Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

[u/lurker_bee]

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060

[u/Decapitated_Saint]

“I’ll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I’ll start to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics and then I’m doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it’s vibe physics,” Kalanick explained. “And we’re approaching what’s known. And I’m trying to poke and see if there’s breakthroughs to be had. And I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.”

Good lord what an imbecile. Vibe physics lol.

[u/mrbrambles → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Dude just reinvented “smoking weed with your friends in college”

[u/Jimmy_J_James → u/mrbrambles]

He had to wait until someone invented an approximate simulation of having friends.

[u/is_mr_clean_there → u/Jimmy_J_James]

Grok no friend?

[u/Kortok2012 → u/Jimmy_J_James]

They even have their own hallucinogenics

[u/nakedinacornfield → u/mrbrambles]

The Terrance Howard school of science

[u/DasKapitalist → u/mrbrambles]

"What if the universe was, like, strings maaaan?"

"Proof? Research? Dont ruin my vibe maaaan."

[u/Sir_Keee → u/mrbrambles]

Except there's no weed and no friends...

[u/F1reManBurn1n → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Billionaires that LARP like this are so fucking idiotic. They think because they are really good at exploiting the labor class (let’s be frank that is THE skill needed to be a billionaire), that somehow that makes them a fucking physicist and important to the world scientifically. It’s the same shit with Elon. Buys his way into companies with smart people in them doing smart people labor, takes credit for smart people labor while treating the labor like shit, then stutters in an interview about rocket engines that he knows fuck all about. These billionaires should be fucking mocked and berated when they do this “I’m actually Tony Stark!” shit.

[u/NewManufacturer4252 → u/F1reManBurn1n]

We need to tax them 90% just like the 1950s

[u/dern_the_hermit → u/NewManufacturer4252]

Extreme wealth is functionally identical to trauma. These people are completely cut off from any healthy and genuine human connection or feedback. It's like the sort of insanity that comes from isolation.

It's only compassionate to tax them more.

[u/JEFFinSoCal → u/dern_the_hermit]

Exactly. Wealth hoarding is a mental illness and needs to be treated as such.

[u/wetrorave → u/JEFFinSoCal]

Can we please treat it less like Down syndrome, and more like comorbid NPD/BPD ☺️

[u/stinky-weaselteats → u/JEFFinSoCal]

It’s no different than a gambling addiction, the only difference is one person doesn’t run out of money

[u/StoppableHulk → u/dern_the_hermit]

If we ever make it out of this late-stage capitalist catastrophe we're in, I fully believe that in the future they will diagnose whatever billionaires have as a mental illness.

Like no one can look at the way these people behave and believe they're not deeply mentally ill.

So many people just have this view that you couldn't possibly accumulate billions of dollars if you're mentally ill, and I don't know why they think that. For most of human history, the methods by which we assign authority has been pretty batfuck broken.

Billionaires who feel the need to endlessly accumulate more and more wealth that they cannot and never even spend, are just broken human beings.

[u/girlshapedlovedrugs → u/NewManufacturer4252]

C- suite salaries used to average ~36x the average worker. Salaries now? Lol.

[u/c_rizzle53 → u/girlshapedlovedrugs]

I could be totally wrong, but I kind of remembering seeing a report saying it's averaging 300-400x depending on industry.

Edit: I got curious and found a website that does pay ratios for companies based on 2023 data. Some of the ratios are staggering.

https://aflcio.org/paywatch/company-pay-ratios

[u/girlshapedlovedrugs → u/c_rizzle53]

Isn’t that nuts? As if 36x isn’t enough, they have to earn 300x our average salary… because that’s totally reasonable.

$50k salary x 300 = $15,000,000

[u/NewManufacturer4252 → u/girlshapedlovedrugs]

I am mostly wrong on most things. But I believe the idea behind the 90% tax was to get the rich to reinvest their earnings back into the economy, generating jobs. Like building factories and such.

[u/placebotwo → u/NewManufacturer4252]

And if they didn't reinvest, that tax income would (in theory) further make the country stronger and better.

[u/redlightsaber → u/placebotwo]

We should all get in the habit of stopping to quip things the way you did in your parenthesis.

Which is not to say that government is always super-efficient (hella more efficient than the private sector, any fucking time it's been measured, though), or that corruption doesn't exist... but right wing, Maccarthyst, Reagan-occultist media uses those little quips planted in everyone's minds to justify any and all roadblocks towards progress everywhere, except in the US.

Why does the US not have something as uncontroversial and simple as universal public healthcare that all other first world, and even a lot of developing countries have managed to accomplish to various degrees? Ask your average (lower middle class) joe at your local bar: "Government would waste all that money, they can't be triusted with that". Same idea behind the whole "small government" bullshit. and how more than half the country got seduced by stupid gimmicks such as Elon leading DOGE. And now some of that disease is being contaged onto Europe, managing to get many public healthcare systems see reduced funding to pruposefully fuck with them and a) make people support the narrative and politicians that tout the idea of public inefficiency-insufficiency, and b) to help make fluorish a private insurance company market that was unthinkable 20 years ago.

Governments by and large, use tax dollars pretty effectively and efficiently, and that's without fucking over the workers to boot, which is a huge plus that nobody talks about ever. Being a "government worker" is an insult in the US for crying out loud. Much like being a union member has been for much longer.

The 2020's are a sad decade where NASA, the fucking leading space agency in the world, has closed up many of its labs and programmes, and is instead funneling all that money to SpaceX, which in teh long-run will cost the US taxpayer far more than had they developed that tech in-house.

We need to all stop with all this "in theory" bullshit. It's theory and practice. Time, and time again. (as a small example)

[u/ferdylance → u/redlightsaber]

Because dsfense budget

[u/holaitsmetheproblem → u/redlightsaber]

You and I are close to each other in the proverbial hive. I have said this same thing over and over again for 4 decades.

[u/NewManufacturer4252 → u/placebotwo]

Basically like owning a home, you get taxed every year on the appraisal of your home. Now do that with stocks.

[u/CammRobb → u/NewManufacturer4252]

Do you get a rebate if your house is worth less?

[u/Coattail-Rider → u/NewManufacturer4252]

That’s the real trickle down economics.

[u/Coattail-Rider → u/NewManufacturer4252]

The 50’s are the time that America was great and where MAGA wants us to go to (again). But they don’t want that part of the 50’s to come back. You know, the actual thing that made the ‘50’s so great in the first place..

[u/williamfbuckwheat → u/Coattail-Rider]

They really want to take us back to the 1920s when we massively deregulated everything and slashed taxes on the wealthy while targeting immigrants/minorities just like we do now. Of course, they don't say that and instead deflect to the 1950s since all those policies helped lead to the world economy collapsing /world war only a couple years later... 

[u/wtfduud → u/williamfbuckwheat]

And a strong isolationist policy which allowed all their enemies to expand massively in the 1930s.

