If people want to collaborate, they will. If collaboration makes people more effective, they will want to collaborate. The novelty of any new technology is exciting and disrupting to existing habits but as the years pass we will reflect on what works and what doesn't. At least, those who are willing to reflect and adapt. Humans have a knack for this sort of thing...
The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
131–140 of 311 posts
Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
#132I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…
I think there will be a rebalancing, and it might painful first for some. Confidence in LLM for highly complex tasks, very lots of context, most of all when this context isn’t in a single place or simply isn’t digitalised, will go down. But right now, it’s still the shiny new toy
Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
#133I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…
I think it is amazing and it will democratise information. A lot of times the concept ends up being simple with a lot of jargon exists as a gatekeeping method. Well of course the incumbents wouldn't like that rando from outside gets to understand and speak about things they worked on for many years. Sure he doesn't get it right 100% but he's in the correct direction.
Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
#134I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…
Sure, they use it a lot, but despite the stereotypes against physicists in some of the replies to you, they have shown a good ability to catch themselves before leaning too hard on what an LLM tells them about things they are not experts in, and I haven't had any interactions where I felt like I was just arguing with a meat proxy.
Maybe it's because in the environment I'm in; it's relatively easy to just ask someone who is an expert in the topic for their advice.
My feeling is that this kind of overconfidence outside of one's domain is largely a thing for people with little "physical reality" experience. When all you deal with is the very flexible digital world, it becomes very easy to ignore how deep the knowledge and intuition goes in things that are directly constrained by reality. I consider myself to have been in this category too (CE background), though I have been making efforts to improve.
Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an unfamiliar, I find it interesting how you specifically called out physics grads in the pre-LLM era. Is that just snark or is there some widespread truth / stereotype of that behavior?
Physics, and to a large degree pure mathematics, has attracted a critical mass of the personality type that needs to feel like the smartest person in the room in any given situation. It has given them a slightly notorious reputation in academia.
Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Physics, and to a large degree pure mathematics, has attracted a critical mass of the personality type that needs to feel like the smartest person in the room in any given situation. It has given them a slightly notorious reputation in academia.
From a one-time physics grad student, I do think there advantages to being ... like this. The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's goi…
Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it's hard to gauge this take without specifics. My experience with LLMs tends to be towards the opposite concept; LLMs dissuading me of hunches and notions I have about things (where I have no particular expertise; societal-level things), saving me and others time and strife having an argument about something they were actually right about all along, as my internal doubts that I'm too embarrassed to bring up (becaus…
i had that experience with them a few years ago but not these days. The models are being improved constantly, so here my "non expert hunch" is that...well, two things. either the models are getting better at sycophancy, OR, I myself am getting better at prompting - because I don't "argue" with a model. I'd still love to chew on some specific examples though.
Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
#138The benefits of serendipity are intractable by design whereas throughput gains can be readily measured (or at least we think so).
The OP notes a point - "who did you think with?" -- maybe there are points based on some social graph, that adds weightage to a particular output?
Edit : Other posters have said it is AI generated, I did not catch it, but felt the point was well-made. I dont know the author, but lets assume that he is not a good writer but had these valuable insights, did this AI generation not add value here?
Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
#139Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
#140I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…
Yup, the arrogance when barging into unfamiliar domain that was previously reserved mainly to physics grads seems to have spread everywhere. I also had people opining on my expert area via their LLMs and the problem is they can't even ask the model the right question, let alone evaluate the nuance of their answer.