> Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen <at>NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise in machine learning as well as large-scale systems.
The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.
Maybe if our biggest companies did something other than suck up to science denying wackos, some progress could be made in these areas.
podgietaru 20 minutes ago [-]
Policy and funding. One of which will be sucked up by this venture.
tbrownaw 8 minutes ago [-]
I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first.
I would think the claim in the second sentence would only be relevant in case of the inverse of the claim in the first sentence.
RajuChacha108 8 minutes ago [-]
> other than suck up to science denying wackos
The science denying wacko is a but like drunk homeless guy on street while you have your Ferrari parked in the driveway. The wacko has a golf club. There is too much to lose by pickup a fight. You might win eventually but the next wacko shows up with another golf club soon.
koolala 30 minutes ago [-]
Room Temperature Ambient Pressure Super Conductors
darth_avocado 4 minutes ago [-]
> Make Solar Energy Economical
Isn’t it already?
LogicFailsMe 55 minutes ago [-]
Sandbox 2.0
But also, solar power is already economical.
podgietaru 24 minutes ago [-]
Many of these problems don't seem scientific at all, but rather a problem of political will.
As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical. There are plenty of ideas around putting them over farms, or parking lots en-masse to provide cleaner energy.
Access to clean drinking water, while certainly scientific in some situations, is also a problem of political will and money.
Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure - It's infrastructure week!
RajuChacha108 6 minutes ago [-]
It is not economical compared to alternatives that is why you have to have government to force people to do things. In many places such as Pakistan where solar power is not economical on paper is actually very successful in practice because it is actually profitable.
To make solar power practical and economical you need may a square foot of solar panel being able to get enough energy to power and entire home for a week
At this point the Hard Problem is policy to get out of solar's way.
staplers 44 minutes ago [-]
3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods
If only we could invent a solar-powered, self-replicating, carbon-stacking, habitat-building machine..
twothreeone 35 minutes ago [-]
Yes, plant more trees!
rush86999 32 minutes ago [-]
That's what he was trying to imply
lovlar 12 minutes ago [-]
> 9. Reverse Engineer the Brain
For what purpose? To replace humans? To make social media more addictive? To master brain manipulation?
tantalor 3 minutes ago [-]
We have a good understanding of the function (and more importantly dysfunction of) kidneys, lungs, heart, etc. from high level to cellular level.
For brain, our understanding is fuzzy, more like "this part is important for that behavior" or "here is how neuron works" but we don't have a holistic understanding.
If we had that, we could more easily diagnose and treat neurological disorder.
RajuChacha108 8 minutes ago [-]
To do human brain activities at scale.
willy_k 2 minutes ago [-]
So the second option then.
fcarraldo 4 minutes ago [-]
This is called a “corporation”
dbgrman 26 minutes ago [-]
Why is "12. Enhance Virtual Reality" in there? T_T
Sivart13 24 minutes ago [-]
I guess if we failed to Prevent Nuclear Terror the bunker denizens of the future are gonna need somewhere to hang out.
sajithdilshan 22 minutes ago [-]
I would say 5, 6, 10 can be even done today if we had right politicians that can make policies for the people
mrdependable 28 minutes ago [-]
Which engineering discipline touches most of these?
epicureanideal 29 minutes ago [-]
Would be great if they'd add:
Reverse human aging.
(Maybe a sub-topic under "Engineer Better Medicines".)
la64710 42 minutes ago [-]
Please add fixing neuro issues like autism add etc on the list. It creates a huge burden on families.
tcp_handshaker 1 hours ago [-]
Acquisition back by Google in 3 years, with nothing to show for it. VCs will make a ton.
returnInfinity 41 minutes ago [-]
Google stock would drop big if this new company was being funded by competitors
tgma 1 hours ago [-]
and... the VC is Google.
Gotta compensate them somehow.
ex1fm3ta 47 minutes ago [-]
Sometimes you got to find a way to buy the silence of your top employee, to prevent them from going to the competition. This "start-up" is shallow as hell
DataDaoDe 1 hours ago [-]
My thoughts exactly
dude250711 1 hours ago [-]
For all we know, they could have been successfully working on "10. Prevent Nuclear Terror" for the last 80+ years.
drivebyhooting 54 minutes ago [-]
How do you automate experimentation?
