5 ms·

Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely

40 points by joozio 13d ago

einpoklum 12d ago
Not only do we have to live with endless LLM slop now, it seems we also need to accept an endless sequence of 2-cent philosophical blog posts where people describe the "world with AI" based on two minutes of meandering thought.
- Avicebron 12d ago
  Well with each new thing we get the grifters, lesswrong is an AI grifter hangout.
  - doitLP 12d ago
    Grifters don’t usually spend their entire lives devoted to preparing for something that doesn’t yet exist, giving up whatever else they like doing to work on that problem, and spending years trying to plan out how to make things go well for everyone when that thing materializes. Grifters are opportunistic short-termists. Whatever you can say about these rationalists, they aren’t that.
    - Avicebron 12d ago
      Eliezer spent his life devoted to science fiction and building a cult around himself, and now him and the rest of them are trying to vindicate themselves before they fade into obscurity.
  - dgellow 12d ago
    They are true believers. Terrible philosophers but true AI believers
- A_D_E_P_T 12d ago
  Hah, well, you must have never encountered LessWrong before. It has been like that for well over a decade, in fact it's probably approaching its second decade... One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit.
  - aaron695 12d ago
    [dead]
  - Chance-Device 12d ago
    He’s right though, this post says nothing non-obvious. It boils down to “AIs that can do some difficult things might be able to do other difficult things. Also: Danger!”. There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting.
    - baq 12d ago
      On the contrary this couple paragraphs is aimed strictly at 'normies' as in people who are riding the current exponential with little history of thinking about this moment. Most people's beliefs and knowledge needs updating and patching without hoping that 'it obviously follows from assumptions' because most people don't bother to think about the assumptions in the first place. IOW: > There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting. True - for you and the dozens of folks like you, to paraphrase a meme.
      - Chance-Device 12d ago
        I don’t think it’s good at doing that either.
    - cbogie 12d ago
      is the horsepower behind ai speculation less than, greater than or equal to human speculation? seems they’re recursively related, though human speculation has more torque since it occurs naturally or at least as spontaneously as it takes for an epiphany instance to occur. and then transposed into an ai chat prompt to get the analytical momentum for some grand scheme that gets published to whatever extent ie a comment, blog post, or whatever textual content that then gets ingested as training data…llm rinse repeat. not sure where this is going. is anyone?
- elcritch 12d ago
  Yes, it’s also the way human society processes new stuff, be it novel technologies and the philosophical ramifications or other topics. Call it distributed Bayesian processing. Sure each 2-cent philosophical posts isn’t worth much on its own but add up many of them over time and we get something more than its parts.
- dgellow 12d ago
  I guess you haven’t yet read Amodei’s essays? There is a significant overlap between the early SF AI scene and LessWrong contributors. That comes directly from the top, look at Anthropic leadership
bglazer 12d ago
Has anyone in the rationalist, doomer community actually seriously engaged the real biology/virology of a “virus that wipes out humanity”? Playing Plague Inc doesn’t count. I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first principles thought experiments here. Thus, they have limits imposed by physics and biology. Limits on transmission rate, lethality, particle size, evolutionary change rates, and so on. All of these interact and define a design space that nature has been searching for at unimaginable scale for as long as humans have existed. And yet here we are! Seems like “wiping humanity” might be really hard, perhaps impossible for a virus. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable or insufficiently creative, but these people strike me as deeply unserious in their engagement with the actually real physical world of biology. EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?
- reedf1 12d ago
  yes - I don't want to publicize what I know. I worked briefly at a leading university bio lab. It's haunted me for awhile that it would only take 1 disgruntled postdoc to wipe out humanity. There are {AI things} now that will tell you how.
  - bglazer 12d ago
    I currently work in a chemical biology lab and I don’t think one disgruntled postdoc could wipe out humanity. Also disgruntled is more or less unnecessary when combined with postdoc. Sort of goes without saying.
    - reedf1 12d ago
      .
      - gerikson 12d ago
        Are you asking for humanity to be wiped out so you can win an argument on the internet?
moomoo11 12d ago
if you can do the worst “bad” thing possible, you can also do the best “good” thing possible and then what? was the needle move at all?
- besterman23 12d ago
  Suppose it matters what order you do it in. The best good thing possible for humans who are all suffering from an extremely painful, incurable disease might just be ending that misery. The worst bad thing possible in a perfect utopia might be a minor inconvenience comparatively.
