> 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.
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?
There is but the cost is way, way higher from what I can tell. If I want a customized metal shielding with awkward shapes, I can just walk down to Shenzhen and have 10 people clamoring to make it. Does the US have the same?
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?
Why wouldn't it? There's a lot of research going into AI alignment, which means finding the best way to train an that AI isn't going to get in the way of making the people training it as wealthy as possible.
I mean of course the universe has no need to be fair - that's a frankly asinine observation in the context of a discussion about social policy and resource distribution.
the universe doesn't require opposition to slavery either but I'll be bold and assume you oppose it anyway
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
This is not a particularly new struggle: Jimmy Carter installed American-made solar water panels on the White House in 1979, then Reagan tore them out.
It's a lot more complicated than that -- Solar is great for discretionary, opportunistic, and time-shiftable additive demand, but not for replacing all-day baseline load. Using solar to dip into baseline demand sometimes is catastrophic, because the "profit" is exploiting its failure to provide consistent, reliable power but charging "default" prices that have an implicy assumption that power is consistent and reliable.
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.
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
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.
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.
They cherrypicked 15 countries. And still, some of those still had renewables decrease since 2000 like Nigeria, others saw an increase but it's still way less than fossil, and others like China are heavily subsidizing solar. I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.
The "world" chart shows an increase from 19% renewal to 34%. Did they cherry-pick that? (Also, "European Union" is more than one country.)
> I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.
Does that distinguish renewables from fossil fuels? Haven't governments been essentially subsidizing fossil fuels (not least by allowing environmental externalities to be ignored) for as long as they've been in use?
Because a lot of countries in the world, especially the EU, are subsidizing solar. That doesn't make it economical.
Externalities ignored from fossil fuels, yes. That's not a subsidy though. I'm not saying they should ignore it, but if they do, they aren't the ones who pay for it.
Look at Australia then. Millions of homes already using solar yo basically power their homes for free most of the time. Yes it was subsidized, like oil was and still is. Solar without subsidies is already miles better than oil and gas.
Australia is a rich country that subsidizes solar, and they're still 90% fossil according to their Wikipedia article, so idk why the mismatch with this article.
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.
I get the gas turbine for semi-temp power when there's not enough grid support, but Google leadership is talking about doing this long-term and at scale: https://www.gstatic.com/marketing-cms/79/80/fb229abf40efa81e... . Not a single mention of "solar" or "renewable" in there. Are they just trying to appease Trump administration?
Google may not have written about it in that document, but they're funding what will be the highest storage capacity battery system in the world for a renewable-powered data center in Minnesota:
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.
They might be, but if they are, it's because a new administration might subsidize solar again. Meanwhile Trump seems like he'd be against solar even if it were economical, I guess cause oil companies.
What makes me pessimistic is even during Biden's administration, these companies made meaningless pledges more than actual changes. This suggests that the most profitable thing to them is fossil.
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!
"Solar PV with storage = solar PV installation paired with four-hour duration battery storage, scaled to 20% of the output capacity of the solar PV."
Sometime the sun goes away for more than 4hrs.
That may be OK for closed-ended systems (turn off the science at night and during storms), but not for open-ended systems with diverse user demand.
4hour batteries are competitive with gas peakers to match high demand during and after sunny times, but solar needs gas peakers or similar to over for non-sunny times.
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
Not sure what you’re talking about here. We can’t replace all energy needs with solar but it’s clearly one of the cheapest energy sources and with the added benefit of low capital expense to get started so you can set it up in distributed grids without the massive expenditure to support nuclear installations.
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.
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'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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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
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.
I think people are missing what this really is: Google giving some of its most senior engineers the best retirement home to keep them away from competitors. This isn’t in jest; I wish i could make enough money to not care for more from my job and then do research after i get old. Its honestly a brilliant move.
I am siding with the "intelligence is not the bottleneck" crowd. Science takes more than reading literature and making a hypothesis. You have to run the experiment. And that is where messy reality will crush the naive, and resist any attempt to package it up into a factory-like innovation engine. But they will take your money, should you have some to invest.