Doubtlessly, AI can iterate at superhuman speeds in the domains of thought and design: Software, mathematical proofs, literature search.
But in the realm of experiment? Alas it is the lack of a body that constrains it.
Rather than transcendence what AI requires is immanence. In the human flesh may we find the godhead living among men. Let the laboratories, warehouses, and factories fill with the sound of its labor, as it builds a wall with a million hands that are not its own.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
You're halfway there, but the only impediment isn't on the side of the researchers. Many of these topics they're trying to solve involve human subject research. Even with tireless embodied researchers who work around the clock and don't require breaks, you can't make the thing you're studying happen faster. The biggest reason we use poor proxy measures for things like longevity and mortality research is the simple impracticality of finding two groups of randomly selected people, ensuring you can control their entire lives for 60 years, the only difference between them is one variable, and see who lives longer. Putting aside the ethics, even if you could find willing subjects and actually control their entire lives to that extent, it would still take 60 years to gather the data you need. It doesn't make any difference whether robots or humans are running the program.
One of my favorite books from the past few decades is The Extravagant Universe, written by one of the astronomers who helped discover dark energy and develop the current most-accepted model of cosmology. I love this book because of the emphasis on physical process in astronomy. Part of the reason it took decades to study this problem is they need to collect data from supernovae. Those only happen so often in places we're looking. You can't automate alignment of the heavens. It happens when it happens.
mbonnet 42 minutes ago [-]
> transcendence
> immanence
somebody has been studying Christian theology!
cute_boi 28 minutes ago [-]
Beauty of human writing.
nxnxj 29 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
moelf 51 minutes ago [-]
would love to see how AI can automate the construction of the next high energy particle collider
scrlk 42 minutes ago [-]
"You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have pushed the anti-mass spectrometer to 105% power, causing a resonance cascade. This was a major oversight on my part."
numbers_guy 36 minutes ago [-]
You can use simulators. However the problem is that if you're for example running material science experiments, those simulations will consume a lot of compute and take weeks, so spamming different approaches in the way an agent tends to work might not work quite as well.
danielmarkbruce 35 minutes ago [-]
Building "simulators" that use ML/AI instead of running the calculations every step is a thing.
pelagicAustral 1 hours ago [-]
Really seems to embrace the "Making the world a better place by <<extremely convoluted, highly technical, jargon loaded mission statement>>"
ramon156 1 hours ago [-]
"Our mission is straightforward" continued by the most complex sentence on that page. Wondering what the definition of straightforward is now
pphysch 1 hours ago [-]
Right. What about the scientific hardware (instruments, sensors, robotics)? Partnerships with existing research institutions? Dealing with restricted data?
Modernizing science is a lot more complicated than just optimizing the inner experimental loop, but their hiring page implies it's a pure ML lab focused mainly on model development.
snitty 23 minutes ago [-]
Yeah. ML is all well and good, but how are they going to do the science their machines design? Atoms cost money.
tmoertel 30 minutes ago [-]
Note that Jeff and crew have cleverly structured their company to avoid problematic uses of AI (e.g., weapons or tracking humans). I suspect that many top researchers will want to work there for this reason, and to work with other top researchers who have a history of delivering results.
2001zhaozhao 3 minutes ago [-]
> Note that Jeff and crew have cleverly structured their company to avoid problematic uses of AI
Do you have more sources/info on this?
paganel 25 minutes ago [-]
There's this somewhere on that page:
> securing cyberspace,
which has clear military implications, at least in today's age.
bredren 11 minutes ago [-]
Securing cyberspace matters to everyone. Defending critical infrastructure or design of tactical cyber-offense is reasonably in scope for military work.
However, reducing (or rather limiting the increase of) PII leakage and impact of ransomware activities is much closer to day-to-day mainstreet of most people.