- notpachet 12d ago
  > if you can do the worst “bad” thing possible, you can also do the best “good” thing possible You say this like it's a truism, but I don't think it is. The bad things may be categorically easier than the good things. It's easier to destabilize a delicate system than to stabilize it. It's easier to break something than to fix it.
KasianFranks 12d ago
The positive impact on human aging/lifespan/healthspan is not being talked about enough when it comes to AI+biosciences.
- ACCount39 12d ago
  The issue is, you kind of have to not get wrecked by the negative impacts to collect those positive impacts. Unfortunately, "AI that's competent at bioweapon R&D" might be an easier mark to hit than "AI that can put a dent in the aging process". And biorisks can have a very favorable "resource input -> suffering output" rate of returns.
- dgellow 12d ago
  Have we already seen that impact? Or is it speculative? Because the speculative part is discussed all the time
- LogicFailsMe 12d ago
  Cutting sugars, not smoking, regular checkups, watching your weight, managing stress, and getting enough exercise and sleep still trumps any other therapeutic-based life extension approach. But I know, I know, it's actual effort, and technology is about making things easier so it's a non-starter. But I do agree that if we're on the verge* of von Neumann replicators and getting replaced by Pokhumans** to cheer on the ASI, then curing cancer, immortality and cryo-suspension are likely trivial achievements in comparison. *Nope, not even close, but don't tell that to the ASI cultists, that's like questioning the veracity of the gospels now. **Yes, that's the strong claim in AI 2027. And the democratic party apparently believes it.
Semkas 12d ago
Is the term "One-shotting" here even appropriate? In the context of AI one-shotting means giving your llm a single prompt and having it return a surprisingly good result (usually code related) without requiring further input, but the llm (probably) still iterates heavily before showing the results. When Codex "one-shots" something it depends a ton on the fact that code is easily testable.
- belluxx 12d ago
  Lately "one-shotting" means "without human steering / feedback" I think its a consequence of the improvements in harnesses and LLMs of the last year. Before they had a hard time self-reviewing the results and proceeding to a second iteration, now they are quite good at it although not perfect.
alansaber 12d ago
You can use AI to brute-force different crystal configurations, run some MD/DFT and identify candidates. I'd be (not completely, but) shocked if there wasn't a research group doing this already. To rapidly iterate with physical samples is still beyond our capabilities AFAIK.
jackb4040 12d ago
Uninformed speculation from the rationalist cult forum that wants to will science fiction into reality. If you actually look at the trajectory of post-LLM AI developments, the successes have all been in areas where the major labs have some way to get their hands on s**tons of correlated data. That's why they're pushing into maths now. I see no reason to assume that will be replicated with biological science data, which is extremely proprietary and not required to be exposed as part of the end product. It doesn't even have an equivalent to a black market in piracy like books or movies did. This data was not valuable to the public before now.
- ACCount39 12d ago
  The successes are in areas where you can get AI to execute an iterative loop autonomously. Try, fail, refine, retry - succeed eventually. Coding is, inherently, quite amenable to that. Is bioscience? They're certainly working on making it so: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-resea...
  - jackb4040 12d ago
    We're saying the same thing. The ability of the system to iterate is dependent on the digitizability of its artifacts, and its familiarity with such artifacts through its training data.
chasd00 12d ago
I remember being told that coming up with the alloy for the oxygen side pre-burner in Spacex's Raptor engine was a tedious trial and error grind over many days and nights and not a euphoric 'a ha!' moment. I wonder if AI could help with these kinds of problems, if it can be simulated in software then let AI do the grinding. /the oxygen side pre-burner in a full flow staged combustion rocket engine is a nasty place and figuring out a material that will survive in that environment was the key (or one of the keys) to making Raptor a reality.
deleted 12d ago
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deleted 12d ago
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ennepoai 12d ago
[dead]
kyledrake 12d ago
The post focuses on AI social engineering a lab to make something for it, but I think that's the wrong concern. I think the bigger concern with AI is that an individual, or small group of individuals, uses AI as a really useful assistant to learn how to develop deadly viruses on a DIY level. I'm pretty bearish on the idea of AI becoming Skynet from Terminator 2, but I do think there's some credibility to the bioterrorism argument. When I used to talk with people that work in orgs tasked with preventing terrorism, this was the thing that was keeping them up at night, and this was before AI.
- LogicFailsMe 12d ago
  You don't need an AI to tell you where to buy castor beans or their seeds.