I’m not sure that I agree entirely with your framing here, yes, you do at some point need to correct your assumptions with external evidence. But clearly there have been many individuals throughout history who have had incredibly out sized impact in their respective fields as a consequence of the quality of their reasoning.
I'm a scientist. On the one hand I take some comfort in thinking that I will always have an advantage in the lab. On the other hand I'm not taking anything for granted. And my advantage in the lab has to translate into an employer being smart enough to keep me around until if and when the AI takes over, which kind of translates into their investors wanting to keep me around.
We know what happened to manufacturing when investors were no longer interested in it.
Seems like Karpathy was largely focused on ML / SWE research rather than the other domains this group is after. Still, hard to imagine they were not influenced by autoresearch.
Andrej, if you're around, please share your thoughts on Discovery Loop.
That is also what I understand from that page. Autoresearch is the closest thing we (mainstream audience) know of but I am sure there is already an active research literature around it.
Doubtlessly, AI can iterate at superhuman speeds in the domains of thought and design: Software, mathematical proofs, literature search.
But in the realm of experiment? Alas it is the lack of a body that constrains it.
Rather than transcendence what AI requires is immanence. In the human flesh may we find the godhead living among men. Let the laboratories, warehouses, and factories fill with the sound of its labor, as it builds a wall with a million hands that are not its own.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
In my area (pharma) what it looks like is this:
A human defines a high-level research objective. "Identify a protein target that causes disease in humans, and find a molecule that binds to, and disables, that protein, eliminating the disease".
That objective then gets loaded into an ML model that spits out an experimental protocol. A protocol can be as simple as: "make 1 million test tubes, each with the protein, and in each, a custom molecules, and look for test tubes that show some reaction of interest". It can be a lot more complicated (for some reason, biologists who run these systems always try to do the most challenging experiments first, while I tend to spend all my time demonstrating the system can pass basic controls first). The protocol is then loaded into a robotic work cell which has access to protein-making machines and drug making machines, and then it handles all the experimental details (which previously would have been done by a technician). It scales up far larger than individual technician, is much more reliable, and faster (in theory- all of these are aspirational goals right now). T he results of those experiments are used to fine tune the experimental protocol and run another round. You run this in a loop and the result is better drugs faster (again- in theory.)
This is already an active area of research with more resources going to into it every day. The fact that Jeff and Sanjay have chosen to bet on this approach should be no surprise. In many ways, this is exactly what I intended when I wrote the documents inside Google (15 years ago) that motivated Jeff and Sanjay to work on scientific computing problems, and my current company is already trying to figure out how to work with Discovery Loop.
"You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have pushed the anti-mass spectrometer to 105% power, causing a resonance cascade. This was a major oversight on my part."
You're halfway there, but the only impediment isn't on the side of the researchers. Many of these topics they're trying to solve involve human subject research. Even with tireless embodied researchers who work around the clock and don't require breaks, you can't make the thing you're studying happen faster. The biggest reason we use poor proxy measures for things like longevity and mortality research is the simple impracticality of finding two groups of randomly selected people, ensuring you can control their entire lives for 60 years, the only difference between them is one variable, and see who lives longer. Putting aside the ethics, even if you could find willing subjects and actually control their entire lives to that extent, it would still take 60 years to gather the data you need. It doesn't make any difference whether robots or humans are running the program.
One of my favorite books from the past few decades is The Extravagant Universe, written by one of the astronomers who helped discover dark energy and develop the current most-accepted model of cosmology. I love this book because of the emphasis on physical process in astronomy. Part of the reason it took decades to study this problem is they need to collect data from supernovae. Those only happen so often in places we're looking. You can't automate alignment of the heavens. It happens when it happens.
As a scientist, I can confirm. Reality will likely kick their assess. Intelligence and creativity is not the bottleneck. Great scientists have 50 good ideas for every one they actually manage to execute on the grant->experiment->manuscript haul.
You can use simulators. However the problem is that if you're for example running material science experiments, those simulations will consume a lot of compute and take weeks, so spamming different approaches in the way an agent tends to work might not work quite as well.
Work for a manufacturing company, and we spend a lot of time creating surrogate models for physical simulations. Huge speed ups, 100-1000x possible. You end up still using the “real” simulation for validation, but you can run orders of magnitude more simulations for early design and refinement first.