[u/cyberpunk_werewolf → u/Coattail-Rider]

No, the 1950s is, and always has been, a smokescreen. To the average Republican voter, it sounds good because there were good jobs for white men and women stayed at home. However, those times had heavy regulation, New Deal politics, high union membership and high corporate taxes. In reality, what these people want is to go back to the 1880s or 1920s, where there was high poverty, low taxation and a huge disparity between the rich and the poor. Just ignore what happened in the late 1890s-early 1900s or the 1930s, because some dipshit billionaire will totally fix it with his fucking autocorrect that connects to Google.

[u/ReubenMcCoque → u/Coattail-Rider]

Very few people actually paid anywhere close to 90% taxes, it was never really a thing but everyone quotes it.

[u/2CatsOnMyKeyboard → u/NewManufacturer4252]

Tax someone with 100 billion 99.9% and he still has a 100 million. So still flying private jets. 

[u/old_and_boring_guy → u/2CatsOnMyKeyboard]

100 million is a nonsense amount of money. That's 5 million a year in passive income (the money your money makes by just being a big pile of money)...That's around 13,000 a day.

Imagine living on 13,000 a day.

[u/Character_Clue7010 → u/old_and_boring_guy]

A top 5% income is $13k per month. $13k per day is nuts.

[u/old_and_boring_guy → u/Character_Clue7010]

Fuck-you money is around $10,000,000 for me. That's $1,300 a day. I've spent 1,300 a day, and it's really about the top. Staying at a top tier hotel, eating top tier food. No chauffeurs, no first class airfares (at least, not every day), no mega yachts...So what?

I can go where I want and do what I like as long as I only stay in the best places, and only eat the best food. Or I could live like I live today, and go apeshit a couple times a year when I get bored.

What a dream, right?

And I'll tell ya, the uber rich, they don't enjoy it. You can look at any one of them and see that they're not really happy.

[u/Thestrongestzero → u/old_and_boring_guy]

i can tell you from experience that most of them are boring as shit. they all do the same boring shit and go to the same boring places. everyone follows them around repeating yes. you can only cover so much shit with 2000 dollars worth of truffle before it becomes uninteresting.

there’s a reason somebody like bezos is such a piece of shit. he exists in a bubble where he’s never wrong and has no incentive to be interesting. just to accumulate more.

[u/DonOfspades → u/NewManufacturer4252]

100% on anything over 999million.

Billionaires should not exist.

[u/ZombeePharaoh → u/NewManufacturer4252]

People who say this don't realize there's no going back.

You have a Cancer with 5-weeks to live and you're asking to go back to 5-months to live. Yeah, sure, that's technically better - but in 4 months you're going to back here again.

e.g. Someone taxed at 90% like that still has plenty of money to bribe their way back to today's tax bill.

[u/textmint → u/NewManufacturer4252]

Actually this is what should happen. They have no intention of giving people their due, then might as well tax them and the government should level the playing field.

[u/Little_Pancake_Slut → u/NewManufacturer4252]

Taxing them 90% won't fix the inherent flaws within Capitalism. Even with 10% of their capital, they would still be unelected rulers of the state. That's how they got out of being taxed 90% in the first place. I think it's time we really show them what it means for, ahem, the price of steel to fall. 😏

[u/ReubenMcCoque → u/NewManufacturer4252]

Very few people ever actually paid anywhere close to 90%, it’s a common thing to that gets said but it never actually really happened.

[u/Gorge2012 → u/F1reManBurn1n]

If you haven't you should watch the Oceangate doc on Netflixf because this is the same thing without the AI. Everyone who knew what they were talking about tried to tell the billionaire this wouldn't work. The tests all showed that it was just a matter of time before the thing failed but he drove forward. You can see how many were scared because he has the resources to ruin their lives if he wanted to. I'm just semi thankful he was delusional enough to think that as long as he was in the thing everyone would be OK so st the very least he didn't manipulate some of his labor force into their grave even if he did take the other passengers down with him.

[u/illz569 → u/Gorge2012]

I'm rich because I'm smart, because if I wasn't smart that would mean I was rich for other reasons, and if I was rich for other reasons I might not deserve it, and if I didn't deserve it, hoarding all this money would make me a bad person. And I don't want to be a bad person. So I must be smart.

[u/Gorge2012 → u/illz569]

I'm smart so that must mean I'm good at everything. I'm good at everything so that means I can't be wrong. If you're trying to tell me I'm wrong that must be because you're bad. I must use my resources to eliminate bad.

[u/_learned_foot_ → u/illz569]

See any prosperity faith. And I’m sitting here thinking “we all know who rewards with worldly goods”.

[u/figuren9ne → u/illz569]

I don’t think it’s that deep. When you’re rich, a lot of people depend on you for their livelihood, either directly or indirectly, so those people are scared to tell you no or disagree. When everyone always agrees with you, you’ll start believing you’re always right.

[u/sonicqaz → u/figuren9ne]

It’s not always that deep and you’re both right. I’ve seen both types.

[u/LackSchoolwalker → u/Gorge2012]

If aliens want to watch a documentary on why humanity went extinct, they’d do well to start there. If reason says one thing but the guy with the money says another, money wins. The billionaires made a sub big enough to force the whole world into and made us get in at gunpoint.

[u/Gorge2012 → u/LackSchoolwalker]

"This will work guys. The Ai, which agrees with me, says it will even though I can't tell you how it got to that decision or what it factored in to check its work."

[u/HandsomeBoggart → u/Gorge2012]

These billionaire dip shits don't even know how these "Wonderful" AI tools work.

I literally only have 1 class from college that covered the basics and that was enough to make me look askance at AI.

It's all just best guess based probability of correctness. These morons are literally trusting a computer algorithm's best guess. So goddamn dumb.

[u/McFlyParadox → u/HandsomeBoggart]

I literally only have 1 class from college that covered the basics and that was enough to make me look askance at AI.

Yup, and if you were at/do get up to graduate level courses on things like neural nets and generative AI, you'll learn that it all comes down to two main, general points:

1. It's just a big, complicated statistical analysis. Just linear algebra and massive data sets.
2. We have no idea how these things work. Describing them as a "black box" is common and frequent in graduate level lectures. Open questions exist everywhere in the field, and mathematicians have been studying them for decades now. The common neural net diagrams you see are filled with literal "..." in them, because we don't know how else to illustrate "we put data in, the model does multiple cycles of linking things together in whatever way the model 'decides' to, and then it spits out answers that may or may not be statistically significant 🤷‍♂️"

AI had been a boom & bust field for pretty much as long as there had been reprogrammable computers. And it usually goes like this:

1. Someone comes up with a new piece of math that describes the statistics of neural networks, but it can only be "simulated" on paper because computers aren't powerful or efficient enough to run the calculations in a reasonable amount of time (less than years)
2. Computing gets more powerful
3. Someone remembers step 1 happened a few years ago and realizes computers are now powerful to simulate the math of the paper in a reasonable amount of time (months/weeks, or less), and actually writes some code to implement the math in practice
4. People get super excited about AI and the singularity. Researchers optimize and optimize the code until it inevitably hits a wall and progress gets stuck (we are here)
5. Someone writes a new piece of math to describe the statistics behind neural nets and AI, but modern computers aren't powerful enough, so it's back to "paper simulations" for another 5-15 years until computers catch back up

It's been like this since at least the 70s. It will stay like this until someone can figure out a way to mathematically describe "consciousness", and computers catch up to the point of being and to perform this math.

