I'm not at all anti-AI, but I'm still holding my breath to see real scientific contributions coming from modern (LLM/CoT/agent) AI. Much of the premise behind "AI will make superabundance a reality" hinges on getting AI-driven science that affects everyday lives Anthropic's quasi-CRISPR-like discovery did not seem super compelling, and that is still the best I have seen. If anyone has more heartening stories that could convince me to be an optimist, please do share ;)
What I think the parent post is missing is that breakthroughs in science don't immediately translate into breakthroughs in engineering and even less so into economically viable products.
I have a feeling that many more fields are utilizing AI and having some success with it and we just don't know about it in our STEM bubble.
On the other hand, you could downplay the math findings a bit, since it didn't further our understanding of mathematics just yet, only provided proves to things we didn't have proves for.
There’s been a tendency since well before LLMs for AI demos to focus on “here’s a new problem we made up that it solves that you could imagine will soon transfer to an existing real problem” as opposed to “AI solves X”. This has been an ongoing challenge, it does cool stuff and looks so promising but has been very hard to harness for useful work. It’s still going to take time before the hype dies down and we see what’s left.
I don’t think it’s going away, LLMs and other ML stuff will no doubt remain part of people’s workflow, but I also see no evidence for superabundance or anything close to it.
I’d be surprised if that isn’t already the case with CERN itself already being a multi-national collaboration project and with things like GÉANT https://geant.org/ existing
Man, when I was doing my PhD at CERN the most far out thing that we were generally allowed to use was boosted decision trees :) getting anything other than that approved for any Higgs-related analysis was… not a thing.
Using neural nets for signal background separation was pretty standard in ~2012 when the Higgs discovery was published. Was also pretty standard for CDF + DZero papers that came out before the LHC turned on.
It makes sense in a political way but I'm not sure if it's the best choice for scientific development seeing as Mistral has been pretty behind the curve it's entire existence.
It makes more sense if they're the only company who was willing to work on a more custom solution for the proposed LHC model but I don't that a bit as it would be great PR for the frontier labs.
This seems a lot more like an effort to bolster European AI by moving CERN money into Mistral.
AI has been beneficial in multiple research fields across maths and science. That is to say, it's actually benefited humanity in those particular use cases.
As opposed to enshitifying the lives of the working class in most other areas.
I think there is a large group of commenters who actually just hate silicon valley tech companies, and they're fine with AI as long as it comes from someone else.
Using AI as a tool to investigate the mysteries of the universe is a huge win for humanity. Generating slop images to confuse people online is not. AI is tool, we like when tools are used for good.
Maturity is understanding there's an enormous range between "like" and "dislike", between "love" and "hate", between "good" and "bad", and its also possible to be neither at once or both at once.
What I think the parent post is missing is that breakthroughs in science don't immediately translate into breakthroughs in engineering and even less so into economically viable products.
On the other hand, you could downplay the math findings a bit, since it didn't further our understanding of mathematics just yet, only provided proves to things we didn't have proves for.
I don’t think it’s going away, LLMs and other ML stuff will no doubt remain part of people’s workflow, but I also see no evidence for superabundance or anything close to it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0763 - used neural nets extra tt+jets noise https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05066 - used neural nets for signal/background separation.
Makes perfect sense and I’m glad that CERN is focusing on EU providers
It makes more sense if they're the only company who was willing to work on a more custom solution for the proposed LHC model but I don't that a bit as it would be great PR for the frontier labs.
This seems a lot more like an effort to bolster European AI by moving CERN money into Mistral.
As opposed to enshitifying the lives of the working class in most other areas.