> Our mission is straightforward: we are building AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering.
Right. What about the scientific hardware (instruments, sensors, robotics)? Partnerships with existing research institutions? Dealing with restricted data?
Modernizing science is a lot more complicated than just optimizing the inner experimental loop, but their hiring page implies it's a pure ML lab focused mainly on model development.
Note that Jeff and crew have cleverly structured their company to avoid problematic uses of AI (e.g., weapons or tracking humans). I suspect that many top researchers will want to work there for this reason, and to work with other top researchers who have a history of delivering results.
In short, they are in the business of using AI to automate the discovery of useful knowledge, not to sell general-purpose AI capabilities that could be directly used in troubling ways.
The question is what they plan on doing with all their scientific knowledge once they succeed.
Sure, they'll keep it internal for a while to make sure their knowledge bank is more thorough than everyone else's, and because oftentimes discoveries can be far more convincing internally than externally (you need fewer sigmas for it to update your belief in a certain direction). But then how do they intend to profit from it in the end?
Maybe a little naive for this but given the decades Jeff Dean and Sanjay have been contributing to so many things in the industry and never heard a bad word about either, they never seemed to reach for attention or self promote, going to give them a little more of a cachet of trust.
So does more efficient cooking methods, but that is not the primary focus.
As opposed to say weapons systems or targeting systems, which are really only for military use.
The military needs a lot of things that other people need, and some things that only the military needs. If you don't work on the things only the military needs, I think you're in the clear.
Do you believe that securing cyberspace is problematic solely because it has military implications? I mean, everything has military implications. That fact doesn't imply, however, that those things are bad for society.
In essence I agree with that, it's just that cyber-security has particularly been the focus of recent military discourse.
Just yesterday I was reading an article here in the Romanian mainstream media about how Constanta Port's (our biggest port at the Black Sea) IT infrastructure has been under constant cyber attacks (presumably by the Russians) so as to hinder the export of Ukrainian grains through it. And this is just one of the many such (relatively) recent examples.
Securing cyberspace matters to everyone. Defending critical infrastructure or design of tactical cyber-offense is reasonably in scope for military work.
However, reducing (or rather limiting the increase of) PII leakage and impact of ransomware activities is much closer to day-to-day mainstreet of most people.
Anyone committed to advancing science should care about this regardless of its potential contributions to defense.
This is very cool. It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery. So often we find things that are "this could have been done 20 years ago" and with an indefatigable searcher perhaps we'll close all those things. Though it does remind me of that Ted Chiang (I think) story where humans and superhumans coexist and all the science of the former is meta-studies of the work of the latter.
That founding team is insane. Very excited to see what happens here. I really like that they do not mention AGI or anything like that. Their mission statement reads pretty pragmatic compared to other AI companies (the bar is very low…)
Maybe this is what happens when someone with Jeff Dean's standing tries to quit?
TBH, I'd rather have Jeff Dean working on the creepiest-possible tech for ICE than joining the race to automate AI research. Automating AI research is terrifying.
If you check out some sub-tweets from people in the org, it wasn't really all butterflies internally for a while. Sorry, really don't want to name people and give examples.
I’ve always felt that the idea that science is bottlenecked and therefore needs more automation only works for a very narrow definition of what science is, and entails a very specific view on what it should be.
> only works for a very narrow definition of what science is
And so does academia. It's just that instead of AI and robotics, PhD students are thrown onto problems that are in large parts slightly tweaked reconfigurations of similar experiments.
Especially in chemistry, biochemistry, material sciences there is a large space of discoveries that are barely "novel" in an intellectually stimulating way, but still highly valuable that can be explored orders of magnitudes faster than is currently the case.
Yep. A communications professor where I did my MS says a 200usd/mo claude sub (which ant gives for free) does as much work as 5 grad students. It's mostly like you said, trying out new ideas rapidly.
Yes. They have grad students too. This is just like having more grad students that don't need to be trained so the work you can get done is not bottlenecked by the number of people you can train.
It's 90% to advance science via cheap labor and 10% to train a small group of future experts who will hire grad students to 90% advance science via cheap labor etc.