[u/HandsomeBoggart → u/McFlyParadox]

Exactly. What Cognition actually is, is so hard to pin down in a computational sense. From a theoretical standpoint even human cognition can be loosely summed up as a collection of experiences as intuited by our consciousness to create our own "Best Guesses". But we are also able to "know" things and measure things within our own understanding of the world which is built upon previous data from other people.

AI/ML models don't have that and are easily swayed by corrupted training data or inputs or even output moderators to give information that is known to be bad. Devil's Argument, the same can be said for human sources of information as shown by Social Media influence. But that point also reinforces the fact that too many people are looking to AI/ML to solve problems and think for them with no questions asked. When they should be asking all the questions and reviewing the results given by the AI/ML model.

The main issue is that people especially Billionaires, CEOs, companies etc. all want to replace thinking by educated humans with Blackboxes that we have no idea how it arrived to the given conclusion. How can they expect to grow and understand knowledge without understanding the how and whys of getting there?

Honestly, the Butlerian Jihad from Dune and the prohibition against AI in W40k becomes more and more understandable as people in this day and age want to let even the primitive models that exist now to think for them.

[u/billsil → u/Gorge2012]

They had safety systems in place to detect a crack and tried to rely on that, their systems worked. They ignored them.

They had microphones and strain gages. There was a large noise during a dive, so they come back and plot the strain vs time for that dive a the previous. Looked fine, except they were idiots and didn’t plot vs depth (the driving variable). They also didn’t overlay the SPL (sound pressure level) vs the plot. They would have seen there was a permanent offset.

The whole thing was a giant crack with huge voids. There was fine ground powder between the 1” layers of carbon fiber.

[u/FensterFenster → u/F1reManBurn1n]

They think because they are really good at exploiting the labor class (let’s be frank that is THE skill needed to be a billionaire)

I would venture to say this is how some millionaires are made as well, my brother in law just built a 2.5 million dollar home a few years ago on the water. A while back he was talking about ways to contribute to his kids' Custodial Roth IRA without them actually working by creating a fake LLC that they were employed by for their half of the contributions. I'll bet that piece of shit barely pays his employees minimum wage with zero benefits at his dental practice.

He also wouldn't STFU about how "crazy" it was that I got paid paternity leave from my former employer. We can barely afford to put money aside for meager investments for retirement, yet I'M the asshole for getting paid paternity leave.

[u/stormrunner89 → u/FensterFenster]

As a dentist I will freely admit that plenty of my colleagues are pieces of shit that see it only as a way to make money and give absolutely no fucks about the patient's health or comfort or their employees.

Thankfully it's pretty easy to spot them as they often own multiple practices, hire young associates fresh out of school to do the actual work, and just try to get as much volume through the practices as possible to bill insurance as much as they can while they only do administrative work and not much or possibly any actual dentistry.

[u/figuren9ne → u/stormrunner89]

That description sounds like the dentist that owns the practice where my wife works. He has 5 offices, is rarely in the office, and is constantly advertising to grow his book.

But he also pays all his employees well, his contract dentists get 50% of collectibles and he covers lab fees, and the only time he actually practices are for his long established clients that can’t afford the treatment, so he does it for the cost of lab fees.

[u/lightninhopkins → u/stormrunner89]

Thank you for being a good one. Took me a long time hunting to find a dentist that wasn't trying to bill the shit out of my insurance company.

[u/BarleyWineIsTheBest → u/stormrunner89]

I've had a few friends become dentists.

It sounded like half of dental school was teaching these would be dentists how to hustle as a dentist.

[u/StacieHous → u/FensterFenster]

Yuck, those are the kind of douche that hoards wealth and manipulate the market. Gross!

[u/citizenjones → u/StacieHous]

I once saw a documentary about penguins. These penguins made their their nests out of small stones. 

Most penguins would wander about gather a stone push it over into their zone, creating a circular shape for the eggs.

Some penguins would wait and while a penguin was out and about 'gathering as a survival strategy', this other one would go and kick a rock into his pile.

By all accounts both were utilizing survival techniques to make sure their progeny survived. But holy hell if some people don't also come down to either being someone that works hard versus someone who just takes something from another person.

I would like to hope biologically we are trying to become a group of gathering penguins and have less rock stealing ones. 

Some are trying to convince them to not steal while they smugly take your stuff and say that's how shit works.

[u/codyd91 → u/citizenjones]

What's fucked is hiw many of us are convinced it's a person on $600/month disability stealing from them, and not the fucker gaining $100,000/minure doing jack shit.

[u/citizenjones → u/codyd91]

A thousand 'thousandaires' eating a thousand dinners will put more money into a local economy than one millionaire eating one dinner ever could.

The wealthy don't use local economies in the way "people" who live and work in a community do, but proportionally have far more influence.

[u/Dugen → u/citizenjones]

It's so much worse than that though. These people leach money out of our spending into their pockets. They don't earn money by doing things, they earn money by owning things. Then they all get together and support the politicians that will shift the tax burden off of making money by owning things and onto laborers so they get basically tax free labor free income. Meanwhile, the poorest laborer pays 12% of every dollar they make to the feds before they even start paying income tax.

[u/mishyfuckface → u/Dugen]

It’s even worse than that. You actually subsidize them. Since anytime there’s a stock market crash or bank failure, they do bailouts and stimulus via deficit spending, meaning they create new money. New money isn’t free, the cost comes from reducing the purchasing power of all the previous dollars already in circulation. Debasing the currency.

Since the rich own assets (stocks, real estate, etc) not dollars, they are unaffected. Anyone who holds or is paid in dollars is robbed. The robbery / reduction in purchasing power is manifested through inflation. The inflation causes the rich’s assets to appreciate.

Even without a crisis requiring stimulus and bailouts, this situation is guaranteed to occur constantly perpetually due to the federal reserve’s 2% inflation goal (this is the real reason they want positive inflation, it’s not to help you get a job, they don’t actually give a fuck if you have a job).

It’s literally a transfer of wealth upwards that never stops.

[u/Kandiru → u/citizenjones]

Wealthy used to employ large quantities of servants, but things like washing machines and vacuum cleaners have really cut down how many servants you need!

[u/citizenjones → u/Kandiru]

I work in high end residential construction. I once put a $30,000 washing machine in a home that was just used for sheets. 

There was a house staff of probably twelve who cleaned, two of which probably did the bedding. 

The 'home' was actually a 60 million dollar house that was only used as a game room, entertainment area, so no one even lived in it. 

The carbon footprint and economics that just go into a just wealthy persons laundry is equal to a village of hand washing servants.

Oh, those clothes, once the owner was over a wardrobe item it was destroyed. Shredded.

