Absolutely. But without post docs, it won't be long before we are unable to understand what the LLMs are suggesting.

sterlind an hour ago | parent | next [-]

many drugs were discovered, evaluated and approved without understanding at all how they worked.

iirc back in the day chemists synthesized a whole bunch of random compounds, observed their effects (in mice etc., or even the chemists tasting them!) then did clinical trials to measure safety and efficacy.

high-throughput screening of chemical libraries on in vitro assays is the modern version of this. "rational" drug design, which uses understanding of mechanisms to design chemical structures for a specific purpose, largely failed back in the '80s.

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suddenlybananas 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

Well I guess who gives a shit about knowledge

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mlazos 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

Ive been thinking about this a a lot, like now if LLMs can just try a bunch of things, you can just try them all now. Are there some applications where we can just brute force and test at scale and no longer need to understand? Where understanding is now in essence that it “works” and passes our acceptance tests.

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suddenlybananas 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

I give a shit about knowledge! I think it's good entirely for its own sake.

	▲	orangecat a minute ago \| parent [-]
		I agree! I'm also not going to turn down an Alzheimer's vaccine that's been demonstrated to be safe and effective even if we don't know exactly how it works. (And if you think that's a contrived fantasy, check out the shingles vaccine).

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mikestorrent 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can't understand what the post-docs are suggesting.

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drusepth 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

True, but it's also not your job to understand what post-docs are suggesting (hopefully), unlike post-docs who kind of need to understand what LLMs are suggesting.

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mlinsey 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not to get back into the AI safety debate from last week, but I really, really want a team of human experts to understand what the AI is suggesting before we administer new medical treatments or synthesize new lifeforms in the lab.

	▲	fidotron an hour ago \| parent [-]
		At this point it should be clear that Anthropic are determined to create the doomsday scenario as the most idiotic "I told you so" gotcha in history.

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asdff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If you can't, then you aren't in the field, and it doesn't matter if you could or not.

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ai-x 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There will always be a %age of humans who will be curious how the universe works including LLMs. Delusional to think those humans are only incentivized by degrees, or money.

Humans were curious and started the intelligence / learning explosion much much before money and degrees were invented.

	▲	matthewdgreen 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		For most of history we died of easily preventable diseases because we lacked the scientific institutions to learn how to prevent them. The fact that a percentage of the population wanted to know more is why we live so well today, but it didn’t stop many of those people from dying awfully. It wouldn’t take a lot to go back there, or at least to a civilization that would go back there the second the AIs have a major outage.
	▲	papyrus9244 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Sure. But unless they are born into a very wealthy family, or decide to pass up on having a family and other hobbies, they won't be able to satisfy that curiosity beyond a very basic level.

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plutomeetsyou 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

once everyone lives to 200 yo there will be no need for post-docs - afterward we can just upload PI's brain to some AI.

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6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I wonder who's going to pay for that extra 120 years of living we're gonna be doing?

	▲	ben_w 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have no idea what prompts questions like these. We got to 80 without inventing money. Living that long back then was hard work every day. Then the industrial revolution happened, and we got state pensions at one end of life and extended childhood a few years past adolescence on the other. We currently pay for this… by taxes funding both education and a pension. Absent the radical transformations of an AI driven economy, we live 200 years in exactly the same way. With those transformations, all bets are off unless they violate the laws of physics.
	▲	emkoemko an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Musk said we will all be rich so we will?
	▲	wavewrangler 26 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
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	▲	boinkboink78912 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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