40 points by joozio 13d ago

Not only do we have to live with endless LLM slop now, it seems we also need to accept an endless sequence of 2-cent philosophical blog posts where people describe the "world with AI" based on two minutes of meandering thought.

Avicebron 12d ago
Well with each new thing we get the grifters, lesswrong is an AI grifter hangout.
- doitLP 12d ago
  Grifters don’t usually spend their entire lives devoted to preparing for something that doesn’t yet exist, giving up whatever else they like doing to work on that problem, and spending years trying to plan out how to make things go well for everyone when that thing materializes. Grifters are opportunistic short-termists. Whatever you can say about these rationalists, they aren’t that.
  - Avicebron 12d ago
    Eliezer spent his life devoted to science fiction and building a cult around himself, and now him and the rest of them are trying to vindicate themselves before they fade into obscurity.
- dgellow 12d ago
  They are true believers. Terrible philosophers but true AI believers
A_D_E_P_T 12d ago
Hah, well, you must have never encountered LessWrong before. It has been like that for well over a decade, in fact it's probably approaching its second decade... One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit.
- aaron695 12d ago
  [dead]
- Chance-Device 12d ago
  He’s right though, this post says nothing non-obvious. It boils down to “AIs that can do some difficult things might be able to do other difficult things. Also: Danger!”. There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting.
  - baq 12d ago
    On the contrary this couple paragraphs is aimed strictly at 'normies' as in people who are riding the current exponential with little history of thinking about this moment. Most people's beliefs and knowledge needs updating and patching without hoping that 'it obviously follows from assumptions' because most people don't bother to think about the assumptions in the first place. IOW: > There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting. True - for you and the dozens of folks like you, to paraphrase a meme.
    - Chance-Device 12d ago
      I don’t think it’s good at doing that either.
  - cbogie 12d ago
    is the horsepower behind ai speculation less than, greater than or equal to human speculation? seems they’re recursively related, though human speculation has more torque since it occurs naturally or at least as spontaneously as it takes for an epiphany instance to occur. and then transposed into an ai chat prompt to get the analytical momentum for some grand scheme that gets published to whatever extent ie a comment, blog post, or whatever textual content that then gets ingested as training data…llm rinse repeat. not sure where this is going. is anyone?
elcritch 12d ago
Yes, it’s also the way human society processes new stuff, be it novel technologies and the philosophical ramifications or other topics. Call it distributed Bayesian processing. Sure each 2-cent philosophical posts isn’t worth much on its own but add up many of them over time and we get something more than its parts.
dgellow 12d ago
I guess you haven’t yet read Amodei’s essays? There is a significant overlap between the early SF AI scene and LessWrong contributors. That comes directly from the top, look at Anthropic leadership

bglazer 12d ago

Has anyone in the rationalist, doomer community actually seriously engaged the real biology/virology of a “virus that wipes out humanity”? Playing Plague Inc doesn’t count. I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first principles thought experiments here. Thus, they have limits imposed by physics and biology. Limits on transmission rate, lethality, particle size, evolutionary change rates, and so on. All of these interact and define a design space that nature has been searching for at unimaginable scale for as long as humans have existed. And yet here we are! Seems like “wiping humanity” might be really hard, perhaps impossible for a virus. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable or insufficiently creative, but these people strike me as deeply unserious in their engagement with the actually real physical world of biology. EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?

reedf1 12d ago
yes - I don't want to publicize what I know. I worked briefly at a leading university bio lab. It's haunted me for awhile that it would only take 1 disgruntled postdoc to wipe out humanity. There are {AI things} now that will tell you how.
- bglazer 12d ago
  I currently work in a chemical biology lab and I don’t think one disgruntled postdoc could wipe out humanity. Also disgruntled is more or less unnecessary when combined with postdoc. Sort of goes without saying.
  - reedf1 12d ago
    .
    - gerikson 12d ago
      Are you asking for humanity to be wiped out so you can win an argument on the internet?

moomoo11 12d ago

if you can do the worst “bad” thing possible, you can also do the best “good” thing possible and then what? was the needle move at all?

besterman23 12d ago
Suppose it matters what order you do it in. The best good thing possible for humans who are all suffering from an extremely painful, incurable disease might just be ending that misery. The worst bad thing possible in a perfect utopia might be a minor inconvenience comparatively.
notpachet 12d ago
> if you can do the worst “bad” thing possible, you can also do the best “good” thing possible You say this like it's a truism, but I don't think it is. The bad things may be categorically easier than the good things. It's easier to destabilize a delicate system than to stabilize it. It's easier to break something than to fix it.

