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Discovery Loop

discoveryloop.com

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Re: Discovery Loop

#571

Post by scottyah »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #335
tmoertel wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do not call attention to this aspect of their new company, but it is implicit in their business model: https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724 In short, they are in the business of using AI to automate the discovery of useful knowledge, not to sell general-purpose AI capabilities that could be directly used in troubling ways.

The question is what they plan on doing with all their scientific knowledge once they succeed. Sure, they'll keep it internal for a while to make sure their knowledge bank is more thorough than everyone else's, and because oftentimes discoveries can be far more convincing internally than externally (you need fewer sigmas for it to update your belief in a certain direction). But then how do they intend to profit from…

These are all top-class engineers entering retirement age and none of them are hurting for money. This seems like Don Knuth working on finishing his books, or Tim Berners-Lee working on Solid.

Re: Discovery Loop

#572

Post by scottyah »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #372

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.

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.

Re: Discovery Loop

#573

Post by don_esteban »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #487
retube wrote: post #480

I don't understand. how does some software algorithm replace physical experimentation?

Numerical mathematics

Eh, that has limited applicability.

Ideally, you can simulate everything from first principles. That works well enough only for a rather limited set of systems.

More typical is that you need to do real world measurements/model (not LLM, but a model of what you simulate) validation before you can reasonably simulate.

And then there is biology and psychology ...

Re: Discovery Loop

#574

Post by scottyah »

dekhn wrote: post #162
bonsai_bar wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like you're quite jealous of him.

Actually the list is technically accurate. So maybe it's sour grapes, but it's correct sour grapes.

But they're all highly unsubstantial, sounds like hit-piece lazy journalism. Almost all are just that Jeff was in a leadership role and part of committees that had things under them go bad. One was just saying that people disagreed with what he said when he actually put out a statement to clear confusion when an employee went a bit rogue (went to media instead of going to someone like Jeff) in an attempt to get a promotion.

I just don't see anything damning on the list that isn't someone's opinion on public perception of his actions.

Re: Discovery Loop

#575

Post by orsorna »

interstice wrote: post #495
tern wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this question. If history is a guide, some version of that is what will happen (employment doesn't seem to go down, despite technological progress and population + economic growth). I suspect the root cause is that it's harder and scarier to imagine good outcomes. It exposes us to disappointment, and when you do it publicly, it looks "crazy". Another explanation is that there's no direct consumer for "more." I…

I know some scientists and there's barely enough demand for them as it is

Is the demand low because the capital requirements to perform the research aren't there? Excluding wages...granted, for an average research project I don't know what % goes to wages and admin overhead. Probably the bulk?

Re: Discovery Loop

#576

Post by scottyah »

teamonkey wrote: post #159
porridgeraisin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. A communications professor where I did my MS says a 200usd/mo claude sub (which ant gives for free) does as much work as 5 grad students. It's mostly like you said, trying out new ideas rapidly.

The purpose of hiring grad students isn’t to advance science, it’s to train experts.

Perhaps this is the fundamental problem that can be solved with AI. As a non-scientist, I'd very much prefer to have massive amounts of scientific breakthroughs instead of massive amounts of well-trained experts.

Re: Discovery Loop

#577

Post by fuzzfactor »

mikelitoris wrote: post #403
mikelitoris wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This list smells of so much tech bro “I can do better than the people that have been working in the field for 20 years” egotistical attitude that permeates silicon valley. Why do software engineers think they are smarter than everyone else? Is it because they earn more than most people? But then bankers and finance bros should think they are gods? Also, solar energy is already economical!? Do they mean more economica…

Thanks for all the down votes tech bros! Really proving my point

>But then bankers and finance bros should think they are gods?

Have you ever seen anything to the contrary?

Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote

Re: Discovery Loop

#578

Post by scottyah »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #190
pelagicAustral wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> landing on their site and and seeing that beige colour and blurred-backdrop navbar, I immediately moved to close the tab

Don't judge a book by its cover? Sounds like you're just having issues because you've set up a bed filter in your brain. Are you really advocating that everyone change their websites to make it easier for you to distinguish if you'll find the information valuable?

Re: Discovery Loop

#579

Post by scottyah »

polishdude20 wrote: post #409
lrae wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a great point. If you know how to promote and work with AI to create novel solutions to hard problems. Why can't you prompt it to at least make a better website?

Because the website is neither a hard problem nor is their work going to be anything remotely close to just prompting current LLMs.

Re: Discovery Loop

#580

Post by scottyah »

dfunckt wrote: post #471
GodelNumbering wrote: post #86

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.

They kind of touch on this: > Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today. By automating the loops of discovery, the world will be able to make much more rapid advances across countless fields of science. The problem is that for this to actually become true, compute…

That's fine by me. I certainly won't be making any major discoveries on my own (not on this current life trajectory anyway), but am very grateful that other people have.
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