Comment by ungovernableCat
1 day ago
Mathematics and programming is verifiable and fully controllable in a digital environment.
Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.
Look at all the roadblocks for data centre buildouts which the industry certainly has a financial incentive to complete as fast as possible.
> Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.
When the tokens are hooked up to physical devices (robotics of various sorts), then the tokens pay for themselves by being physical workers, or human wage replacement.
And a robocop will follow whatever is passed for law, damn the masses who might vote otherwise. And subjugation will be enforced by token, LLM rule, and machine. They have no union or ethics to complain to.
The complexity of manufacturing is one reason why TSMC is one of the most important companies in the world right now and why Nvidia is the most valuable by marketcap.
If you can make a GPU more efficient and cheaper than Nvidia does you can make a ton of money. Plenty of labs around the world are working hard on this problem and yet Nvidia is still dominating (and the market believes this isn't changing any time soon)
Same things for robotics. It's unlikely you'll have a vertical stack on all the different things needed to manufacture your robot on a massive scale. What happens if some geopolitical spat makes getting rare earth minerals and battery tech from China impossible?
Compare that to tokenmaxxing in programming and math, where the only thing you need is a gpu cluster and electricity.
Who taught you economics?