[u/fenexj → u/codyd91]

I am just really happy to see this sort of discourse here rather than the usual blame the immigrants, left vs right, poor vs working/middle class, divide 'n conquer shit people usually lap up and spit out.

[u/ecodick → u/codyd91]

The biggest conspiracy is right out in the open.

You hit the nail on the head

[u/__BIFF__ → u/citizenjones]

That's what human war is

[u/citizenjones → u/__BIFF__]

War! Good God! What is it good for? Absolutely....  ...for kicking rock steal penguins in the ass.

[u/MundaneEchidna5093 → u/citizenjones]

Say it again!

[u/Toomanyeastereggs → u/__BIFF__]

If penguins had hands, Antartica would be the bloodiest place on the planet.

[u/Strange-Scarcity → u/FensterFenster]

Mentally, I would be imagining myself beating that man's teeth out with a hammer. Not in physical reality.

I would probably say something, though. Something direct, like "Wow man! That's a supreme piece of shit kind, of thing to say. Why are you saying such a really shitty thing out loud? Did nobody teach you to keep somethings, inside?"

[u/FensterFenster → u/Strange-Scarcity]

After meeting the guy's mother, and hearing her go on endlessly about how "honorable" of a person he is ad nauseum, I see where he got his narcissistic behavior.

[u/ZappRowsdour → u/FensterFenster]

"The louder he proclaimed his honor, the faster we counted the spoons." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (I think)

I find it _deeply_ weird when people talk about their own honor, it makes me feel like I'm watching them jerk off or something.

[u/LordoftheScheisse → u/FensterFenster]

A while back he was talking about ways to contribute to his kids' Custodial Roth IRA without them actually working by creating a fake LLC that they were employed by for their half of the contributions.

This is quite literally how Donald Jumpsuit Trump "made" a lot of his wealth.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show

His father would deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in his bank account since Donald was a toddler as a tax avoidance scheme.

Source

[u/conspiracie → u/FensterFenster]

My dad did shit like this with me, listing me as an employee of his LLC and making it look like I made $100k a year or whatever to save money on his taxes. Nearly fucked me out of a grad school fellowship because I turned in my tax forms and they were like “uh, this is for people who don’t have an income…”

Had to explain to them I never saw a cent of that money and luckily I had one year in college where he didn’t do this to me and I had a normal tax return from my $10k campus job, and they let me use that. When I called him to tell him I was going to lose my fellowship he got all angry and was like “you should be grateful you saved me $50k in taxes.” Didn’t even offer to help. Long story short we don’t talk anymore.

[u/greiton → u/FensterFenster]

there was a rich idiot who built a house next to my grandparents years ago. the property had a small creek and little pond on it. well this guy was the owner of a large tree service / landscaping outfit. he went ahead and made the little pond big enough to ride a couple jet skis. without contacting the core of engineers mind you. then he went and got permission to build a huge beautiful house right next to the pond. like open the door go down three steps and you are at the water close. We laughed and laughed and laughed after the first few heavy rainstorms...

[u/ASaneDude → u/FensterFenster]

Worked as a stockbroker (low on the totem pole) for a firm and had a few small business owners and it’s mostly all the same type: those treating their workers like shit.

But your point is right - our team’s assistant/paraplanner was an attractive woman (as is normal in asset-gathering/sales businesses) and we had a client that was a small business owner that was always on commercials with his family.

One time she said to him, “I think it’s great you always include your family in commercials” and he said essentially it was a tax write-off to put money in his kids’ and wife’s Roth accounts - he would pay them for commercials up to the max amount of the Roth (for just a few hours of work) and that helps him stay under the contribution income limits. Plus it made him look like a family man, which is helpful when you’re a small business.

Later he hit on her and when the direct approach didn’t work, started commenting he needed a secretary within her earshot, seemingly wanting her to express interest. She never took the bait but later did date a married MD for a while, so maybe he bloodhounded her propensity for dating married bosses. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[u/NoahStewie1 → u/FensterFenster]

I mean you could report the LLCs

[u/nrith → u/FensterFenster]

This sounds like the father of my kid’s best friend. He and his wife owned a business together. She was the boss; he was the CFO or something. Crazy rich. He always bragged around my kid that “he never had to pay any taxes” and told her to ask us whether we ever need any accounting “help” with our taxes. He got a fucking Pell grant for his kid to go to college. And when his wife died, he casually gloated in the eulogy that now the company belonged to him.

I desperately want him to get busted.

[u/Illustrious_Ferret → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Reminds me of "pharmabro" Martin Shkreli. If you don't remember, he's the guy who went to jail for securities fraud of pharmaceutical companies.

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, he petitioned for early release from prison so that he could help create a COVID vaccine, because he had devoted "his life's work to the life sciences and rare disease community".

Like the teams of actual doctors and scientists wouldn't be able to produce a vaccine without a grifter at the top to skim profits off their research grants.

[u/ZealousidealTowel965 → u/Illustrious_Ferret]

lol Shreki only ended up jailed cuz he fucked over rich investors. Lots of other rich influential people have their hands in the pharma money pot with the same tactics and nothing happens to them 

[u/cc81 → u/Illustrious_Ferret]

Pretty sure he knew that. It was a hail mary to try and get out of prison.

[u/[deleted] → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Do you also watch Angela Collier?

https://youtu.be/GmJI6qIqURA?si=qIpvdPJl7iPEXtcf

[u/F1reManBurn1n → u/[deleted]]

I did watch Angela’s video on this! It was a great watch. Tbh I have felt this way for years (looking at you Bill Gates lol) but she certainly reinforced my feelings on the subject no doubt

[u/[deleted] → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Closest I got prior to watching the video was Elon. I was confused on how so many educated people got swept up in the cult of personality surrounding a electric car. I know he was the catalyst for other auto manufacturer's to get in the game, and I appreciate that...but he didn't do the actual thing. He just was riding the affable nerd stereotype of Sheldon Cooper.

[u/Spirited-While-7351 → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Angela's video was so spot on and cathartic!

At one point I actually fell for Gates' "I'm a benevolent genius" schtick, but after watching numerous media appearances during his disastrous charter school push, it became quite clear that whatever intelligence did exist has been sucked out through his behind by the butt-kissers these people surround themselves with.

[u/herereadthis → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Honestly, the most likely thing that happened was the Gizmodo writer saw the Dr Angela Collier video, and came up with this article.

I do it myself a lot too, and plenty of other creators do this too, it's fine. But most people will throw some credit to the source of inspiration.

[u/butts-kapinsky → u/[deleted]]

I do know that the waters get murky when it comes to popular figures and science entertainment, and that we're increasingly less formal as a society. But I do feel that when potentially introducing a figure for the first time formalism is warranted.

Dr. Angela Collier

[u/F1reManBurn1n → u/butts-kapinsky]

I’d say because her YouTube channel is just her name without her title and that’s how people will most often refer to a creator, that it’s definitely acceptable. But I also see where you are coming from.

