> (as well as an obvious instant Nobel prize).
South Korea has been waiting for a (real, STEM) Nobel prize for decades.
These guys will be worshipped as gods if they deliver
South Korea has been waiting for a (real, STEM) Nobel prize for decades.
These guys will be worshipped as gods if they deliver
I’ll draw an analogy to the LLMs and diffusion models that have lately rocked the computer world. These things are straight up science fiction. I would have said computers would have never been capable of art and poetry. It was all fantasy until it was suddenly reality.
We’ll probably know if this can be replicated relatively soon. And if it can it will kick off a whole new branch of materials science and begin a multi-year race to commercialization.
We are facing gigantic challenges in energy and climate. We need the win, so my fingers are crossed.
Academics (and similarly venture startup founders) like to sort of jump to conclusions along the lines of “discovery was the hardest part - now this thing could enable ... in the next X years” at the end of a paper. And then people spend many decades to actually reduce this to practice. So 90% of work belongs to applications, not technology in on itself.
1.2 years ago if you claimed that an AI will just come out and make artists mass panic you would be laughed at. Now art is somehow just 'solved'. Progress is continuous and massive from Midjourney v1 -> v5
In other words, merely copying/reproducing something is emphatically not art.
The same thing happened with traditional (painting) art and photography - the latter didn’t really replace it but just supplanted it in the areas where one wasn’t really looking for art but for mere reproduction of reality. And then over time, photography itself has evolved into art, since people have learned how to channel their inner self through it, and aimed at quality instead of “quantity” (and unlike the former, the latter by itself became trivial). I don’t see the same happening with generative models quite yet (heck, they didn’t really replace photography either!)
North Korea: "We're still working on reliable electricity."
And rightfully so. Humanity is moved by great people and these would be great people. We would build monuments to them to symbolize their importance.
Ouch.
Alfred Nobel would probably find this characterization very ironic.
psht, as if