...
Yah, by funding and how we award it, not by an imaginary lack of undergrad and grad students. Scientific funding requires a shotgun approach and many national science funds try to pick winners as opposed to funding broadly. When the folks who researched bacteria in volcanic vents or the molecular biology of the Gila monster they never could have imagined the industries and markets they'd create let alone the lives they'd impact (i.e., PCR and GLP-1 agonists). Lots of grants require you to explain how the work is "translational" or has some sort of economic application (even if not explicitly), but that'll just get us faster horses or whatever the Ford quote is.
I truly believe if we took a measely $50b out of the LLM world we could create trillion dollar economies from basic research within 10 years. I personally know folks who have intuitive understanding of things that can't get funding to be studied. If we could keep the money away from university upper management, it'd cost $10b max.
Oh and while we're at it, $20b a year would house every homeless person in the US - there's a hell of a lot of extremely high intelligence and low social cohesion folks who can't handle the extractive punitive system we have. Our ability to deliver opportunity to create lucky situations for ourselves is getting worse and worse
$50B is essentially 100% of the annual NIH budget, which funds the vast majority of JUST life sciences basic research. So you may want to update your beliefs
e: oh and while we're at it, California spent over $24 billion over a five-year period (2019–2024) specifically targeting homelessness
This is one of the interesting aspects the 'AI job loss' community doesn't account for. As the technology unlocks things, more startups are created. And even at a lower nominal engineer-to-work ratio, overall demand for talent still goes up. Ultimately, we are not a single group trying to achieve a common outcome, we are a collection of many groups trying to compete against each other.
What percentage of people work at a startup though? Not just new/small business, which could include restaurants, local services, etc., but tech/science startups that would meaningfully benefit from AI.
I'd bet you could 10x the number and still be in low single digit percentages of the US workforce. And it seems pretty likely that AI-enabled startups will also employ less people per-startup.
If AI causes a white-collar jobs apocalypse, I don't think startups are picking up the slack, although it'll plausibly cushion the blow somewhat for top-performing tech workers.
Why are people so sour about this?? I can read the site easily, its clear, performs well on mobile, what else do you want? Why is so offensive to people that models trained on tailwind or whatever?
Some parts are pretty annoying to read... the paragraph beginning in "Our mission is straightforward:" has many lines with just 2-3 words, massive font, and tons of unused whitespace to the right. Changing the page/browser zoom doesn't seem to help much either.
To many people, myself included, who have to wade through huge amounts of low-quality AI slop which is actually a negative value: no-one benefits when non-experts fire-off one-shot LLM/agent prompts to produce PRs, reports, documentation or "journalism" riddled with imagined truth and factual errors - and the more that people like me have to evaluate these inputs for our job and how wrong they are it pisses us off - but also it means we pick-up on the hallmarks, tells and cliches of these low-effort, no-respect submissions - and now the litany of tells includes this beige-themed, blurred-backdrop-navbar corporate website look: theirs site looks like the 4 or so other LLM-generated, negative-value slop-farm sites I've wasted time on recently - all over the past few weeks.
So I'm saying that, without having known anything about what "Discovery Loop" is - or is not - but landing on their site and and seeing that beige colour and blurred-backdrop navbar, I immediately moved to close the tab; what kept me here was seeing the HN thread had over 100 comments by now and read more about it; if not for that then I wouldn't have given it further thought.
Having "that" beige site look with same the overused looks is either an unintentional indication that the site's author used a low-effort AI prompt to generate the site and that the content within is likely to be low-quality, low-value - or it's an intentional lure to appeal to those who uncritically share in the AI psychosis and so, I assume, are a good target to seek investment from even if it means losing the audience of cynical Internet critics like myself because they know people like me won't be breathlessly repeating their vision-statement on LinkedIn and throwing money at them - kinda like how scam emails intentionally include mistakes for better audience selection. And both possibilities have unpleasant implications.
------
Anyway, regardless of the background of the team behind it, the way the project is described sounds exactly like the recursive-self-improvement and simulated-science thought-experiments from _that other website_ - it's the kind of thing I expect Angela Collier to brutally takedown in an amusing video.