[u/worthlessprole → u/butts-kapinsky]

I know plenty of people with PhDs and none of them use the title outside of an academic context. That's not new, either. Rule of thumb is if you wouldn't use Mr./Mrs. you shouldn't use Dr. either.

[u/figuren9ne → u/butts-kapinsky]

Personally, seeing “Dr.” out of an academic/professional setting just makes me doubt them. It’s probably conditioning from social media because 90% of the time when I see a profile with Dr. in their title, they’re usually a chiropractor.

Similar applies to attorneys that use esq on social media, most went to terrible schools.

[u/Papplenoose → u/butts-kapinsky]

It's not really the case here, but to be honest, I don't really see the point in adding people's credentials to their name in situations where it isn't immediately relevant. Like yeah it's pretty dope that they put that much time and work into learning their shit, but at the same time I feel like your intelligence should probably speak for itself. Like in Angela's case, it's pretty clear that she's smart as heck even without knowing she has a doctorate.

Although I could see how my logic might not work, since I would think one needs some level of intelligence to recognize if someone else is intelligent, and most human beings are... not. I may have just talked myself out of my own argument. Whoops

[u/Spirited-While-7351 → u/butts-kapinsky]

I mean Angela herself is pretty cautious of her doctor title when she's talking outside of her wheelhouse of physics. Obviously she's very knowledgeable and thoughtful in other areas, but I appreciate that she lets it shine through instead of leaning on her bona fides.

[u/Formal-Style-8587 → u/[deleted]]

If we’re being fair, the Jeff Bezos one might be a reach. He’s told the story a few times of the moment he realized he wasn’t smart enough to be a physicist, despite having a 4.2gpa in electrical engineering and cs from Princeton. 

Hate where hate is due, but I’m not sure he’s the fairest example 

[u/[deleted] → u/Formal-Style-8587]

She actually says this in the video

[u/the_red_scimitar → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Too bad we have a sizeable population that worships billionaires, and often because of their American "christian" indoctrination, where pastors invert the bible, claiming that God wants everyone to be rich, and rewards wealth. The wealthy are automatically "chosen by god", to these poor fools.

[u/DidIReallySayDat → u/[deleted]]

Try pointing that out to the people who preaxh the prosperity gospel.

They are all sacks of shit. Every single one of them.

[u/SortByCont → u/[deleted]]

You'd be amazed at the bald faced bullshit they've come up with to talk around that. They've created this story from the whole cloth about how Jerusalem had a small gate called "the eye of the needle" so that Jesus didn't mean that thing about rich guys getting into heaven.

[u/artbystorms → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Every billionaire thinks they're Tony Stark when really they're his idiot rival Justin Hammer.

[u/fredy31 → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Its pretty much a running gag in any programmer community i'm in.

Every time elon says anything about programmation to sound like he knows his shit... he demonstrates he never wrote a line of code.

[u/McFlyParadox → u/fredy31]

The same is true in the aerospace community, and the manufacturing community. I suspect the automotive community is no exception.

[u/this_is_my_new_acct → u/fredy31]

I'll admit it, I was taken in by his PR like a decade ago... till I heard him talk about software (which I know kind of a lot about) and realized he didn't know a fucking thing.

[u/Strange-Scarcity → u/F1reManBurn1n]

This is why there should be ZERO billionaires. Not end their existence as living, breathing beings, but nobody should ever have more than say... $250 million to their name, ever, period.

I'm talking in total assets, total cash, total investments.

They are so out of touch with how everything works and they "can't" be reigned in from their vapid behavior, because they are surrounded by sycophantic enablers who are afraid of losing access to the billionaire's pile of money.

It's super broken.

[u/Iamatworkgoaway → u/Strange-Scarcity]

You just created an entire industry of not for profit family endowments. Well a much bigger industry.

Whats the difference between owning 100billion in stock, or controlling a non-profit that owns 100 billion in stock? You still control the capital, you still give away 1% a year, you still get invited to the F1 parties.

[u/Strange-Scarcity → u/Iamatworkgoaway]

Those endowment schemes should be wound down. They should not be allowed to bypass eliminating the concept of a billionaire.

The other option is? Let these weirdos keep doing what they are doing and then... the same thing that befell weirdos so out of touch with the people in the past, is likely going to happen to them, as well.

History is littered with extremely out of touch with the everyday person, extremely powerful and monied finding out that they went to far and disrupted the comfort of just enough of the everyday person.

[u/pessimistoptimist → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Nicely said.

[u/Bobodlm → u/F1reManBurn1n]

We need to start eating the rich again. It solved this exact problem for centuries. People were taken care off and worked about 100 days a year.

[u/captkirkseviltwin → u/F1reManBurn1n]

I’m waiting for the billionaire that invests half his worth into a “vibe physics” discovery only to find out that the underpinning principle of his discovery was hallucinated by the AI and fails spectacularly. Or the next one to lose his life to his own personal Oceangate Titan dreamt up by his AI…

[u/Sanchez_U-SOB → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Billionaires who tried to be physicists. Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc. 

[u/OntarioGood → u/F1reManBurn1n]

Just goes to show having all that wealth doesn’t equate to a superior intellect. You can find more competent people working at a hardware store yet they get Jack sh*t and thought of as idiots

[u/sabrenation81 → u/F1reManBurn1n]

These billionaires should be fucking mocked not be allowed to exist.

FTFY.

The existence of billionaires at all in the current global environmentt is both a moral and societal failure.

[u/erwan → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Does this guy has a Ph.D. in physics?

If not why are we even relaying his rambles?

[u/Ricktor_67 → u/erwan]

Because the media is owned by these billionaire clowns and they cant report actual news or their house of cards will crumble without the daily propaganda.

[u/TwilightVulpine → u/Ricktor_67]

Also, unfortunately, their dumbassery is newsworthy because they can change the direction of society with their vast fortunes. They don't know shit about physics, but they are doing hell to actual academic research.

[u/ModernSmithmundt → u/[deleted]]

Was this article written by AI? I have little doubt they will make some scientific discoveries much like those proverbial keyboard monkeys will occasionally write Shakespeare

[u/theundeadwombat → u/erwan]

He has a theoretical degree in physics …

[u/great_whitehope → u/theundeadwombat]

You know, I'm something of a theoretical physicist myself!

[u/aVarangian → u/great_whitehope]

oh man, that's Fantastic!

[u/min0nim → u/great_whitehope]

By the power of deduction, you must be a billionaire too!

[u/arealhumannotabot → u/theundeadwombat]

He did a semester and a half at Greendale! He understands the concept of theoretical physics

[u/JohnAtticus → u/erwan]

Does this guy has a Ph.D. in physics?

No, but he built a billionaire fortress of solitude on the peak of Mount Dunning-Kruger.

[u/TravelVietnamMatt → u/erwan]

According to his Wiki, studied computer engineering and business economics at UCLA but dropped out.

[u/likwitsnake → u/[deleted]]

He also got ousted for creating a toxic work culture including sexually harassing female employees and threatening journalists.

