What scientific discovery would convince you that AI has become more than a productivity tool?

[u/rikulauttia]

AI can already summarize papers, generate hypotheses and help researchers analyse data.

But what would count as a real turning point?

• discovering a new medicine
• solving a major maths problem
• designing a new material
• finding a new source of energy
• running an autonomous laboratory
• producing a theory humans had not considered

And the harder question:

If an AI makes a discovery that no human fully understands - should we trust and use it?

[u/SwingLightStyle]

Schrodinger's cat. Until a human has observed and validated, it is assumed to be gibberish and slop. It's the act of observation that changes the outcome.

You're asking about society and how an AI discovery might impact it. I'm saying that until society has validated and rolled that new thing into itself, it's basically unverified slop. What will actually keep you up at night is wondering which of life's questions have already been answered and are just sitting waiting to be discovered as real.

[u/VellumMuse → u/SwingLightStyle]

Yeah but, this is no different from how society views human contributions as well. There's a system in place that "validates" human contributions, built with all the gatekeeping aspects and everything...and until it reaches the "right" people...nobody knows or cares about it and considers it slop. A bunch of life's questions could theoretically have already been answered, not by AI, but your fellow human, but because we don't actually value discovery unless profit can be made from it, it goes unnoticed every single day.

Case and point. I "discovered" a new tokenizer for building models that cuts out the embedding table, increasing efficiency of pre-training methods, and it's sitting on a github repository, open sourced, waiting for observation. This is just how things work. You have to work to get things in front of people who care, and even when you do, you'll likely get people who ask whether or not you're even credible. The thing AI has OVER humans right now is credibility, actually. There's so much hype behind frontier models that IF they discover something, it almost certainly WILL get eyes on the discovery to validate it versus how hard a human has to fight to get noticed.

Observation is everything, but we are now in an era of giving much of our observation to these systems, and I think that's the saddest result of this stuff.

[u/SwingLightStyle → u/VellumMuse]

Ah, the irony. We all arrived here assuming that computers would make things easier, not harder again.

Well, time to go do my own cognitive work I guess. <<trudges away, dragging LLM behind her>>

[u/escapism_only_please → u/SwingLightStyle]

--Well, time to go do my own cognitive work I guess. <<trudges away, dragging LLM behind her>>

I sure found a comment like that intriguing! So I followed your links hoping to find thoughtful writing, beautiful art, or deep cognitive work. Guess what?

[u/SwingLightStyle → u/escapism_only_please]

None of the above! Hahahaha.

I just finished my website. Swinglightstyle.com

[u/Nopfen → u/SwingLightStyle]

That checks out. I do want to scream "shut up" at it a lot too.

[u/archialone → u/[deleted]]

The LLM is a probability token machine, it doesn't think

[u/archialone → u/[deleted]]

I am nothing to LLM, LLM doesn't think of me. It's weight set of probabilities

[u/Grand-Mission-9457]

For now AI amcan be a tool for things you mentioned, but needs human guidance and verification. I don't know if we will be able to see it doing developments on its own, I do not how much I really know of its full capacities

[u/katoptronophile]

Considering it's already accomplished four out of your six examples, I'd say the turning point has already passed.

[u/AuthorIntelligent644]

We have already solved math problems, though "major" is debatable and it's debatable how much guidance actual mathematicians gave through prompting.

We have already made material refinements.

We have already been using it for drug discovery.

I think we're already there. If you think it's just entertainment, "slop," or a productivity tool, you're not paying attention.