Sarah?

I am almost completely tuned out of the tech hypetrain around AI so I can’t comment on the minutiae of what the various tech CEOs are claiming.

But, most of what people in the consumer tech world are seeing is entirely based on applying transformers to one kind of data: written text or images. This is only an incredibly tiny slice of the kinds of things that these transformer networks can be used for.

Even just generating a python script is incredibly impressive. If you tried to write a program that could generate arbitrary python in 2010 it would take a massive engineering effort and tens of thousands of hours of work by incredibly well educated humans. But early generations of LLMs were able to do this as an emergent behavior simply by being shown enough examples. People often fail to realize exactly how much LLMs “for free” that, previously, required a concerted effort from engineers and mathematicians.

There have been many attempts at creating programs which could predict how strings of amino acids folded into proteins. AlphaFold applied transformers to the problem and was able to predict essentially every protein that we’ve been able to observe. Even more, they can apply diffusion techniques (like, ‘AI image generation’) to generate a string of amino acids that form new novel proteins with arbitrary properties. We can write these sequences into DNA (CRISPR) and mass produce these custom designed proteins.

This is such an incredible leap in biotech that it is hard to state what kind of impact that it will have. We’re already seeing things like HIV cures, optimized flu vaccines, immunotherapy drugs which are custom designed for the individual’s phenotypes. We’re years away from seeing the products of these technologies (clinical trials take time), but Transformers (‘AI’) are driving revolutionary changes in many fields.

He’s probably been fired long ago, but due to non-existant QC, he was never notified.

Microsoft fired QC long ago.

I can’t wait until my cousin learns about this, he’ll be so surprised.

I’d tell him but he’s at work. At Microsoft, in quality control.

That doesn’t make it worthless.

People are often wrong about technology, that’s independent of the technology’s usefulness. Quantum computation is incredibly useful for the applications that require it, things that are completely impossible to calculate with classical computers can be done using quantum algorithms.

This is true even if there are people on social media who think that it’s a new graphics card.

Unlike Extended Memory.

I still say you EM users are playing with fire.

Quantum computation is a lot like fusion.

We know how it works and we know that it would be highly beneficial to society but, getting it to work with reliability and at scale is hard and expensive.

Sure, things get over hyped because capitalism but that doesn’t make the technology worthless… It just shows how our economic system rewards lies and misleading people for money.

On this topic, the vast majority of people seem to think that AI means the free tier of ChatGPT.

AI isn’t a magical computer demon that can grant all of your wishes, but that doesn’t mean that it is worthless.

For example, Alphafold essentially solved protein folding and diffusion models built on that discovery let us generate novel proteins with specific properties with the same ease as we can make a picture of an astronaut on a horse.

Image classification is massively useful in manufacturing. Instead of custom designed programs purpose built for each client ($$$), you can find tune existing models with generic tools using labor that doesn’t need to be a software engineer.

Robotics is another field. The amount of work required for humans to design and code their control systems was enormous. Now you can use standard models, give them arbitrary limbs and configurations and train them in simulated environments. This massively cuts down on the amount of engineering work ($$$) required.

That’s like saying the work on rockets is clearly separable from thermodynamics.

No it’s fine, we banned Lowtax

It was a sick ostrich

The same reason that humanoid robots are useful even though we have purpose built robots: The world is designed with humans in mind.

Sure, there are many different websites that solve the problem. But each of them solve it in a different way and each of them require a different way of interfacing with them. However, they all are built to be interfaced with by humans. So if you create AI/robots with the ability to operate like a human, then they are automatically given access to massive amounts of pre-made infrastructure for free.

You don’t need special robot lifts in your apartment building if the cleaning robots can just take the elevators. You don’t need to design APIs for scripts to access your website if the AI can just use a browser with a mouse and keyboard.

A good UI would have allowed the user to make this transaction in the same time it took to give the AI its initial instructions.

Maybe, but by the 2nd call the AI would be more time efficient and if there were 20 venues to check, the person is now saving hours of their time.