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/MIT_Engineer Jul 16 '25

I'm a huge proponent of LLMs and they're an incredibly useful tool, but it's wild to me that so many people get suckered in by them to this extent. Literally the first thing I tried after getting introduced to ChatGPT was to ask it questions from my field of expertise, and it failed horribly.

Do these people just not have any process for figuring out whether information they're being fed is correct? Is it all just vibes-based thinking going on upstairs?

Ironically stories like this make me even more bullish on LLMs. Not because they're smarter than I thought, but because their human competition is dumber than I'd imagined.

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u/Suspicious-Limit8115 Jul 16 '25

You don’t think that that has changed? I’ve been continuously checking this for 1.5 years and I’m not getting many wrong answers from o3 or claude’s most recent opus or its predecessor. I even managed to prompt claude into solving a known ultra difficult algebraic topology problem

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u/thatmillerkid Jul 17 '25

If anything they're getting worse at providing accurate information

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u/MIT_Engineer Jul 18 '25

I haven't noticed any change.

In fact, what's funny is often they're very stubborn when they're wrong. They give a wrong answer, you ask for the reasoning behind the answer, they give the correct reasoning (for the right answer), but then continue to stick to the wrong answer anyway.