Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely • Hacker News Board

Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely

#51

Post by nsarrazin » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 3:50 PM UTC

timcobb wrote: post #50

nsarrazin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did some quick maths, it’s roughly 10% for the bird (2W, approx. 4g/day of fat, over 10 days) so not negligible but doesn’t change the full story. And you could argue the plane also has a baseline metabolism ;)

Haha thanks for the check, I am, tbh, pretty surprised. It's within the same order of magnitude, which is interesting too.

To be completely fair to the birds, I think a lot of this comes from the fact that what matters for flying efficiency gets better as you size up thanks to the square-cube law: the drag is reduced and the engine efficiency increases.

You could not scale down a plane to the size of a bird and match their efficiency. On the other hand you also couldn’t scale a bird to the size of a plane so I guess we can call it even!

Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely

#52

Post by kyledrake » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

The post focuses on AI social engineering a lab to make something for it, but I think that's the wrong concern. I think the bigger concern with AI is that an individual, or small group of individuals, uses AI as a really useful assistant to learn how to develop deadly viruses on a DIY level.

I'm pretty bearish on the idea of AI becoming Skynet from Terminator 2, but I do think there's some credibility to the bioterrorism argument. When I used to talk with people that work in orgs tasked with preventing terrorism, this was the thing that was keeping them up at night, and this was before AI.

Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely

#53

Post by jackb4040 » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

ACCount39 wrote: post #35

jackb4040 wrote: post #33

Uninformed speculation from the rationalist cult forum that wants to will science fiction into reality. If you actually look at the trajectory of post-LLM AI developments, the successes have all been in areas where the major labs have some way to get their hands on s**tons of correlated data. That's why they're pushing into maths now. I see no reason to assume that will be replicated with biological science data, whi…

The successes are in areas where you can get AI to execute an iterative loop autonomously. Try, fail, refine, retry - succeed eventually. Coding is, inherently, quite amenable to that. Is bioscience? They're certainly working on making it so: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-resea...

We're saying the same thing. The ability of the system to iterate is dependent on the digitizability of its artifacts, and its familiarity with such artifacts through its training data.