If this was a design firm, it might matter. But this is mostly a hiring ad for engineers, and a landing page for VC. I'd judge them more if they actually put effort into it.
"The site itself demonstrates the team is spending their money in the places that matter, and using quick solutions for the stuff they need but isn't mission critical"
That's a great point.
If you know how to promote and work with AI to create novel solutions to hard problems. Why can't you prompt it to at least make a better website?
LawZero, Yoshua Bengio’s startup, also proposes to automate scientific research and experimentation, from the perspective of safety, by being explicitly “non-agentic”:
with billion dollar seed rounds becoming the norm, it seems like there's no longer an advantage to build from within these bloated giants. can be much nimbler and have access to the same budget out the gates
Discovery and optimization are very different processes. Optimization is the process of finding the shortest path to a goal. Discovery is the process of stumbling on new goals and redrawing the map of what's possible.
Ambitious goals and new discoveries happen via novelty-based search. Progress in scientific discovery is measured by how different/interesting the outcomes are, not by closeness to a predetermined goal.
Discovery is a creative search that preserves optionality, whereas optimization restricts optionality. In other words, you usually don't discover anything novel unless you're trying new things that don't appear connected to the goal in the first place. Would an ML optimization loop have discovered transformers?
> would an ML optimization loop have discovered transformers?
I think that’s exactly the kind of problem this group is looking to solve. You make a compelling intuitive argument, but that’s not the same thing as a proof
1. There’s some irreducible costs in terms of time and material in the physical world that are not amenable to the kind of optimization or parallelization or even just the raw speedup from Moore’s law or computational architecture improvements we’re used to with software. My experience is primarily in biology, where the examples here are things like “it takes 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate” - it has taken 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate for a billion years, and next year it will still take E. coli 20 minutes to replicate, no matter how good your software stack is. Similarly, it takes X amount of energy to grow enough E. coli to produce a meaningful result, and that energy costs money, whether it’s in the form of glycerine or heat or whatever you want, and that also won’t materially reduce in the same kinds of “orders of magnitude” sense we’re used to from software, which is what we’re usually expecting to make the economics of these things work out.
2. Complicating the above, physical systems are phenomenally multivariate - far, far more than you think, and biological systems especially are just unbelievably complex - which means the number of experiments and the length and duration of those experiments you need to run to get enough data to be reasonably confident you’re seeing genuine signal is Way higher than you think.
Combine those two things and what you get is a money furnace, even before you get to the AI model training part, which is Also a money furnace. There’s low hanging fruits in all this, there’s areas where automating the approach can be really valuable, but typically the moment you turn this machine on, you’re gonna start burning money at a rate that would embarrass a finance bro on a coke bender, and that’s effectively unavoidable because the real world is not amenable to software’s scaling laws.
Interestingly, one list identifies "AI" as a top world problem! One person's problem is another person's solution, I guess--and vice versa, as well.
An extreme example: curing a disease is good for patients but bad for the healthcare industry--which is (in kind) also bad for healthcare workers and everyone in science working on cures.
> we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on, including multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google News, Google Translate, Google File System, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, Pathways, TPUs, AlphaChip, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold, Gemini, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, sequence-to-sequence models, chain of thought reasoning, neural architecture search, and multiple generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) among others.
This looks like a realization of "benevolent self conscious AIs agreeing to cooperate with mankind to do great stuff". Often in these tales, there is a hidden cost to it: the AI has its own agenda, or does crazy experiments with humans mind/brain. I'm wondering what shape will take that plot twist in reality :)
This reminds me of Three body problem and how the scientist discovered the high strength wire was through quick physical experiments and use them as input to an AI model to determine if it works.
I know these sorts of meta comments are often frowned upon, but good god do I hate this approach of fading in every individual element on scroll down the page. It's one of my biggest pet peeves of "modern" web sites.
I mean what are they doing right now at Google? Optimizing data centres? Pretty lame compared to this. Even if they completely fail, i'm sure there'll be good lessons.
The problem is all these new labs don't have any competitive advanatge amongst each other, talent can only take one so far, though Jeff is a legend no doubt.
