> AI bros consistently handwave away any notions of the material world imposing limits, because (spoiler!) it's a religion where you start from the miracle and work backwards.

How else are you going to work towards a dream? It's how Elon Musk managed to get reusable rockets when everyone said it's unfeasible.

Granted, most ideas don't work, this is why you need testing, but I am a bit surprised to see this attitude on hacker news.

If they said that their dream is to solve physics, I'd say "that's cool and I can't wait to see how it turns out." LLMs have gotten so good at mathematics, and are so adroit at analyzing vast quantities of data, that they might have a really good shot.

But they said that they want to cure cancer. That's far outside the core competencies of any LLM, and it requires a lot of real-world wetwork with liquids, chemicals, cell line experiments, animal experiments, etc. They can't merely analyze existing data -- they'd need to generate vast amounts of new data, which isn't really the case in physics. And then regulatory approvals and so forth.

"We're working on curing cancer" sounds more like a poor PR attempt than an actual effort, though I'd love to be wrong.

Fair enough, but taking the history-ending outcome as given so externalities don't matter doesn't seem like a great approach.