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Discovery Loop

discoveryloop.com

201–210 of 629 posts

Re: Discovery Loop

#201
post #67
post #56

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

let me rephrase that: "The site itself demonstrates the team is spending their money in the places that matter, and using quick solutions for the stuff they need but isn't mission critical"

You could rephrase that again I guess:

"The team of AI pioneers lacks the basic prompt-writing capability to make their marketing landing page not look like AI slop."

I, personally, don't hate it. It's a decently clean site, but it does invoke those thoughts in me too.

Re: Discovery Loop

#202

This is one of the interesting aspects the 'AI job loss' community doesn't account for. As the technology unlocks things, more startups are created. And even at a lower nominal engineer-to-work ratio, overall demand for talent still goes up. Ultimately, we are not a single group trying to achieve a common outcome, we are a collection of many groups trying to compete against each other.

What percentage of people work at a startup though? Not just new/small business, which could include restaurants, local services, etc., but tech/science startups that would meaningfully benefit from AI.

I'd bet you could 10x the number and still be in low single digit percentages of the US workforce. And it seems pretty likely that AI-enabled startups will also employ less people per-startup.

If AI causes a white-collar jobs apocalypse, I don't think startups are picking up the slack, although it'll plausibly cushion the blow somewhat for top-performing tech workers.

Re: Discovery Loop

#203
post #152

From Jeff's twitter post: > Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise…

> 9. Reverse Engineer the Brain For what purpose? To replace humans? To make social media more addictive? To master brain manipulation?

I imagine a good model of the brain would contribute enormously to alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders.

Re: Discovery Loop

#204
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?

Some parts are pretty annoying to read... the paragraph beginning in "Our mission is straightforward:" has many lines with just 2-3 words, massive font, and tons of unused whitespace to the right. Changing the page/browser zoom doesn't seem to help much either.

Re: Discovery Loop

#205
post #29

This is very cool. It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery. So often we find things that are "this could have been done 20 years ago" and with an indefatigable searcher perhaps we'll close all those things. Though it does remind me of that Ted Chiang (I think) story where humans and superhumans coexist and all the science of the former is meta-studies of the work of the latter.

> It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery. And ... it might not.

Sure - and knowing what is not possible with current tech is a nice datapoint to have.

Re: Discovery Loop

#206

From Jeff's twitter post: > Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise…

The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements. Maybe if our biggest companies did something other than suck up to science denying wackos, some progress could be made in these areas.

> The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.

That is not mutually exclusive. If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.

You can think of it like this: our "political technology" is not good enough to use solar energy at its current prices to replace fossil fuels as fast as we would like. Well, what about if we cut the price of solar by a factor of five? Perhaps it will be good enough then.

Re: Discovery Loop

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these problems don't seem scientific at all, but rather a problem of political will. As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical. There are plenty of ideas around putting them over farms, or parking lots en-masse to provide cleaner energy. Access to clean drinking water, while certainly scientific in some situations, is also a problem of political will and money. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure…

It is not economical compared to alternatives that is why you have to have government to force people to do things. In many places such as Pakistan where solar power is not economical on paper is actually very successful in practice because it is actually profitable. To make solar power practical and economical you need may a square foot of solar panel being able to get enough energy to power and entire home for a we…

https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...

Not sure what you’re talking about here. We can’t replace all energy needs with solar but it’s clearly one of the cheapest energy sources and with the added benefit of low capital expense to get started so you can set it up in distributed grids without the massive expenditure to support nuclear installations.

Re: Discovery Loop

#208

From Jeff's twitter post: > Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise…

> Make Solar Energy Economical Isn’t it already?

Not enough. The more economical it is, the better.

Re: Discovery Loop

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandbox 2.0 But also, solar power is already economical.

Many of these problems don't seem scientific at all, but rather a problem of political will. As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical. There are plenty of ideas around putting them over farms, or parking lots en-masse to provide cleaner energy. Access to clean drinking water, while certainly scientific in some situations, is also a problem of political will and money. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure…

> As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical.

Not if you include the cost of needed storage.

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