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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

I am siding with the "intelligence is not the bottleneck" crowd. Science takes more than reading literature and making a hypothesis. You have to run the experiment. And that is where messy reality will crush the naive, and resist any attempt to package it up into a factory-like innovation engine. But they will take your money, should you have some to invest.

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I'm a scientist. On the one hand I take some comfort in thinking that I will always have an advantage in the lab. On the other hand I'm not taking anything for granted. And my advantage in the lab has to translate into an employer being smart enough to keep me around until if and when the AI takes over, which kind of translates into their investors wanting to keep me around.

We know what happened to manufacturing when investors were no longer interested in it.

Are you suggesting outsourcing? AI produces hypothesis, a chief scientist approves, and it’s outsourced to a lab in Vietnam to execute.

That could happen today, but the chief scientist presumably comes up with the hypothesis. I still think the US has a comparative advantage in science, but it's under attack.

Beyond that, I don't know. Admittedly, I work in a smaller lab setting. There's no chief scientist that I'm aware of, or systematic production of hypotheses. That might be for the bigger labs.

I’m not sure that I agree entirely with your framing here, yes, you do at some point need to correct your assumptions with external evidence. But clearly there have been many individuals throughout history who have had incredibly out sized impact in their respective fields as a consequence of the quality of their reasoning.

Biology resists reasoning. Chaotic interactions make prediction via reasoning uncertain. Simulation, not reasoning can get closer, and could be leveraged by AI, but empirical verification is probably no optional.

That could just be selection bias. How about all the brilliant people we don't know about cause their theories did not match experimental data? Doesn't matter if their reasoning quality is top notch

Would you side with the adjacent statement "expertise is not the bottleneck"? Didn't we recently discuss "LLMs reward expertise"?[1]

I suspect Discovery Loop will have to hire experts in each area they are targeting, to supervise and prompt their system effectively, much like the Terence Tao conversation with ChatGPT the OP cited[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49161518 [2] https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/

I did not intend to imply that AI is not an accelerator, but am implying that there is a last mile that it is not equipped to address, at least not without robotics.

I don't see this group needing funding, in fact I doubt you could get a meeting to try to invest unless you're a personal friend.

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