[pluc]

People are marveling at what AI can discover purely out of time and chance. AI will undoubtedly find awesome things because there's very few things we've thrown this much money at. For every awesome thing AI finds, there's a million mistakes, fake leads, hallucinations, etc. Amaze away but let's not forget this is an exception much more than the norm.

[throwaway27448]

Presumably with automated proofs, hallucinations (aka, creativity or confabulation, if we hadn't botched the naming) is a good thing. It's in the empirical world where trusting an LLM is a stupid thing because there's no automated form of fact checking.

[bnchrch]

I'm sorry. But whats the point of this critique?

That a raw LLM hallucinates?

That we never see all the mistakes and dead ends a complex system using AI hits?

Does it even matter if its accuracy rate across all its experiments is < 100% if it can run trillions of experiments in the same time a human could run 1?

We don't see many of the failed attempts of Human Researchers. Why? Because it doesn't matter.

What amazing here is that it shows our society can make discoveries faster in the post LLM world. Thats incredible.

Your "critique" of how it happened. Not so much.

[switchbak]

As a human, I have many stupid and wrong ideas all day long - most of those don't bubble up to my conscious awareness. If LLMs hallucinate and come up with crazy things, maybe that's ok given that we can filter out the sensible and novel ones.

[runarberg]

And in doing so you spend what, a 100 watt hours per bad idea? Compared to how many megawatt hours of AIs failed attempts at proving math capabilities to investors only to prolong the AI bubble another month?

I bet your stupid ideas also taught you a valuable lesson and you learned at least something from the experience, maybe your next idea won’t be so dumb, and those 100 watt hours weren’t actually wasted (though it may feel like they were). Compered to a failed LLM experiment, where all those billions of billions of computations are completely wasted. the model knows exactly as much after a failed experiment as it did going into it. Those Megawatt hours were simply wasted, turned into heat energy, paid for by raising the power bills of the of the datacenter’s neighbors.

[falcor84]

> As a human, I have many stupid and wrong ideas all day long - most of those don't bubble up to my conscious awareness

I'm sorry to nitpick, but isn't an unconscious idea an oxymoron?

[king_geedorah]

It depends upon what you mean. A dream is a stream of unconscious ideas in a way. One could also look at Jungian psychology and point to the ideas your conscious mind rejects by projecting onto others as unconscious ones, with the idea being that we refuse to face them in ourselves and so must put them outward.

[switchbak]

Maybe we’re using terms in different ways, but in my mind I have subconscious thoughts, ideas, perceptions, emotions, etc. I’m unsure why you would consider that to be an oxymoron?

Unless you’re defining an idea as something that only exists in your conscious awareness?

[salad-tycoon]

Kind of seems to me, the heart of the critique is that 1. unthinkable amounts of financial and social and political credit have been thrown at this which necessarily has deducted it from other fields we could have invested in, instead. 2. Thus, with such wealth you would expect at least a couple of discoveries.

Not my post, but I think point 1 is stronger than 2.

[eru]

> 1. unthinkable amounts of financial and social and political credit have been thrown at this which necessarily has deducted it from other fields we could have invested in, instead.

That's not necessarily true. If our only counterfactual to investing resources in project A were to invest them in some other project B, then, yes, the conclusion above follows. But often people just consume the resources.

(In the end, the goal of all economic activity is consumption. We invest resources so that we can consume more later. If there's no good enough project around, might as well consume more now.)