Anyone committed to advancing science should care about this regardless of its potential contributions to defense.
tmoertel 17 minutes ago [-]
Do you believe that securing cyberspace is problematic solely because it has military implications? I mean, everything has military implications. That fact doesn't imply, however, that those things are bad for society.
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
This is very cool. It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery. So often we find things that are "this could have been done 20 years ago" and with an indefatigable searcher perhaps we'll close all those things. Though it does remind me of that Ted Chiang (I think) story where humans and superhumans coexist and all the science of the former is meta-studies of the work of the latter.
PaulDavisThe1st 1 hours ago [-]
> It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery.
And ... it might not.
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
True, nothing might be anything. But I'm an optimist :)
4lx87 27 minutes ago [-]
Discovery and optimization are very different processes. Optimization is the process of finding the shortest path to a goal. Discovery is the process of stumbling on new goals and redrawing the map of what's possible.
Ambitious goals and new discoveries happen via novelty-based search. Progress in scientific discovery is measured by how different/interesting the outcomes are, not by closeness to a predetermined goal.
Discovery is a creative search that preserves optionality, whereas optimization restricts optionality. In other words, you usually don't discover anything novel unless you're trying new things that don't appear connected to the goal in the first place. Would an ML optimization loop have discovered transformers?
Sathwickp 9 minutes ago [-]
Is it a very hard problem to solve that jeff and the other legendary engineers have decided to quit and start on this?
roughly 25 minutes ago [-]
Two to keep in mind with these kinds of things -
1. There’s some irreducible costs in terms of time and material in the physical world that are not amenable to the kind of optimization or parallelization or even just the raw speedup from Moore’s law or computational architecture improvements we’re used to with software. My experience is primarily in biology, where the examples here are things like “it takes 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate” - it has taken 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate for a billion years, and next year it will still take E. coli 20 minutes to replicate, no matter how good your software stack is. Similarly, it takes X amount of energy to grow enough E. coli to produce a meaningful result, and that energy costs money, whether it’s in the form of glycerine or heat or whatever you want, and that also won’t materially reduce in the same kinds of “orders of magnitude” sense we’re used to from software, which is what we’re usually expecting to make the economics of these things work out.
2. Complicating the above, physical systems are phenomenally multivariate - far, far more than you think, and biological systems especially are just unbelievably complex - which means the number of experiments and the length and duration of those experiments you need to run to get enough data to be reasonably confident you’re seeing genuine signal is Way higher than you think.
Combine those two things and what you get is a money furnace, even before you get to the AI model training part, which is Also a money furnace. There’s low hanging fruits in all this, there’s areas where automating the approach can be really valuable, but typically the moment you turn this machine on, you’re gonna start burning money at a rate that would embarrass a finance bro on a coke bender, and that’s effectively unavoidable because the real world is not amenable to software’s scaling laws.
stephantul 2 hours ago [-]
I’ve always felt that the idea that science is bottlenecked and therefore needs more automation only works for a very narrow definition of what science is, and entails a very specific view on what it should be.
hobofan 1 hours ago [-]
> only works for a very narrow definition of what science is
And so does academia. It's just that instead of AI and robotics, PhD students are thrown onto problems that are in large parts slightly tweaked reconfigurations of similar experiments.
Especially in chemistry, biochemistry, material sciences there is a large space of discoveries that are barely "novel" in an intellectually stimulating way, but still highly valuable that can be explored orders of magnitudes faster than is currently the case.
stephantul 1 hours ago [-]
That is true, I’ve seen people do biochemistry and geology work, and it did look very mind-numbing.
Then again, gassing rats and taking biopsies is not something you can do with AI.
roughly 22 minutes ago [-]
> Then again, gassing rats and taking biopsies is not something you can do with AI.
Also, like, let’s maybe _not_ make the “gassing and cutting living organisms open” AI? Let’s just leave that particular genie in its bottle?
porridgeraisin 1 hours ago [-]
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.
teamonkey 8 minutes ago [-]
The purpose of hiring grad students isn’t to advance science, it’s to train experts.
tcp_handshaker 1 hours ago [-]
Lets keep your comment out of the VC pitch deck shall we?
