Science needs experiments and those will not go faster because of AI. So why would fusion arrive any faster?
Even though I am deeply skeptical whether AIs (as they are commonly understood today) will be helpful for hard scientific problems (for quite different reasons), I don't think this argument necessarily holds: couldn't a (hypothetical!) AI propose much better experiments and experimental designs?
The word “if” in both the parent and GP is doing a lot of lifting here though, if they can do amazing feat X, then they will likewise do amazing feat Y. And I think in every instance you’ve made a credible argument.
But I don’t think we have the if yet. If I could just slip GPT-4 an executive summary of the code I meant to write and the emails I meant to send on a given day I would be doing it.
But it can’t: it’s catastrophically wrong with extreme confidence routinely. These things are easy to cherry-pick in citation but still fuck up on HellaSwag in instances a child would not.