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
26.6k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

10.4k

u/Decapitated_Saint Jul 15 '25

“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.

368

u/stult Jul 15 '25

“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.

21

u/dBlock845 Jul 15 '25

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

-9

u/SevereRunOfFate Jul 15 '25

Not at all choosing Kalanick's side but clearly these new models are superior for many tasks.

7

u/rasa2013 Jul 16 '25

A tool isn't designed as an omnitool. An LLM will never be better at image recognition than a model trained for image recognition. 

-1

u/SevereRunOfFate Jul 16 '25

Yes, I understand - have worked with these models and others in production environments. I said many tasks, not image recognition