Comment by Jean-Papoulos
8 hours ago
>While this underlying RT, found in a jumbo phage, had been identified in previous studies, Claude appears to be the first to notice the system’s defining features—an associated array of non-coding DNA sequences and an additional accessory protein of unknown function.
So they investigated an already known thing. Not exactly "discovering a new system"... Anyone with money to throw at this already-known thing would have gotten those results I assume.
I feel this is overly pessimistic. Perhaps see it this way then; it is now easy and cheap to throw money at a Thing.
Society is bottlenecked by the limited amount of experts it can muster. That is increasingly less the case.
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Money and people and realizing in advance that this particular thing is worth concentrating upon, out of a thousand or maybe a million other opportunities.
Even the people parameter is a serious limitation, in all sorts of domains. An example: we have a huge stash of ancient cuneiform tablets from the Middle East, but most have not been read yet because there are very few people who are able to read them.
Isn't it the whole point?
Throwing money at a problem was expensive, it's a lot less expensive now