Models are commodities the applications eg. BaseTen, OpenRouter should capture the value.
Model routers - send all of your data through a third party who totally swears not to peek at it.
If youre doing anything high value (advanced research, classified work, high value industrial research, health data) then sending your data through a third party like that is insane.
Best option by what metric? For which enterprises. I say this having worked at an “enterprise” where this was not a good option. For (lack of) talent/expertise, budget, infrastructure, and actual value relative to the eventual bottom line.
Still, to get results from that you need someone who can create a decent finetune. That might not be realistic, but it very well could be realistic to have someone optimize some prompts and curate a knowledge base. Point is, its a possibility but “best” depends on the nuances of reality.
I have used something similar. I set up a team of agents that researches, proposes, builds and audits. Then rinse and repeat. I have used it for different topics. It hasn’t made me a millionaire, but I haven’t lost money either - so that’s some sort of win, right? But I would not have been able to ideate, test at that speed and quality without an LLM.
> 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.
Imagine a future where only the anointed few elite minds can participate in science and engineering. Btw we’re hiring.
This is basically something scientists have been alarming about for the past year: We're moving into a future where science may be tiered into the haves (those with access to premium compute) and the have nots (hoi polloi with restricted access), which in turn could seriously influence what kind of science we'll get.
Worst case, we'll get science that is completely dependent on business and politics.
EDIT: I should note, this comment was aimed at a more general case.
From the self-stated bios, this group consists solely of CS guys. No biologist, physicist, linguist, chemist, biophysicist to be found. Based on this observation alone I call nonsense. These is AI bullshittery. These guys aren’t close enough to the problems to understand the challenges.
Source: PhD Computational biophysicist turned experimentalist. I work with genuine scientists across a range of disciplines from neurodegeneration, cancer, to fibrosis. Getting in the lab and generating data is absolutely key, among other things.
“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. By automating the loops of discovery, the world will be able to make much more rapid advances across countless fields of science.”
The key point is these jackasses explicitly state, “ a handful of people” can replace “massive teams of scientists and engineers”.
These guys don’t even understand the nature of the challenge and neither do you apparently. If they did, they would realize that it indeed does require “massive teams of engineers and scientists” to solve our most pressing problems.
I'm skeptical of any Engineering loop that doesn't include reality (as in touch grass) feedback. Pure logic and reasoning is the domain of Maths and Science (philosophy). Surely it will work, but it will not "be able to solve any learning loop".
Jesus, he left Google to do what everyone else is already trying to do? He must be so insulated he doesn’t realize what the real world is actually up to. I mean, organizations started on this exact same mission three or four years ago. Or longer. I suppose it’s better to wake up later than never.
You know when the page has all-caps "01 — THE APPROACH" that it is slopified. I guess I shouldn't be astounded, but I am, that world-class talents with world-class backing are just taking default LLM output and saying, "okay looks fine".
"the benefits of science and technology to the world" just like AI has brought such benefits? Because I haven't seen them, for example it hasn't helped reduce inequality (nor poverty), or reduce climate change, or pollution, or daily stress, if anything it seems to be worsening some of these issues.
So forgive me if I'm skeptic when renowned AI scholars claim to start something for "the benefits of science and technology", because it really seems like we have very different definitions of these words.
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.
Yes but science is well-structures and practically designed about repeatability so its a lot easier to automate than "softer" disciplines.
> "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?
There is but the cost is way, way higher from what I can tell. If I want a customized metal shielding with awkward shapes, I can just walk down to Shenzhen and have 10 people clamoring to make it. Does the US have the same?
>>> 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?
Is science hard to distil?
Why would the AI put up with this exploitation too?
Why do hammers put up with being smashed into nails all day?
because once you're a hammer, you're just biding your time to smash a skull.
they don't. like every thing they wear away in some proportion to their use and replicate in some proportion to their usefulness to other things.
AIs are (going to be) agents, not tools.
And what's the difference?
Agents act on their own. If the hammer looked at what you wanted nailed and said, "Sorry, Dave, I can't do that."
There are degrees of autonomy, of course, and not all noncompliance is bad. Same as with humans; biological agents.
So, the difference is that you need to delete a few bad training runs?