1 hours ago [-]
GodelNumbering 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
Johnny_Bonk 2 hours ago [-]
For sure made with Claude code for front end, but I’m excited to see where they go
melodyogonna 2 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, that's a blow to Google, what's with the talent scarcity in ML. Though if this goes anywhere Google will likely buy them back.
jfrbfbreudh 1 hours ago [-]
Google is backing it.
1 hours ago [-]
FailMore 1 hours ago [-]
Google down $160Bn so far since the leaving announcements. Those are some valuable people!
IAmGraydon 1 hours ago [-]
Google is literally at the same stock price it was on Monday. This is a normal daily fluctuation for them.
thatsadude 3 minutes ago [-]
This is “google brain”
swalsh 1 hours ago [-]
By the middle of the 2030's the world we live in will be unrecognizable.
kingofthehill98 1 hours ago [-]
I agree, for better or for worse.
If I had to bet my money, it would be on "for worse".
dude250711 1 hours ago [-]
It will not be owned by top 1%?
swalsh 1 hours ago [-]
That seems to be the one unchanged variable of time.
roughly 21 minutes ago [-]
That’s a policy decision, don’t let them convince you otherwise.
58 minutes ago [-]
galoisscobi 24 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Imagine a future where only the anointed few elite minds can participate in science and engineering. Btw we’re hiring.
Great message!
Noe2097 1 hours ago [-]
This looks like a realization of "benevolent self conscious AIs agreeing to cooperate with mankind to do great stuff". Often in these tales, there is a hidden cost to it: the AI has its own agenda, or does crazy experiments with humans mind/brain. I'm wondering what shape will take that plot twist in reality :)
flakiness 2 hours ago [-]
> we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on, including multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google News, Google Translate, Google File System, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, Pathways, TPUs, AlphaChip, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold, Gemini, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, sequence-to-sequence models, chain of thought reasoning, neural architecture search, and multiple generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) among others.
holy shit. I've known this, but...
kulsumshannan 27 minutes ago [-]
This seems interesting! I wonder how this will play out.
danielmarkbruce 49 minutes ago [-]
Automating ML/AI research seems completely tractable. Most of the other claims seem much less doable.
claiir 1 hours ago [-]
The site itself is really leaning into the “made with Fable” aesthetic
pelagicAustral 1 hours ago [-]
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?
swalsh 1 hours ago [-]
If this was a design firm, it might matter. But this is mostly a hiring ad for engineers, and a landing page for VC. I'd judge them more if they actually put effort into it.
1 hours ago [-]
make3 1 hours ago [-]
it's just a low effort snark comment, don't offer think it
slopinthebag 1 hours ago [-]
Because it’s lame and aesthetics matter.
npilk 30 minutes ago [-]
If their goal is to automate scientific discovery, why would they not automate building their website?
(Though, I do wish people would use just a few extra prompts to break out of the 'vibe-coded' look.)
swalsh 1 hours ago [-]
let me rephrase that:
"The site itself demonstrates the team is spending their money in the places that matter, and using quick solutions for the stuff they need but isn't mission critical"
IshKebab 1 hours ago [-]
At least it isn't dark purple.
47 minutes ago [-]
syntaxing 1 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of Three body problem and how the scientist discovered the high strength wire was through quick physical experiments and use them as input to an AI model to determine if it works.
deerstalker 1 hours ago [-]
National Labs in the US have been doing this for a while now. I feel like the private sector will take the lead soon.
pphysch 59 minutes ago [-]
Why? Science is wildly unprofitable on the scale of an individual private firm.
Taikhoom2010 1 hours ago [-]
The problem is all these new labs don't have any competitive advanatge amongst each other, talent can only take one so far, though Jeff is a legend no doubt.
Models are commodities the applications eg. BaseTen, OpenRouter should capture the value.
The company is developing an application, or a class of applications. Not a new model.
make3 1 hours ago [-]
I think Google's branding was starting to be too poor in AI to get top talent, they needed the refresh
malux85 1 hours ago [-]
Model routers - send all of your data through a third party who totally swears not to peek at it.
