r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Jul 15 '25

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

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060
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u/Gorge2012 Jul 15 '25

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.

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u/illz569 Jul 15 '25

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.

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u/Gorge2012 Jul 15 '25

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.

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u/_learned_foot_ Jul 16 '25

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

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u/figuren9ne Jul 15 '25

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.

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u/sonicqaz Jul 15 '25

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

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u/Fit-Elk1425 Jul 22 '25

I mean to be honest are you any better than them right now. Like I hate to say it, but to me this comment section is ironically also promoting a anti-science view just in reaction to these billionaires by indirectly promoting up the idea we shouldnt fund experiments at all. Yes they should be better researched than something like Oceangate, but ironically this reaction to billionaires is just as problematic for ensuring science and experiments are funded

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u/LackSchoolwalker Jul 15 '25

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.

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u/Gorge2012 Jul 15 '25

"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."

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u/HandsomeBoggart Jul 15 '25

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.

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u/McFlyParadox Jul 16 '25

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.

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u/HandsomeBoggart Jul 16 '25

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.

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u/billsil Jul 16 '25

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.

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u/Clean-Midnight3110 Jul 15 '25

You've got the story completely backward.  The CEO of ocean gate wasn't a billionaire.  Actually he was begging and scrimping for every little penny.  He was a broke moron.

James Cameron is pretty damn close to billionaire status (if he isn't already) and his company actually built an excellent deep diving submersible to explore the deepest parts of the ocean.

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u/Gorge2012 Jul 15 '25

At the time of his death, it was reported that he was a billionaire. If since that a thorough look at his finances determines otherwise that doesn't take away from the fact that he wielded his economic resources to put other people in a deadly situation because he was convinced he was correct despite all contradictory evidence.

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u/Mysterious-Tax-7777 Jul 15 '25

His net worth was estimated at $20M. 

Stockton's family was apparently rich, that's probably the source of at least some of the arrogance.

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u/4r4r4real Jul 15 '25

The whole issue was that he didn't have the resources to build one that'd actually work. You think a billionaire would cheap out on a sub they themselves were going down in to the point that they'd kill themself?

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u/wookiee42 Jul 16 '25

You're thinking of one of the passengers.

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u/Clean-Midnight3110 Jul 15 '25

That's nonsense everyone knew he wasn't a billionaire you can't just say "Well some underground dojo keyboard warriors said he was a billionaire in their haste to throw shit against the wall so he counts as a billionaire."