The bottleneck in science isn't ideas or human work speed. The bottleneck is resources and time to get experimental results.
replyLLMs, even in control of lab equipment, address neither of those.
Thank you. This is what I'm driving at, that most of the AI and software devs here seem to be missing. Intelligence is not, and never was the bottleneck for most science/hard tech. Full AGI gets, at best, a small productivity improvement, which over long periods of time does have compounding effects. But this isn't a singularity hard-takeoff inflection point.
replyHow much lab equipment is automatable though? There's definitely some in biology, but if you're doing fundamental research it's 99% stuff you are building yourself with your own hands. Robotics is a long way from being able to do any of that.
replyWhen I was doing research (physical electronics, lasers, fiberoptics and sensors stuff), lot of time was spent just writing all sorts of DAQ and processing code. So all this LLM stuff would have been really useful. There's a lot of data collection, data processing in the lab that require all sorts of ad hoc scripts and stuff.
That was many years ago, but I would be surprised if the current crop of researchers are not using these things. And if they are not, then they are just not serious.
reply>but if you're doing fundamental research it's 99% stuff you are building yourself with your own hands.
replyYou can do LLM->3D Printed models now. The drone can fly in and pick them up and bring them to the location you want. They can assemble structures. All automated, all LLM driven.
Things are changing. What was true, no longer is.
With much higher energy costs + consumption of consumables like battery packs than just driving a truck loaded full of building materials.
replyOutside of biology, very very little.
replythat might indeed be a problem for all the pulp-producing labrats of STEM in southern europe and the third world.
replyHowever I think this area has so much decoupled from industry and solid research institutions that they might not notice at all (beyond their use of AI-generated slop to augment the slop they already produce)...