Comment by cjbarber
9 hours ago
From Jeff's twitter post:
> 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
They make many bold promises, but their core goal is neatly encapsulated on the website:
"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."
This is the same goal as every other AI company out there. Automate away the human employees and let a small number of "people" (note that they do not say scientists or engineers for this part) take the credit and financial rewards for every good thing this human-free system produces.
> "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."
I don't think the US have this capability because you guys don't really have manufacturing that is really necessary for scientific research.
For example, if I want a highly toxic chemical, how difficult it would be to procure that in the US vs China?
> you guys don't really have manufacturing that is really necessary for scientific research
Yea no high quality science research happens in the US? What?
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>>> For example, if I want a highly toxic chemical, how difficult it would be to procure that in the US vs China?
With trustworthy composition and purity?
I work with researchers in both the US and China. Definitely easier to procure in the US.
Why shouldn't they?
Also, wouldn't anyone with half a brain use the human-free system to produce another human-free system that was no longer controlled by the "small number of 'people'"?
Why do you think you'd be given access and permission to do this? If a company genuinely cracks this human free system problem, why would they open it up, instead of simply outcompeting everyone that doesn't have their product?
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Life's unfair, avoiding power concentration is a decent principle.
If you grow up in the right place at the right time, how much should you be in control of everyone else's life?
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Because of the negative externalities. It’s the same reason you shouldn’t do any other thing that personally benefits you but imposes a greater cost on everyone.
My best research is one that is seeking funding but none is forthing and by sheer guts and whatnot makes a breakthrough that basically funds itself. No investors. No funders. Definitely not public.
> Why shouldn't they?
Because it's evil?
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My main point is that people shouldn't just swallow the noble and lofty sounding PR. These guys are the same as everyone else in the sector. Don't ignore the harmful or scummy things they'll inevitably do. Hold them accountable. If they are as noble as they sound, they should agree with me.
Reminds of the protagonist in the movie Limitless. LOL.
Yes but science is well-structures and practically designed about repeatability so its a lot easier to automate than "softer" disciplines.
Software engineers are in a decades long project of automating everyone and everything else, and getting the financial rewards out of that.
So...
There is a meta comment here which is there seems to be an implicit assumption in the finite amount of possible work and progress.
It seems that in history we were bounded by not enough people and too much potential and now we all fear the opposite is the situation?
The same thing happened before with every technological advance like cars and personal computers.
I don't get this weird rejection of AI from a socialistic perspective. Or rather, I do, but I don't think it's healthy.
Humans have proven to be incapable of making real progress in science given the effort. Especially academia. We haven't cured many diseases and cancer when we should have (and no im not an amateur and yes I do believe we can "cure cancer". Debate me).
We already have a trillionaire, whats the difference? The only difference I see is that people who were previously rich, but considered themselves middle class, are now realizing they are actually poor just like the several billion humans around the worldanyway.
Many cancers are "cured" in the sense that they're detectable and treatable. My grandmother lived 35 years longer than she would have by detecting breast cancer early and getting a mastectomy.
There is currently a $800 SOTA blood test that can detect most cancers before any symptoms. Maybe a decade until it's a routine part of your annual blood test?
Whole genome sequencing costed $2.7 billion in 2003. You can get it done today using a mailed kit for $400.
HIV went from death sentence to all-but-cured in 50 years.
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What a miserable, misanthropic take
Let me illustrate why you are wrong:
800-400k years ago: humans intentionally create and control fire
300k years ago: humans become anatomically modern
~ now: all of astronomy, biology, medicine, vaccines, spaceflight, antibiotics, sanitization/sterilization, physics, chemistry, fission and fusion, electromagnetism.........
I think we're on a decent pace if we can manage to not exterminate our species.
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.
> The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.
That is not mutually exclusive. If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.
You can think of it like this: our "political technology" is not good enough to use solar energy at its current prices to replace fossil fuels as fast as we would like. Well, what about if we cut the price of solar by a factor of five? Perhaps it will be good enough then.
I don't think that's the way I'd describe it though. It's more like "our political technology is not good enough to reliably do good things instead of bad things". Working around it by lowering prices of this or that is like if you're bad at darts so you just make the board bigger and bigger. Okay, maybe you'll hit it more often, but you didn't fix the problem that you're bad at darts, so everyone still at risk of having their eye put out by an errant throw. Moreover, I don't think I'm the only who finds it a bit perverse to accommodate to failures in that way rather than trying to actually make things better.
> If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.
Your thinking reminds me of this https://xkcd.com/538/
That sounds like just playing further and further into the game of the corrupt leaders. Who do you think would profit off that 5x margin? Would that margin come more likely from a scientific breakthrough of via some new exploitation of natural resources or human labor?
It's yearsss past time that our leaders should have changed policy.
Making progress requires first not dismissing your ideological outgroup along such lines, and instead trying to understand what actually motivates them.
Policy and funding. One of which will be sucked up by this venture.
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.
> I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first.