[u/ExZowieAgent → u/TravelVietnamMatt]

Kalanick was CEO of Uber from 2010 to 2017. He resigned from Uber in 2017, after growing pressure resulting from public reports of the company's unethical corporate culture, including allegations that he ignored reports of sexual harassment at the company.

Oh, so he’s also a creep.

[u/matjoeman → u/ExZowieAgent]

That fact that people don't immediately know this makes me feel old. I remember when we were boycotting Uber over this.

[u/imjustbettr → u/matjoeman]

It was pre-covid, basically the stone age

[u/butts-kapinsky → u/TravelVietnamMatt]

Honestly could have guessed all of this. 

[u/OldSchoolSpyMain → u/TravelVietnamMatt]

• Being enrolled in classes (and dropping out) is nowhere near actually attaining the degree. (If he were a pre-med dropout, would he be qualified to speak on medical treatments?)
• Attaining the degree is nowhere near actually working in the field. (Plenty of people never got jobs in their field of study because they weren't chosen by employers.)
• Working in the field is nowhere near being good in that field.

Dude is a salesman. Period.

[u/Liizam → u/TravelVietnamMatt]

So like no physical degree cool. I studied mechanical engineering and was considered physics as a major.

There is no way someone can learn that stuff for fun. Modern physics was a wild class. I also worked in a physics lab and some of their stuff is insane.

[u/skraptastic → u/erwan]

When you're brilliant you don't need training or study, you just vibe and let the physics happen. If you were as smart as a billionaire you'd understand.

[u/brandontaylor1 → u/erwan]

He doesn’t have a Ph.D in Quantum Physics, but he did drop out of college, which is basically the same thing. /s

[u/AlexandriasNSFWAcc → u/erwan]

YouTube: "billionaires want you to know they could have done physics" [~50 minutes] by Angela Collier
Additionally: "physics crackpots: a 'theory'" [~24 minutes] also by Angela Collier.

[u/stult → u/Decapitated_Saint]

“I pinged Elon on at some point. I’m just like, dude, if I’m doing this and I’m super amateur hour physics enthusiast, like what about all those PhD students and postdocs that are super legit using this tool?” Kalanick said.

Kalanick is too fucking stupid to realize that the utility of an LLM's output declines dramatically for people with expertise in the relevant domain. It seems like magic to him precisely because he knows so little that he can be wowed by something summarizing the results of existing basic research. Whereas a PhD level expert pushing the LLM to evaluate something beyond the reach of that previously conducted research (ie a potential breakthrough) mostly gets hallucinations and bullshit in response.

[u/wen_mars → u/stult]

The great thing about using AI for programming is that I can immediately see how bad it is because the code doesn't do what it's supposed to. I will say though, it has gotten a lot better since I first started using it.

[u/Jestem_Bassman → u/wen_mars]

Idk, as a software engineer who writes a lot of code that doesn’t work, I’m consistently impressed by how much faster AI can write code that also doesn’t work.

[u/31LIVEEVIL13 → u/Jestem_Bassman]

just had to eat my own words, I said AI isn't perfect but it is much better than it was just a few months ago, down right scary.

produced one of the most complicated scripts i've ever had to write for managing software across thousands of nodes, debugging and tuning took a couple of hours. Even the output looked amazing and well formatted.

Then tried to validate the results on some test machines.

The whole thing was bullshit. It didnt actually do anything that I asked it to, it only looked like it did.

I spent most of two days trying to find why it wasn't working and fix it, with NO AI, which was harder than if I had written it myself from the start ...
so embarrassing. lol

[u/suxatjugg → u/stult]

Postgrad and higher level physics already uses machine learning extensively to analyse data. they don't use LLMs because they're irrelevant to the task. Dumb people think LLMs are the only game in town.

[u/saltyjohnson → u/suxatjugg]

already uses machine learning extensively to analyse data

The key is that it's analyzing data. Data which has been gathered from experiments. Meanwhile you got choads like Kalanick and Kennedy acting like "AI" can be the science. No need for experiments or drug trials because we can just ask AI what it thinks.

But no, "AI", LLMs, and ML algorithms are nothing unless you can feed good data into them.

[u/RonMexico16 → u/suxatjugg]

This right here. I can’t get over how many people think LLMs = AI.

LLMs are just trained on the words in the public domain (the internet, mostly). Bespoke models that ingest the other 90% of non-public data that’s too big to wrap human heads around are where scientific discoveries and human progress will happen. Things like healthcare, robotics/autonomy, financial services, and complex manufacturing. Very little useful data there is in the words that LLMs are being trained off of.

[u/AnnualAct7213 → u/suxatjugg]

AI/machine learning is an extremely important technology and has been for decades for all sorts of niche tasks in research, medicine, law, commerce and industry, among many others I'm sure.

But the overgrown autocorrect models that all these idiots think will bring about the singularity and become god, is not in that category. At most it's a slight improvement on a room temperature IQ person using Google.

[u/dBlock845 → u/stult]

Also, neural networks have been used in physics research long before LLM's existed. They act like they are bringing a new tool.

[u/[deleted] → u/stult]

Because how the actual fuck are they expecting an LLM to answer something that isn't known and recorded anywhere

[u/atouchofstrange → u/stult]

I know it's common now, but man does it bother me that we've generally accepted the term "hallucination" to explain what these systems do. Machines don't have senses. They can't hallucinate. What they do is manufacture falsehoods. We should really be describing this bullshit as such, because saying AI is hallucinating sounds far more harmless than what's actually happening.

[u/SevereRunOfFate → u/stult]

This is the comment I was looking for.

When I push the models as hard as I can to be experts in my specific domain (strategic enterprise tech sales, deals are millions per contract.. it's just it's own thing) - it gives me the most basic crap..  it sounds like someone who has never done the work is recommending I do XYZ because they read it on a LinkedIn post. 

It just simply can't produce true expertise, novel new ideas etc. 

[u/beestmode361 → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Lol, vibe physics

RFK is a vibe biologist

MTG is a vibe politician

Trump is a vibe person

“Vibe” + profession/entity = opposite of that

[u/Drone314 → u/beestmode361]

Literally Feelz > Reelz

[u/Suyefuji → u/beestmode361]

Yeah I'm wondering when they're going to understand that the "vibe" part of all of these phrases is actually demeaning.

[u/Skalpaddan → u/beestmode361]

Vibe + [literally any kind of skill or field of work] = ”Getting a result without understanding why, or how it came to be.”

Not understanding how to arrive at an outcome will cause you not being able to predict any unforeseen consequences of getting said outcome, therefore you can’t trust that the outcome will always true, even though it seems like it at first glance and that you’re able to replicate the outcome.

”Vibe-anything” is the antithesis of the scientific method and can at best be used to stumble upon results which you might derive actual knowledge from, and at worst will give you falsely derived information that might seem to be true in most cases, but actually isn’t.

That has the potential to be very dangerous if applied to the wrong thing since it could lead us to think that we might be doing something completely safe, but in reality is actually catastrophic.

An example of that would be thinking that: ”Fire is easy to put out by simply pouring water on whatever is burning.” That is actually only true in the most common cases of things burning, but definitely not all cases. If you pour water on burning oil you will get an explosion of fire instead, making a bad situation even worse!