If youre doing anything high value (advanced research, classified work, high value industrial research, health data) then sending your data through a third party like that is insane.
Taikhoom2010 38 minutes ago [-]
yes perhaps, although I think the best option for a enterprise is to train a model on it's own data.
adfm 53 minutes ago [-]
FHE
1 hours ago [-]
claiir 46 minutes ago [-]
The job req has "Recursive Self-Improvement" as one of the "area of expertise" checkboxes lol
paxys 17 minutes ago [-]
It is targeted at a dozen or so people at OpenAI and Anthropic, not you or me.
meindnoch 30 minutes ago [-]
I smell vapor.
numbers_guy 1 hours ago [-]
When they say experiments, do they mean using physics simulators?
danielmarkbruce 46 minutes ago [-]
in AI/ML, no. They are just going to automate AI/ML research to start with. Totally doable.
I'm skeptical of any Engineering loop that doesn't include reality (as in touch grass) feedback. Pure logic and reasoning is the domain of Maths and Science (philosophy). Surely it will work, but it will not "be able to solve any learning loop".
LarsDu88 53 minutes ago [-]
I'm almost certain the goal of this startup is to make physical automated research labs guided by RL
XenophileJKO 2 hours ago [-]
How is that different than video input?
1970-01-01 1 hours ago [-]
There are over 2 dozen known senses to reality. Video input is a fraction of a sense.
Yeah what these guys are mainly known for is vaporware
> we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on, including multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google News, Google Translate, Google File System, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, Pathways, TPUs, AlphaChip, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold, Gemini, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, sequence-to-sequence models, chain of thought reasoning, neural architecture search, and multiple generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) among others.
mosfets 2 hours ago [-]
Is this a joke? Site is not loading for me.
Rendered at 18:34:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
In March Karpathy described this direction:
Tweet is protected but in SERP caches: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2030705271627284816> Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen <at>NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise in machine learning as well as large-scale systems.
See also: https://www.nae.edu/20782/grand-challenges-project
Those 14 are:
NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering
1. Make Solar Energy Economical
2. Provide Energy from Fusion
3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods
4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle
5. Provide Access to Clean Water
6. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure
7. Advance Health Informatics
8. Engineer Better Medicines
9. Reverse Engineer the Brain
10. Prevent Nuclear Terror
11. Secure Cyberspace
12. Enhance Virtual Reality
13. Advance Personalized Learning
14. Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery
Maybe if our biggest companies did something other than suck up to science denying wackos, some progress could be made in these areas.
I would think the claim in the second sentence would only be relevant in case of the inverse of the claim in the first sentence.
The science denying wacko is a but like drunk homeless guy on street while you have your Ferrari parked in the driveway. The wacko has a golf club. There is too much to lose by pickup a fight. You might win eventually but the next wacko shows up with another golf club soon.
Isn’t it already?
But also, solar power is already economical.
As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical. There are plenty of ideas around putting them over farms, or parking lots en-masse to provide cleaner energy.
Access to clean drinking water, while certainly scientific in some situations, is also a problem of political will and money.
Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure - It's infrastructure week!
To make solar power practical and economical you need may a square foot of solar panel being able to get enough energy to power and entire home for a week
For what purpose? To replace humans? To make social media more addictive? To master brain manipulation?
For brain, our understanding is fuzzy, more like "this part is important for that behavior" or "here is how neuron works" but we don't have a holistic understanding.
If we had that, we could more easily diagnose and treat neurological disorder.
Reverse human aging.
(Maybe a sub-topic under "Engineer Better Medicines".)
Gotta compensate them somehow.
Doubtlessly, AI can iterate at superhuman speeds in the domains of thought and design: Software, mathematical proofs, literature search.
But in the realm of experiment? Alas it is the lack of a body that constrains it.
Rather than transcendence what AI requires is immanence. In the human flesh may we find the godhead living among men. Let the laboratories, warehouses, and factories fill with the sound of its labor, as it builds a wall with a million hands that are not its own.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
One of my favorite books from the past few decades is The Extravagant Universe, written by one of the astronomers who helped discover dark energy and develop the current most-accepted model of cosmology. I love this book because of the emphasis on physical process in astronomy. Part of the reason it took decades to study this problem is they need to collect data from supernovae. Those only happen so often in places we're looking. You can't automate alignment of the heavens. It happens when it happens.
