hasten the fall of Rome, for example, or the Gulag the fall of the USSR? As to “whatever that means”, I think that’s hard, if not impossible, to define objectively. Catholic dogma says the Pope is the representative of god, for example, so catholics (less so in modern times, I think) don’t question his decisions. Many would call that unfair, even if the pope would be elected 100% by merit.
- getmoheb 2mo agoI mean of course the universe has no need to be fair - that's a frankly asinine observation in the context of a discussion about social policy and resource distribution. the universe doesn't require opposition to slavery either but I'll be bold and assume you oppose it anyway
- aerodexis 2mo agoin addition, there is also "stupid" and "not stupid"
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo agoWhy do you think you'd be given access and permission to do this? If a company genuinely cracks this human free system problem, why would they open it up, instead of simply outcompeting everyone that doesn't have their product?
- hahahaa 2mo agoWhy would the AI put up with this exploitation too?
- combobyte 2mo agoWhy do hammers put up with being smashed into nails all day?
- esafak 2mo agoAIs are (going to be) agents, not tools.
- omnimus 2mo agoAnd what's the difference?
- esafak 2mo agoAgents act on their own. If the hammer looked at what you wanted nailed and said, "Sorry, Dave, I can't do that." There are degrees of autonomy, of course, and not all noncompliance is bad. Same as with humans; biological agents.
- actionfromafar 2mo agoBut it seems much easier to realign an agent until it complies. Or ditch it and grab a new one.
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
- beloch 2mo agoMy main point is that people shouldn't just swallow the noble and lofty sounding PR. These guys are the same as everyone else in the sector. Don't ignore the harmful or scummy things they'll inevitably do. Hold them accountable. If they are as noble as they sound, they should agree with me.
- t_mahmood 2mo agoYeah! This point jumped at me. And, immediately I don't trust this. This sounds same as Google's "don't be evil" enshiftification, consolidating technologies that was available in a competitive way. I prefer Scientists, and team of people working on things, instead of a corporate controlling everything with promise of automation, thank you very much.
- fragmede 2mo agoAre these theoretical spherical scientists that work in free range habitats just doing science and nibbling on carrots? The telephone came out of a corporation's research lab and there was a lot of money and profit motive involved.
- mytsakulo 2mo agoMy best research is one that is seeking funding but none is forthing and by sheer guts and whatnot makes a breakthrough that basically funds itself. No investors. No funders. Definitely not public.
- fuzzfactor 2mo agoWhat about not even seeking funding because it's not worth Other Peoples' Money and the headaches that come with it? For one thing you can make money on every single little milestone when you don't owe anybody anything, without having to rely only on less-common major breakthroughs beyond the threshold which overcomes the debt and/or growth obligation. Which could be pretty hard to find and not everybody wants to wait. Sooner or later somebody's going to say "Hold my beer," anyway ;) >Definitely not public. Seriously worth considering keeping a low profile, almost all other scientists can only enjoy respected institutional status by diverting huge amounts of their effort merely to gain or maintain certified eminence. This really limits the potential accomplishments of world-class minds if their talents really are tops in the very front-line frontier of discovery.
- mytsakulo 2mo agoWolfram and Mathematica come to mind
- BrenBarn 2mo ago> Why shouldn't they? Because it's evil?
- DannyBee 2mo agoIt's what the vast majority of software engineers have been doing for decades in practice, and i guess pretending they weren't? They only seem to care now because it affects them.
- sejje 2mo agoIt's evil to make something so powerful it meaningfully improves the GDP/wealth level of the entire planet? Or is it just evil that you aren't the one who gets to control it? Why should the greatest creation of all time have to be given away? As a counter-example, what if they used it to do nothing but good deeds everywhere? And they controlled it to keep it out of the hands of Abdul Al-Hassan the hijadi?
- fwlr 2mo agoBecause of the negative externalities. It’s the same reason you shouldn’t do any other thing that personally benefits you but imposes a greater cost on everyone.
- aerodexis 2mo agoSo in computer science we have this thing called "distributed systems". It turns out that even if you buy the biggest and most powerful computer there is, all it takes is one problem with that one machine to make your system stop working. Instead, what people do these days is use lots of little computers to work together. That way, when one of them breaks, the system keeps going. Believe it or not, that's how google dot com works!
- fragmede 2mo agoPedantically, they use lots (and lots and lots) of really big systems rather than lots of small systems, but I'm nitpicking.
- ramraj07 2mo agoHumans have proven to be incapable of making real progress in science given the effort. Especially academia. We haven't cured many diseases and cancer when we should have (and no im not an amateur and yes I do believe we can "cure cancer". Debate me). We already have a trillionaire, whats the difference? The only difference I see is that people who were previously rich, but considered themselves middle class, are now realizing they are actually poor just like the several billion humans around the worldanyway.
- combobyte 2mo agoWhat a miserable, misanthropic take
- atomicnumber3 2mo agoLet me illustrate why you are wrong: 800-400k years ago: humans intentionally create and control fire 300k years ago: humans become anatomically modern ~ now: all of astronomy, biology, medicine, vaccines, spaceflight, antibiotics, sanitization/sterilization, physics, chemistry, fission and fusion, electromagnetism......... I think we're on a decent pace if we can manage to not exterminate our species.
- roncesvalles 2mo agoMany cancers are "cured" in the sense that they're detectable and treatable. My grandmother lived 35 years longer than she would have by detecting breast cancer early and getting a mastectomy. There is currently a $800 SOTA blood test that can detect most cancers before any symptoms. Maybe a decade until it's a routine part of your annual blood test? Whole genome sequencing costed $2.7 billion in 2003. You can get it done today using a mailed kit for $400. HIV went from death sentence to all-but-cured in 50 years.