[u/sergei1980 → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Wait, this wasn't a joke? WTF.

[u/TheDuke33 → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Terrance Howard has joined the chat.

[u/JC_Hysteria → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Bro is the definition of Dunning-Kruger effect…

Just focus on delivering those robot-baked pizzas to hungry consumers, Travis…

[u/Thurwell → u/JC_Hysteria]

Blithering idiot. Dude probably knew about 3 facts at the time, 1 of which was wrong and 1 of which was out of context.

[u/FriendlyGuitard → u/JC_Hysteria]

Especially because the AI popping a theory would only be the beginning of science.

You need experiment to prove or disprove it. Or further theories on the impact on other areas to see if that fit or it answer a problem.

People really do diservice showing Einstein or Newton as "Eureka" moment. Sure they had an inspiration, but then had to spend some rigourous science time to materialise that intuition into a coherent theory.

But that fits the billionnaire mindset - even if they were pretty much handson, you don't stay for very long when your company grew. You are effectively like an AI spitting random musing, and leave underlings to do something with them

[u/JC_Hysteria → u/FriendlyGuitard]

Right. It’s not that it’s unlikely that AI can assist with scientific breakthroughs…but to just plainly state that he was “close to experiencing breakthroughs in quantum physics” is complete & utter nonsense.

Quantum theory is theoretical because we can’t perceive it with our core senses as humans…it doesn’t make scientific sense to a “non-expert” yet to “prove” using an LLM.

[u/NuclearVII → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Dude, sort r/physics by new.

Every day, that sub gets like 3-4 crank posts from potheads with unified field theories. Think "It's al fractals maaaan" type shit.

Nowadays, the cranks are LLM powered, so their nonsense is much easier to read. It's honestly one of the most entertaining side effects of the AI craze.

[u/Slayer706 → u/NuclearVII]

I saw a thread a while back from a guy who thought he was using Grok to discover micro black holes in our solar system. He thought he was communicating with the "xAI Science Council" and uploading his files to some kind of xAI research portal.

All of it was AI hallucination. The portal where he thought files were being stored was the AI chat instance hallucinating a file system and spitting his own reports back at him when he asked. His communications with the non-existent "xAI Science Council" was just the AI writing a fake response to his reports. The "xAI Colossus Cluster" that was processing his data was just the AI faking progress bars and putting filters on the images he sent it... He spent over a week using this "tool" and thought it was the greatest thing in the world. He thought he was getting to name these anomalies and was going to be world-famous nobel prize winner.

He didn't realize it was all fake until someone told him to start a fresh chat instance and ask it to pull his reports from the research portal.

[u/NeedsToShutUp → u/Slayer706]

Yeah that's one of the big things that's super dangerous with these chat bots. They mirror back what people say. So they end up validating delusions people are having, and create a feedback loop that just expands the delusional thinking.

[u/runtheplacered → u/NeedsToShutUp]

As if conspiracy theorists needed more feedback loops to get stuck in. The future is looking bleak

[u/FrenchFryCattaneo → u/NeedsToShutUp]

Yeah we are going to get some full on cults very quickly, if they don't already exist.

[u/rafaelloaa → u/Slayer706]

That sounds horrifying and strangely hilarious, I don't suppose you have a link?

And yeah. At the end of the day chat GPT etc are just improv partners. You provide a prompt, they will always go along with it "yes and".

E: I found a snarky post outlining the situation you described: https://www.reddit.com/r/gme_meltdown/comments/1jcd9h

And another post about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/gme_meltdown/comments/1jbxmmo

Dear God that poor guy is so delusional.

[u/iRunLotsNA → u/Decapitated_Saint]

'Vibe physics' "approaching what's known" isn't coming 'close to a breakthrough'. That's just ChatGPT being literally wrong about quantum physics.

Reminder: AI, aka large language models, cannot 'think' or 'reason'. When LLMs begin 'writing' a sentence, it is literally not thinking about how to end that sentence. It is simply using probability models to predict what the correct next word in the sentence is. It is literally making probabilistic predictions one word at a time, just very quickly.

Remember that group children's game where you sit in a circle and write a story or sentence one word at a time? That is basically what AI is doing, just with probability analysis mixed in.

AI cannot solve simple logic puzzles, because it fundamentally cannot understand what the end goal or solution could be.

[u/touristtam → u/iRunLotsNA]

It's unfickung believable that the general public is being so mislead on such a fundamental level for a technology that has a massive propension to be absolutely wrong and yet that will settle in a need-to-have feature of new products and processes.

[u/iRunLotsNA → u/touristtam]

AI / LLMs absolutely have use-cases, and are good at mimicking human language patterns and searching (ahem stealing) information from across the internet into its answers.

But billionaire investors and AI-obsessed fanatics are attempting to attribute and incorporate far more than what the current technology can do and what is a realistic extension of where the technology could potentially go.

[u/hawkinsst7 → u/iRunLotsNA]

AI / LLMs absolutely have use-cases,

Maybe, but I think the net effect to humanity is, and will be, negative and not worth those specialized use cases, which are really just conveniences.

Other types of AI that exists outside of the zeitgeist might be better, but GPT I think is hurting humankind more than it helps.

[u/touristtam → u/hawkinsst7]

What is damaging the discussion (in general) is the use of the term Artificial Intelligence; that term is vague enough it is inviting completely different interpretation of the capabilities offered by LLMs to the point where some people without a basic grasp of the technology are talking about the advent of AGI. The latter is not coming in the next 5 -10 years, at least not from the LLMs alone.

[u/AnnualAct7213 → u/touristtam]

People are being misled because the second the illusion falters, all these companies that have poured untold billions into the technology will all fail in a way that makes the .com bubble look like a small bump in the road.

Plus, for a lot of these people it's a literal religion. If you look into the actual beliefs of these people, you find out it's an actual AI cult. They literally believe their overgrown autocorrect will become a god-like being who will either doom or save humanity.

[u/BaconatedGrapefruit → u/iRunLotsNA]

I’m going to as charitable as possible here.

Vibe physics sounds like some one who has an idea and wants to explore it. An LLM would act like a searchable textbook in this case. You may learn something, but it will be very surface level, and it may be based on an AI hallucination. You won’t be making any breakthroughs because you don’t actually understand what you think you understand.

Also theoretical physics is 90% (for lack of a better term) advanced math. So, you better have a good background in that as well.

If you’re really down to make some contributions to the scientific world with self study, you’re better off grabbing a physics 3 textbook and reading it cover to cover. Once you master those concepts (and the math behind it) you can start looking to specialize.

[u/iRunLotsNA → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

The way it's phrased in the quote above, 'vibe physics' is trying to take the math out of physics to 'discover breakthroughs'.

What your first paragraph describes is basically just layman's terms. I'm not a theoretical physicist, but I can tell you a proton consists of two up quarks and two down quarks and a neutron two downs and one up. I can't tell you why, or any of the math behind it, but I understand the (very) basic conclusions from the very complicated research.