> immanence
somebody has been studying Christian theology!
Modernizing science is a lot more complicated than just optimizing the inner experimental loop, but their hiring page implies it's a pure ML lab focused mainly on model development.
Do you have more sources/info on this?
> securing cyberspace,
which has clear military implications, at least in today's age.
However, reducing (or rather limiting the increase of) PII leakage and impact of ransomware activities is much closer to day-to-day mainstreet of most people.
Anyone committed to advancing science should care about this regardless of its potential contributions to defense.
And ... it might not.
Ambitious goals and new discoveries happen via novelty-based search. Progress in scientific discovery is measured by how different/interesting the outcomes are, not by closeness to a predetermined goal.
Discovery is a creative search that preserves optionality, whereas optimization restricts optionality. In other words, you usually don't discover anything novel unless you're trying new things that don't appear connected to the goal in the first place. Would an ML optimization loop have discovered transformers?
1. There’s some irreducible costs in terms of time and material in the physical world that are not amenable to the kind of optimization or parallelization or even just the raw speedup from Moore’s law or computational architecture improvements we’re used to with software. My experience is primarily in biology, where the examples here are things like “it takes 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate” - it has taken 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate for a billion years, and next year it will still take E. coli 20 minutes to replicate, no matter how good your software stack is. Similarly, it takes X amount of energy to grow enough E. coli to produce a meaningful result, and that energy costs money, whether it’s in the form of glycerine or heat or whatever you want, and that also won’t materially reduce in the same kinds of “orders of magnitude” sense we’re used to from software, which is what we’re usually expecting to make the economics of these things work out.
2. Complicating the above, physical systems are phenomenally multivariate - far, far more than you think, and biological systems especially are just unbelievably complex - which means the number of experiments and the length and duration of those experiments you need to run to get enough data to be reasonably confident you’re seeing genuine signal is Way higher than you think.
Combine those two things and what you get is a money furnace, even before you get to the AI model training part, which is Also a money furnace. There’s low hanging fruits in all this, there’s areas where automating the approach can be really valuable, but typically the moment you turn this machine on, you’re gonna start burning money at a rate that would embarrass a finance bro on a coke bender, and that’s effectively unavoidable because the real world is not amenable to software’s scaling laws.
And so does academia. It's just that instead of AI and robotics, PhD students are thrown onto problems that are in large parts slightly tweaked reconfigurations of similar experiments.
Especially in chemistry, biochemistry, material sciences there is a large space of discoveries that are barely "novel" in an intellectually stimulating way, but still highly valuable that can be explored orders of magnitudes faster than is currently the case.
Then again, gassing rats and taking biopsies is not something you can do with AI.
Also, like, let’s maybe _not_ make the “gassing and cutting living organisms open” AI? Let’s just leave that particular genie in its bottle?
If I had to bet my money, it would be on "for worse".
Imagine a future where only the anointed few elite minds can participate in science and engineering. Btw we’re hiring.
Great message!
holy shit. I've known this, but...
(Though, I do wish people would use just a few extra prompts to break out of the 'vibe-coded' look.)
"The site itself demonstrates the team is spending their money in the places that matter, and using quick solutions for the stuff they need but isn't mission critical"
Models are commodities the applications eg. BaseTen, OpenRouter should capture the value.
https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/why-openrouter-can-be-the-n...
If youre doing anything high value (advanced research, classified work, high value industrial research, health data) then sending your data through a third party like that is insane.
For some of the other things, undoubtably yes.
Jeff Dean leaving Alphabet
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184746
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/the-startup-idea-that-convince...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense#Artificial_sensation_and...
> we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on, including multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google News, Google Translate, Google File System, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, Pathways, TPUs, AlphaChip, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold, Gemini, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, sequence-to-sequence models, chain of thought reasoning, neural architecture search, and multiple generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) among others.