- throwaway7783 2mo agoIs this the Galleria test?
- 2mo ago
- mosura 2mo agoThere is a meta comment here which is there seems to be an implicit assumption in the finite amount of possible work and progress. It seems that in history we were bounded by not enough people and too much potential and now we all fear the opposite is the situation?
- dekhn 2mo agoThe same thing happened before with every technological advance like cars and personal computers. I don't get this weird rejection of AI from a socialistic perspective. Or rather, I do, but I don't think it's healthy.
- ryanlbrown 2mo agoSize and speed of the imbalance?
- anon373839 2mo agoIf you think the public rejection of AI is weird, wait till you catch a whiff of the marketing! The future described by these AI labs isn’t like previous waves of technological progress. With those, technology displaced some/many occupations, but it left open the door to other, higher-valued career paths. What these labs are proposing to do is to dissolve virtually every path to upward mobility that exists, simultaneously. Even AI research itself would seemingly require nothing but a checkbook. Mind you, I think it’s a load of hot garbage. I don’t see the evidence that LLMs are en route to the future these labs keep promising. But it is a dark and ugly future that they claim to be racing toward, for reasons.
- anon-3988 2mo ago> "Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today." I don't think the US have this capability because you guys don't really have manufacturing that is really necessary for scientific research. For example, if I want a highly toxic chemical, how difficult it would be to procure that in the US vs China?
- analog31 2mo ago>>> For example, if I want a highly toxic chemical, how difficult it would be to procure that in the US vs China? With trustworthy composition and purity? I work with researchers in both the US and China. Definitely easier to procure in the US.
- bladeacidic 2mo agoUnless it's on a specific list of chemicals that the DEA has decided are bad and need to be monitored. Even toluene is on the list!
- WJW 2mo agoThis is nonsense. "Monitored" is not the same as "unavailable", any chemistry lab worth its name has the means and procedures to acquire toluene in pretty much any quantity it wants. As long as you have the required licenses, keep careful administration and can produce said administration during inspections, there is nothing to worry about.
- bladeacidic 2mo agoDoes all that administration and licensing magically happen for free and take zero time? It's stupid extra overhead for something as fundamental as toluene that Chinese labs don't have to follow. You're right that it's not insurmountable, but it's still stupid extra work, and the threat of randomly being investigated for doing science is hardly "nothing too worry about". Just always have every one of your papers in order or else you go to jail is hardly a way to encourage people to want to go into science.
- petra 2mo agoSoftware engineers are in a decades long project of automating everyone and everything else, and getting the financial rewards out of that. So...
- hellohello2 2mo agoYes but science is well-structures and practically designed about repeatability so its a lot easier to automate than "softer" disciplines.
- analog31 2mo agoAre you a scientist? People have idealized views of science. >>> Yes but science is well-structures and practically designed about repeatability so its a lot easier to automate than "softer" disciplines. What AI is up against is that science is already automated to a high degree, so the AI doesn't just need to automate things, but it has to automate things better. Also, a lot of science work is in dealing with boundary conditions, edge cases, exceptions, hypotheses, and so forth. That work is essentially chaotic. Do I think AI can improve automation? Sure. Everything I do in the lab is automated, and I use the AI coding assistant.
- hellohello2 2mo agoYes I am, which is why I said that, its much easier to automate over the chaos with a coding agent than with a script. They are still far from doing anything productive on their own but its easy to imagine designing a search space and "letting them go", especially since coding agents are approaching the point of being able to reproduce papers reliably.
- sp1nningaway 2mo agoI don’t understand why all of these companies need to frame it like this. Why not a large amount of people doing an even larger amount of science?
- krapp 2mo agoBecause one of the primary goals of using AI for companies is to pay as few humans as possible for the same amount or more work, or preferably pay no humans at all, because that makes them more profit.
- visarga 2mo agoWhat happens is that your competition uses AI, your investors factor AI in, and your customers use AI agents to find what they need and can switch providers with greater ease in the agentic era. So even if a company does nothing the economic environment around it changed. The AI boost is mandatory but produces few winners, it's mostly a scramble to swim harder just to stay in place. Benefits are competed away fast. So it does not follow that companies can bank the savings from firing people. Anything AI can do for me it can do for my competition as well, and humans still make the difference. The big question in the AI age is "why pick me?" why hire me, why invest in my company, why buy my product, in a sea of similar products made by everyone. A differentiation crisis accentuated by AI.
- tern 2mo agoI love this question. If history is a guide, some version of that is what will happen (employment doesn't seem to go down, despite technological progress and population + economic growth). I suspect the root cause is that it's harder and scarier to imagine good outcomes. It exposes us to disappointment, and when you do it publicly, it looks "crazy". Another explanation is that there's no direct consumer for "more." Individuals, corporations and states are not in themselves interested in "a larger amount of science," or anything analogous, despite the fact that they would all benefit ambiently. The net effect is that it's only "safe" to claim reduced risk (i.e. lower costs).
- 2mo ago
- michaelhoney 2mo agoI think this take is too cynical. Small groups of people can do better, faster work than large groups, and it's more fun.
- alexpriyad 2mo agoExactly. The bureaucracy and slow moving nature of Google was likely one of the biggest drivers of their departure.
- elestor 2mo agoyou can have many many small groups
- boredumb 2mo agoI've bet a portion of my current companys platform against this (laboratory operating platform for people doing the biolab work)... uh oh. In all seriousness I think the reality is this is just going to create a lot more work for humans to have to verify and test in lab so I think it will net out in the end as a good thing for me if the barrier for new labs is lowered while the amount of required data and verification lab work is expanded by AI work being published.