Comment by dinkumthinkum
10 days ago
What are the actual benefits? Where are all these medicines that humans couldn’t develop on their own? Have we not been able to develop medicine? What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI? I don’t know what a solution to the climate crisis is but what would it even say that humans wouldn’t have realistically thought of?
You're most likely correct in thinking 'we would get there eventually'. But in the case of medicine, would you like to make that case to those who don't have the time to wait for 'eventually' - or who'll spend their lives in misery?
It's a matter of prompt engineering, you have to be a really good engineer to pick the correct words in order to get the cure for cancer from ChatGPT, or the actual crabby patty recipe
;)
May I ask why people immediately imagine AI slop whenever anybody mentions LLMs? This is exactly what I meant. Those companies ruined their reputation. LLM/AI applications extend well beyond chat and drawing bots.
Here are some domain-specific examples of how AI improved (not replaced) human performance like a tool:
1. How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein...
This is about DeepMind's AlphaFold 2. It's arguably a big deal in medical science. How do you propose humans do it?
2. Code vulnerability detection across different programming languages with AI Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11710
> What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI?
I'm not a mathematician. I cannot give a definitive answer. But I read somewhere that some proofs these days fill an entire book. There is no way anybody is creating that without machine validation and assistance. AI is the next step in that, just like how programming support is advancing from complex tools to copilots. I know that overuse of copilots is a reason for making some developers lose quality. But there are also experienced developers who have found ways to use them optimally to significantly increase their speed without filling the code base with AI slop. The same will arguably happen with Mathematics.
The point ultimately is, I don't have definitive answers to any of the questions you ask. I'm not a domain expert in any of those fields and I can't see the future. But none of that is relevant here. What's relevant is to understand how LLMs and AI in general can be leveraged to augment your performance in any profession. The exact method may vary by domain. But the general tool use will be similar. Think of it like "How can a computer help me do accounting, cook a meal, predict weather, get me an xray or pay my bills?" It's as generic as that.