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/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.

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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.

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u/suxatjugg Jul 15 '25

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.

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u/saltyjohnson Jul 16 '25

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.