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Discovery Loop

discoveryloop.com

181–190 of 625 posts

Re: Discovery Loop

#181
post #32

Jeff Dean, Sanjay, et al have achieved so much. I'm very happy for them. Truly deserving. Sometimes I couldn't resist wondering if I'll ever do work that has a tenth of the impact of theirs.

Gemini has done absolutely nothing for me. I can't even shut off the navigation feature on my phone using only hands free, when I get close to my destination. I have to take my eyes off the road, look down, and tap to exit. Google's advanced AI cannot even exit a mobile app.

Jeff and Sanjay's contributions far predate LLMs and influence far outside of Google.

Jeff was a ACM Fellow in 2009 and published the massively influential MapReduce paper in 2004.

Re: Discovery Loop

#183
post #169

The AI designed italics on thin font is hard to not see as slop.

You know when the page has all-caps "01 — THE APPROACH" that it is slopified. I guess I shouldn't be astounded, but I am, that world-class talents with world-class backing are just taking default LLM output and saying, "okay looks fine".

Re: Discovery Loop

#184
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only works for a very narrow definition of what science is And so does academia. It's just that instead of AI and robotics, PhD students are thrown onto problems that are in large parts slightly tweaked reconfigurations of similar experiments. Especially in chemistry, biochemistry, material sciences there is a large space of discoveries that are barely "novel" in an intellectually stimulating way, but still highly…

That is true, I’ve seen people do biochemistry and geology work, and it did look very mind-numbing. Then again, gassing rats and taking biopsies is not something you can do with AI.

Unfortunately, that's most of science. I don't see these AI systems doing reproducible experiments in "meatspace" any time soon.

Re: Discovery Loop

#186
That founding team is insane. Very excited to see what happens here. I really like that they do not mention AGI or anything like that. Their mission statement reads pretty pragmatic compared to other AI companies (the bar is very low…)

Re: Discovery Loop

#187

Someone who left DeepMind over Google's agreement to provide military AI to the US government tried to get Jeff Dean to quit too: https://turntrout.com/why-i-left-google-deepmind Maybe this is what happens when someone with Jeff Dean's standing tries to quit? TBH, I'd rather have Jeff Dean working on the creepiest-possible tech for ICE than joining the race to automate AI research. Automating AI research is terrifyin…

If you check out some sub-tweets from people in the org, it wasn't really all butterflies internally for a while. Sorry, really don't want to name people and give examples.

Re: Discovery Loop

#188
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antigravity + Gemini Pro absolutely RIPS through fullstack react + react-native apps / systems. I pay ~$20/month and I basically don't have to do my real work anymore. My time is freed up to learn systems programming and blender.

Oh nice have things stabilized with models/quotas and Antigravity is usable with the Pro plan again? I was getting a crazy amount of value out of Gemini CLI for “free” on my Pro plan but after the shutdown struggled to make agy work with the updated quotas/bigger models without instantly being rate limited and just started doing everything on Codex/Opencode Go. I should give it another try…

Yeah can't remember how long ago but it was running out after less than an hour - then they announced they were loosening restrictions and I've been able to easily get everything I need to done without hitting limits.

I don't do huge automatic project wide hands-off agent loops though. I spent a lot of time architecting my systems to be easy to generate code on top of with pointed & detailed prompts. So I'm not abusing context... YMMV

Re: Discovery Loop

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first. Point 1 on the list is "Make Solar Energy Economical". Solar is economical today - mostly due to China investing (and heavily subsidising) in solar for the past couple of decades; but compare to the US where certain particular big-businesses (oil companies, mostly) were instead cynically funding disinformation efforts and getting into bed with the Republi…

Solar is not (yet) economical for reliable, year-round electricity because of storage costs. China coal use is growing again this year.

Solar is profitable to install at both industrial and home scale in most areas. You're moving the goalposts.

Re: Discovery Loop

#190
post #56

The site itself is really leaning into the “made with Fable” aesthetic

Why are people so sour about this?? I can read the site easily, its clear, performs well on mobile, what else do you want? Why is so offensive to people that models trained on tailwind or whatever?

> Why are people so sour about this?

To many people, myself included, who have to wade through huge amounts of low-quality AI slop which is actually a negative value: no-one benefits when non-experts fire-off one-shot LLM/agent prompts to produce PRs, reports, documentation or "journalism" riddled with imagined truth and factual errors - and the more that people like me have to evaluate these inputs for our job and how wrong they are it pisses us off - but also it means we pick-up on the hallmarks, tells and cliches of these low-effort, no-respect submissions - and now the litany of tells includes this beige-themed, blurred-backdrop-navbar corporate website look: theirs site looks like the 4 or so other LLM-generated, negative-value slop-farm sites I've wasted time on recently - all over the past few weeks.

So I'm saying that, without having known anything about what "Discovery Loop" is - or is not - but landing on their site and and seeing that beige colour and blurred-backdrop navbar, I immediately moved to close the tab; what kept me here was seeing the HN thread had over 100 comments by now and read more about it; if not for that then I wouldn't have given it further thought.

Having "that" beige site look with same the overused looks is either an unintentional indication that the site's author used a low-effort AI prompt to generate the site and that the content within is likely to be low-quality, low-value - or it's an intentional lure to appeal to those who uncritically share in the AI psychosis and so, I assume, are a good target to seek investment from even if it means losing the audience of cynical Internet critics like myself because they know people like me won't be breathlessly repeating their vision-statement on LinkedIn and throwing money at them - kinda like how scam emails intentionally include mistakes for better audience selection. And both possibilities have unpleasant implications.

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Anyway, regardless of the background of the team behind it, the way the project is described sounds exactly like the recursive-self-improvement and simulated-science thought-experiments from _that other website_ - it's the kind of thing I expect Angela Collier to brutally takedown in an amusing video.

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