Point 1 on the list is "Make Solar Energy Economical".
Solar is economical today - mostly due to China investing (and heavily subsidising) in solar for the past couple of decades; but compare to the US where certain particular big-businesses (oil companies, mostly) were instead cynically funding disinformation efforts and getting into bed with the Republican party (which dovetailed with the GOP's allying with other science-denying movements of the Bush Jr era like creationism and public-health matters with abstinence-only sex-ed and defunding gun safety research efforts) - means we're decades behind where we could have been...
Consider an alternative past, where the GOP had the backbone to resist the oil industry's corruptive influence and instead made a big bet on American Solar; it's entirely possible that instead of MAGA today we'd instead have a right-wing coalition strongly supporting solar and wind energy because they align nicely with American rugged individualism - whereas the current situation on the right is an unprincipled farce with inconsistencies in policy positions at every turn.
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It's a total delusion to think that the key to reverse-engineering the brain or producing energy from fusion is policy.
It also happens to be the favorite pretext for people to seize more political power and launder more money through nonprofits though.
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> Provide Access to Clean Water
??? We don't need any AI for this.
Start with separated sewage/wastewater and stormwater drains. Then accredited and highly scrutinised wastewater treatment and discharge into water bodies (or see below for a high-tech solution). As for clean water to the home, direct those stormwater drains to new reservoirs which sustain freshwater aquatic life. Protect aquifers from over-drainage, and build pipelines from water-abundant regions to water-scarce regions.
To reclaim waste water or treat unknown water sources back to potable/semiconductor standards we have ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, UV treatment, pH adjustment, fluoridation, desalination, softening (which is generally obviated by RO...). This is basically Singapore's NEWater.
Good sanitation is a financial and political problem. The engineering has been solved for decades now.
> Good sanitation is a financial and political problem. The engineering has been solved for decades now.
This was true of computers, phones, books, washing machines, refrigerators, A/C...most technologies.
Turns out that doing the addition engineering to figure out how to do these things cheaply makes the political and financial problems way easier.
Sure you do, go full EA:
Build a better surveillance ads system, and use (some of) that cash to pay for water projects.
Agree. Same for better medicines. We could get pretty far just by getting existing medicines that work to people who need them.
> Make Solar Energy Economical
Isn’t it already?
Probably want to jump 1 generation ahead directly compared to captive Chinese investment with fully automated US factories churning out Silcon perovskite tandem panels directly with few inputs and electricity
Definitely pretty far along imo. But maybe they consider the progress bar to be at 75% or 80% rather than 100%.
Not enough. The more economical it is, the better.
The paradox of solar is that more economical it is for the end users the less money is there to be made. So nobody wants to invest in it.
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People on HN keep saying it is, but I'm still not seeing it. Companies are building datacenters in vast, sun-blasted deserts and still choosing to power those with natural gas. This in turn makes people complain about emissions pledges being reversed, but if it were economical, no pledge would be needed.
Of course, USA has cheaper oil/gas than other countries. But if you look elsewhere, rich countries are subsidizing solar, poor ones are basically not using it.
I don't think you have an updated view of energy production.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/20/how-globa...
In the chart for section 3, how many countries have seen their share of electricity being generated by fossil fuels increase in the last 5 years? Only Canada.
Take a look at the charts for Pakistan, Australia, Nigeria, and China for the last few years. Pretty dramatic drops for fossil fuels generation.
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Solar is dirt cheap in China, where 85% of panels are produced. The problem is they're made in China and face tariffs/import bans in the US/Europe.
Nat gas is preferred for AI DCs because it has faster time-to-market, doesn't have the intermittency issues. Training on solar + storage is an issue because of network synchronization.
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> poor ones are basically not using it.
I don't think that's true: https://rmi.org/resources/the-global-souths-cleantech-revolu...
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Data centers need lots of power 24/7 and regardless of cloud cover. Solar is great to reduce your daytime bills but you still need other methods to cover the downtime.
I would be surprised if data centers didn't put in gas _and_ solar.
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15. Cut AI energy use by 1000x while increasing processing speed 1000x
Obvious near term trillions dollar market to disrupt.
Sandbox 2.0
But also, solar power is already economical.
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!
> As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical.
Not if you include the cost of needed storage.
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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
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Seems to have been developed in 2008 (continuing through 2017), which explains the "economical" framing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Engineerin...
At this point the Hard Problem is policy to get out of solar's way.
In some regions, but it would be great if it was economical in cloudy Seattle and not just the sunbelt
If only we could invent a solar-powered, self-replicating, carbon-stacking, habitat-building machine..
Not to say we shouldn't grow plants... But we can do it 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more efficiently with machines.
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Yes, plant more trees!
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Room Temperature Ambient Pressure Super Conductors
Would be great if they'd add:
Reverse human aging.
(Maybe a sub-topic under "Engineer Better Medicines".)
At a population level, humans getting rid of their off switch is about as good of a thing as your own pancreas cells getting rid of theirs.