KasianFranks 12d ago

The positive impact on human aging/lifespan/healthspan is not being talked about enough when it comes to AI+biosciences.

ACCount39 12d ago
The issue is, you kind of have to not get wrecked by the negative impacts to collect those positive impacts. Unfortunately, "AI that's competent at bioweapon R&D" might be an easier mark to hit than "AI that can put a dent in the aging process". And biorisks can have a very favorable "resource input -> suffering output" rate of returns.
dgellow 12d ago
Have we already seen that impact? Or is it speculative? Because the speculative part is discussed all the time
LogicFailsMe 12d ago
Cutting sugars, not smoking, regular checkups, watching your weight, managing stress, and getting enough exercise and sleep still trumps any other therapeutic-based life extension approach. But I know, I know, it's actual effort, and technology is about making things easier so it's a non-starter. But I do agree that if we're on the verge* of von Neumann replicators and getting replaced by Pokhumans** to cheer on the ASI, then curing cancer, immortality and cryo-suspension are likely trivial achievements in comparison. *Nope, not even close, but don't tell that to the ASI cultists, that's like questioning the veracity of the gospels now. **Yes, that's the strong claim in AI 2027. And the democratic party apparently believes it.

Semkas 12d ago

Is the term "One-shotting" here even appropriate? In the context of AI one-shotting means giving your llm a single prompt and having it return a surprisingly good result (usually code related) without requiring further input, but the llm (probably) still iterates heavily before showing the results. When Codex "one-shots" something it depends a ton on the fact that code is easily testable.

belluxx 12d ago
Lately "one-shotting" means "without human steering / feedback" I think its a consequence of the improvements in harnesses and LLMs of the last year. Before they had a hard time self-reviewing the results and proceeding to a second iteration, now they are quite good at it although not perfect.

alansaber 12d ago

You can use AI to brute-force different crystal configurations, run some MD/DFT and identify candidates. I'd be (not completely, but) shocked if there wasn't a research group doing this already. To rapidly iterate with physical samples is still beyond our capabilities AFAIK.

jackb4040 12d ago

Uninformed speculation from the rationalist cult forum that wants to will science fiction into reality. If you actually look at the trajectory of post-LLM AI developments, the successes have all been in areas where the major labs have some way to get their hands on s**tons of correlated data. That's why they're pushing into maths now. I see no reason to assume that will be replicated with biological science data, which is extremely proprietary and not required to be exposed as part of the end product. It doesn't even have an equivalent to a black market in piracy like books or movies did. This data was not valuable to the public before now.

ACCount39 12d ago
The successes are in areas where you can get AI to execute an iterative loop autonomously. Try, fail, refine, retry - succeed eventually. Coding is, inherently, quite amenable to that. Is bioscience? They're certainly working on making it so: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-resea...
- jackb4040 12d ago
  We're saying the same thing. The ability of the system to iterate is dependent on the digitizability of its artifacts, and its familiarity with such artifacts through its training data.

chasd00 12d ago

I remember being told that coming up with the alloy for the oxygen side pre-burner in Spacex's Raptor engine was a tedious trial and error grind over many days and nights and not a euphoric 'a ha!' moment. I wonder if AI could help with these kinds of problems, if it can be simulated in software then let AI do the grinding. /the oxygen side pre-burner in a full flow staged combustion rocket engine is a nasty place and figuring out a material that will survive in that environment was the key (or one of the keys) to making Raptor a reality.

deleted 12d ago

[deleted]

deleted 12d ago

[deleted]

ennepoai 12d ago

[dead]

kyledrake 12d ago

The post focuses on AI social engineering a lab to make something for it, but I think that's the wrong concern. I think the bigger concern with AI is that an individual, or small group of individuals, uses AI as a really useful assistant to learn how to develop deadly viruses on a DIY level. I'm pretty bearish on the idea of AI becoming Skynet from Terminator 2, but I do think there's some credibility to the bioterrorism argument. When I used to talk with people that work in orgs tasked with preventing terrorism, this was the thing that was keeping them up at night, and this was before AI.

LogicFailsMe 12d ago
You don't need an AI to tell you where to buy castor beans or their seeds.