Aside from the better versions of what AI is visibly doing now (software dev, human language translation, video gen, etc), many of the AI bears are dismissing the potential impact of hooking AI up with automated experimentation so it's able to generate new types of data to train itself. The impact on drug discovery, material science, and other domains are likely to be very significant. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold is just a glimpse of this future.
Completely agreed. It won't even displace the people who were diligent in all of those crafts. It will supercharge them. And there will be novel combinations producing new services/products. It's going to be great.
"automated experimentation so it's able to generate new types of data to train itself"
AIs don't understand reality. This type of data generation would need a specific sort of validator function to work: we call this reality. That's what "experimentation" requires: reality.
We already have this right now, with the AI training ingesting AI crapgen, with StackOverflow posts no longer happening. That would seem to point to a degrading AI training set, not an improving one.
A number of startups are working in verifiable domains where they can provide realistic data. This is an interesting thread from one of those startups: https://x.com/khoomeik/status/1973056771515138175
Side note: I happened to look at the SO "Community activity" widget earlier this week and was quite surprised to see just how far engagement has fallen off. I don't have historical entries to reference but I'm _fairly certain_ there used to be hundreds of thousands of users (if not more) online during the middle of an average work day (I'm in America/New_York) and there are currently ... 16,785.
Not really. One is a conscious design choice for what you choose to build as your ethos or Magnum Opus or what have you. And the other is a consequence of dealing with hard techincal engineering and scientific matters. :)
