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Comment by MathYouF | Hacker News Reader

Speaking from my personal fields of work, AI (computer vision & generative), AR, and VR, I'd say we've made tremendous progress since 2011.

I'd be really curious to hear someone in those fields justify thinking otherwise.

I'd dare to say the progress in AI from 1981-2011 (Watson, CNN's, Chess) was less than the progress from 2011-2021 (StyleGAN, GPT-3, AlphaGO).

As for VR, if you had told someone in 2011 that there would even be a mainstream company making VR in 2021 they might not believe you. Instead, many major companies are building VR and AR glasses, and the leading market one has inside-out tracking, hand tracking, done from an onboard processor, for only the inflation adjusted cost of a Nintendo 3DS at that time.

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I was part of the initial 3D graphics research community during the 80's. We've seen a few paradigm shifts in my career: 3d going mainstream, the graphical UI going mainstream, the web being separate from the Internet, mobiles overtaking the desktop as the dominate computer people use, and social media overtaking broadcast news as where people get their opinions. I'd say we are in the midst of the next paradigm shift now, and that is scientific computing with DL/ML being applied to any field the data and will is available. The fruits are gonna be profound.

That is true, but breakthroughs in fields like Biology, Materials science etc. enabled by AI advances is what I was really excited about. May be we will see some news on this front by the likes of Deepmind etc.

As someone working in the field, Materials Scientists are at the point where they have heard a description of what a computer is and they are trying to invent possible uses for one from scratch.

Do you mean they were resistant to change, skeptical or have they finally found a reason to embrace new techniques due to proven success by their younger or more adventurous peers ?

They have been resistant to change until now, but also seem unable to accept that people did think about the subject in the past, any plans that I see treat the whole subject of using computers for materials science as a completely new field.

I added support for materials data to STEP over 25 years ago, they could just use software and data formats that are already available.

Lithium batteries were discovered 30+ years ago, and while there hasn't been a major breakthrough in the tech (a single-improvement that 2x+ it) if you look at e.g. prices they have been exponentially decreasing for the last 10 years, and now they are around 90% cheaper than 10 years ago. Make them another 50%-80% cheaper and e.g. ICE simply won't make sense.

On Biology for example, isn't Covid19 vaccine and mRNA in general a huge breakthrought?

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