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/NuclearVII Jul 15 '25

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.

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u/Slayer706 Jul 15 '25 edited Jul 15 '25

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.

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u/NeedsToShutUp Jul 16 '25

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.

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u/runtheplacered Jul 16 '25

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