Why not just add 'mind control' while you're at it.
Only death stops stagnation in the end. Without death, especially if death can be avoided by the rich and powerful but not the poor, life will get much, much worse for the average person (until only the rich and their automated capital remain I suppose, in which scenario they will simply turn on each other).
Very honorable effort, but a lot of these seem to touch heavily regulated industries impeded by unwise or outdated policy no less than by the lack of clever engineering - medicine, education, urbanism, energy. I wonder if they've given some thought to the key blocking factor as well.
Such a weird list. How is preventing nuclear terror an engineering problem?
Creation of nuclear reactors that are useless for terrorists could help
And what about the terrorism that exists today?
Satellite/drone detection of nuclear material? Shooting missiles out of the sky?
Why is "12. Enhance Virtual Reality" in there? T_T
When one of them dies, they want to leave behind a puzzle so complex that entire groups of the population dedicate their lives to solving it within the virtual world. They look old enough to have a lot of favorite 1980’s and 90’s pop culture references, so those will probably be the clues.
I guess if we failed to Prevent Nuclear Terror the bunker denizens of the future are gonna need somewhere to hang out.
I'm guessing this might be about "teleoperation" (like remote surgery via robots + VR) and being able to remote training as well. The binocular vision VR gives you compared to flat screens help a lot with depth perception for precision of incisions for example.
Higher-fidelity telepresence could be as significant as the recent COVID work-from-home wave.
You dont see making heaven on earth worth doing?
In what sense is solar energy not already economical?
4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle
Easy solution - eat less products that pass an animal first - reduces nitrogen pollution by 10x intantly, low tech.
I'd re-formulate: 4. Make people more flexible to changing their mindsets & habits - this is the ultimate problem.
Easier to just make factory farms illegal no?
> 9. Reverse Engineer the Brain
For what purpose? To replace humans? To make social media more addictive? To master brain manipulation?
> For what purpose?
To understand, same reason you reverse engineer anything. Doesn't have to have a further goal than that, understanding the brain better helps in so many ways. But like most technology, obviously can be used for bad too. Should we just skip researching some topics then?
I'm all for alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders, but yes, some topics are worth skipping research on. For example chemical/biological/nuclear weapons, human cloning, and unethical gene modification.
I just like to challenge myself, as an engineer, with the idea that not everything has to be engineered and optimized. What if we simply left some things unexplored and mysterious, and trusted nature and our own human capabilities?
A better way of alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders might just be to focus on societal factors.
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.
I imagine a good model of the brain would contribute enormously to alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders.
To do human brain activities at scale.
So the second option then.
This is called a “corporation”
I would say 5, 6, 10 can be even done today if we had right politicians that can make policies for the people
agreed
Which engineering discipline touches most of these?
Please add fixing neuro issues like autism add etc on the list. It creates a huge burden on families.
Idk, they never struck me as being into eugenics.
What the fuck man? I really don't want some tech startup trying to "fix" my neurodivergence.
Treating autism (and preventing it) is not eugenics. That's a talking point some folks raise, but we're talking about intensely pervasive autism, not neurodivergence. Really, please try to do better in your arguments than immediately saying your opponent is like Hitler.
This list smells of so much tech bro “I can do better than the people that have been working in the field for 20 years” egotistical attitude that permeates silicon valley. Why do software engineers think they are smarter than everyone else? Is it because they earn more than most people? But then bankers and finance bros should think they are gods?
Also, solar energy is already economical!? Do they mean more economical?
You’re right. It’s better to just not try and let other people do good things
Or actually work with the people with domain expertise.
Thanks for all the down votes tech bros! Really proving my point
This reads as hype of the kind: "well, we can't reliably do these rather mundane things with AI, but we're going to run it extra hard and extra long in some novel way, and it will do amazing things".
The issues are with verification and with detecting drift from the goal. These are related, if not roughly the same issue. And, if they can solve this, then they will have essentially fixed AI. Maybe even AGI.
But, if this were the goal, then it seems more reasonable to solve the relatively more mundane verifiable challenges (e.g. generating solid, reliable code). Then, working up from there.
And, that's exactly what gives this the hype smell. No use for solving problems that don't get the oohs and aahs. Just straight to NAE Grand Challenge problems.
Acquisition back by Google in 3 years, with nothing to show for it. VCs will make a ton.
and... the VC is Google.
Gotta compensate them somehow.
Google stock would drop big if this new company was being funded by competitors
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
These people are all already making 9 figure compensation packages, I think if they thought they could do the work they wanted at Google, they would.
9 figure is hardly enough when some kid sells their vscode fork to them for more, is it? Why not just boomerang and get $$$.
Given the resources that would be available to them at Google: compute resources, data, etc. It's clear they want absolute freedom. Good for them. At this revolutionary turning point in history, I want the smartest people working in whatever area they want.
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My thoughts exactly
For all we know, they could have been successfully working on "10. Prevent Nuclear Terror" for the last 80+ years.