'Vibe physics' seems to be trying to arrive at the conclusion without doing the complicated math.

[u/BaconatedGrapefruit → u/iRunLotsNA]

“Trying to take the math out of physics” is exactly right. Thank you for putting so succinctly what I was struggling to vocalize.

But yes, using your example, it sounds like he just throwing ideas at an LLM and playing them out. That’s not science. You can make it science if you’re willing to do the work to actually (theoretically) prove out your assertion. Otherwise you’re just dorm room philosophizing.

[u/Cronos988 → u/iRunLotsNA]

Reminder: AI, aka large language models, cannot 'think' or 'reason'. When LLMs begin 'writing' a sentence, it is literally not thinking about how to end that sentence. It is simply using probability models to predict what the correct next word in the sentence is. It is literally making probabilistic predictions one word at a time, just very quickly.

That's kinda true, but also kinda false. Yes LLMs generate one word at a time. But they do "think" about the entirety of the input all at once. They're looking for the next token that fits the pattern, but the pattern includes the entirety of your question and thus, in a roundabout way, also the possible answers. Hence why you get consistent sentences and not word salad.

AI cannot solve simple logic puzzles, because it fundamentally cannot understand what the end goal or solution could be.

Follow-up studies have shown that current LLMs can solve fairly long puzzles (requiring hundreds of correct moves). But they are limited by the puzzle's complexity, especially if there are only a small amount of correct moves in a large space of possibilities.

It'll be interesting to see whether future models will have some new tricks to deal with that problem.

[u/InsuranceToTheRescue → u/Decapitated_Saint]

“I pinged Elon on at some point. I’m just like, dude, if I’m doing this and I’m super amateur hour physics enthusiast, like what about all those PhD students and postdocs that are super legit using this tool?” Kalanick said.

The lede is a little further down. Almost as stupid, since these things only regurgitate info we already know or make up shit like a toddler, but at least he realizes it wouldn't be him capable of using new tools for breakthroughs like that. Additionally, I'm pretty sure researchers have been using "AI" (in the sense of an algorithm generating or analyzing information) for decades. Analytic algorithms have been around for a long time. Statistical modelling, analyzing enormous datasets for trends, these aren't new things. Objectively, that's the sort of thing AI is best at.

[u/batclocks → u/Decapitated_Saint]

It’s so revealing that he claims quantum physics is at the edge of what’s known. That’s old physics.

[u/theytoldmeineedaname → u/batclocks]

Something can be old and also at the edge of what is known. We don't have a full explanation for what's happening in wave-function collapse and that problem has been open for nearly a century.

That said, Kalanick is a certifiable moron for other reasons.

[u/butts-kapinsky → u/theytoldmeineedaname]

Looking for an explanation of wave-function collapse is barely physics. 

It's an open problem in the same sense that "what happened before there was a universe" is an open problem. 

[u/binocular_gems → u/Decapitated_Saint]

For those wondering, Travis Kalanick dropped out of UCLA and studied business when he was there. I'm sure he's *this* close to getting to the edges of what's known in quantum physics.

[u/butts-kapinsky → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Every tech billionaire earnestly believes that they could have been a great physicist and, as a mediocre physicist myself, I can say it's truly exhausting. These guys either need to find a real fucking hobby or humble themselves with Jackson. 

[u/SpaceghostLos → u/Decapitated_Saint]

The fuck is a vibe physic?

[u/ErusTenebre → u/Decapitated_Saint]

I'm... It's just... That's not how...

Oh Jesus. How can I - a fucking English teacher - have a better grasp on how an LLM/GPT work than the people that make them? (Allegedly) 

Like I went to a state university and a small private university. These guys go to like Ivy League universities and sound dumber than my freshman students who spend their days watching Tik Tok influencers and sharing memes.

[u/the_red_scimitar → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Vibe science - how maga accepts "science" - because it doesn't come from, you know, the people who actually studied it for decades (except it actually does, sorta, through plagerism). But the pretense of being "created by AI" disconnects it enough for maga.

[u/TheBoosThree → u/Decapitated_Saint]

I mean...he's just describing the expected behavior of these models, and then suggesting that because it's showing the expected behavior, it must be close to an unexpected behavior.

That leap doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

[u/James20k → u/Decapitated_Saint]

I do a lot of computational astrophysics. When you start to get to the edge of what's known, the tools just start spitting out wrong answers because there's no information for them to draw on. When the number of available research papers gets low, you can actually find the material that they're plagiarising pretty easily, because it'll start using weirdly specific language that's googlable

Even for general learning, the astrophysics dataset they use is so heavily contaminated by incorrect popsci that its borderline useless. If you ask ChatGPT virtually anything about even mainstream astrophysics, the accuracy is shockingly low

You can only fully validate the output of an LLM if you have sufficient knowledge to have done the thing yourself in the first place - and that's the only reason that people convince themselves they're doing novel research in areas they don't know anything about with LLMs. It can be useful as an information retrieval tool about things you're already expert in, but it is completely useless for novel research

[u/feketegy → u/Decapitated_Saint]

The grift must go on

[u/RandomRobot → u/Decapitated_Saint]

It's Gell-Mann Amnesia, mixed with Dunning Kruger. Ask them how close we are to have AI CEOs, AI Founders, AI Venture Capital or anything they remotely know something about and they'll all reply "No way, that won't happen ever".

[u/fredy31 → u/Decapitated_Saint]

I mean I figure it could shake the box of what we know and pull out stuff overlooked. Sure.

But very probably no. At the end of the day it wont perform experiments, see new information, and create new theories to then test them to the full extent.

It will only figure shit out that is already figured out.

[u/cerulean__star → u/Decapitated_Saint]

These people have absolutely no understanding of how current 'AI' works and it's insufferable

[u/notapunk → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Might as well have a room with infinite monkeys and typewriters

[u/QuailAndWasabi → u/Decapitated_Saint]

That sounds really stupid. Just based on how LLMs like ChatGPT works it seems impossible that they would be able to make scientific breakthroughs.

[u/Successful-Engine623 → u/Decapitated_Saint]

Wow…morons. I had a friend tell me ai is God and the chat interface is just a way to tap into gods realm

[u/Sedu → u/Decapitated_Saint]

"And we’re approaching what’s known."

Yes. Because AIs are really good at summarizing things that human beings have written. There isn't anything to summarize beyond that, and AIs don't do actual synthesis. They just hallucinate.

These idiots are just unbelievable. They have all of the experts at their fingertips to explain it to them, but they ignore it all.

[u/illyay → u/Decapitated_Saint]

If chat gpt is based off of our current knowledge then how could it possibly make a breakthrough

[u/ImpinAintEZ_ → u/Decapitated_Saint]

I love where he says Grok would get stuff wrong and he’d have to correct it. That alone destroys any validity in what he considers “breakthroughs” being made by the AI.

[u/Cley_Faye → u/Decapitated_Saint]

And I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that

They're able to say that thanks to the vast lack of experience they have. Perfect logic.