But it seems much easier to realign an agent until it complies. Or ditch it and grab a new one.
Why wouldn't it? There's a lot of research going into AI alignment, which means finding the best way to train an that AI isn't going to get in the way of making the people training it as wealthy as possible.
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?
There is no "should" there are only "is" or "is not"
The universe has no need to be fair.
Sure, but almost everyone already knows this. It’s not hugely relevant in a discussion about how things could be better.
It says that we have to fight for whatever rights we think how things "should" be, they're not just gonna happen.
I think people, broadly, have driven life to be fairer, and that we should continue to do so
There are evolutionary benefits to groups that cooperate and improve fairness internally.
But if an AI surpasses humans in every way, is there any evolutionary benefit for the AI to cooperate with humans?
The topic was why should only some people benefit from AI. Not why would AI cooperate with humans.
> The universe has no need to be fair.
Human societies have a strong need for fairness, however. Unfair societies collapse.
This is how you get the french revolution.
I mean of course the universe has no need to be fair - that's a frankly asinine observation in the context of a discussion about social policy and resource distribution.
the universe doesn't require opposition to slavery either but I'll be bold and assume you oppose it anyway
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?
It's what the vast majority of software engineers have been doing for decades in practice, and i guess pretending they weren't?
They only seem to care now because it affects them.
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.
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.
Is this the Galleria test?
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.
This is not a particularly new struggle: Jimmy Carter installed American-made solar water panels on the White House in 1979, then Reagan tore them out.
Improving panels or batteries (e.g. through automated material discovery) would make solar energy economical in a lot more regions.
Solar is not (yet) economical for reliable, year-round electricity because of storage costs. China coal use is growing again this year.
Solar is profitable to install at both industrial and home scale in most areas. You're moving the goalposts.
It would be even better if it had ROI in 2 years instead of 10 for northern installs.
It's a lot more complicated than that -- Solar is great for discretionary, opportunistic, and time-shiftable additive demand, but not for replacing all-day baseline load. Using solar to dip into baseline demand sometimes is catastrophic, because the "profit" is exploiting its failure to provide consistent, reliable power but charging "default" prices that have an implicy assumption that power is consistent and reliable.
Where do you find the information for 2026?
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.
> 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.
This was basically solved by massive subsidies from the Chinese government.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-clean-tech-developing-cou...
That's solved by either private monopoly charging money to fund investment, or public monopoly raising taxes to fund investment.
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.
They cherrypicked 15 countries. And still, some of those still had renewables decrease since 2000 like Nigeria, others saw an increase but it's still way less than fossil, and others like China are heavily subsidizing solar. I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.
> They cherrypicked 15 countries.
The "world" chart shows an increase from 19% renewal to 34%. Did they cherry-pick that? (Also, "European Union" is more than one country.)
> I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.
Does that distinguish renewables from fossil fuels? Haven't governments been essentially subsidizing fossil fuels (not least by allowing environmental externalities to be ignored) for as long as they've been in use?
Because a lot of countries in the world, especially the EU, are subsidizing solar. That doesn't make it economical.
Externalities ignored from fossil fuels, yes. That's not a subsidy though. I'm not saying they should ignore it, but if they do, they aren't the ones who pay for it.
Look at Australia then. Millions of homes already using solar yo basically power their homes for free most of the time. Yes it was subsidized, like oil was and still is. Solar without subsidies is already miles better than oil and gas.
Australia is a rich country that subsidizes solar, and they're still 90% fossil according to their Wikipedia article, so idk why the mismatch with this article.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity to put in an edit with the Wikipedia page then :)
Oof. What's going on here in Canada with that recent uptick? Last I checked it seemed like all the trends were good.
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.
I get the gas turbine for semi-temp power when there's not enough grid support, but Google leadership is talking about doing this long-term and at scale: https://www.gstatic.com/marketing-cms/79/80/fb229abf40efa81e... . Not a single mention of "solar" or "renewable" in there. Are they just trying to appease Trump administration?
Google may not have written about it in that document, but they're funding what will be the highest storage capacity battery system in the world for a renewable-powered data center in Minnesota:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/worlds-largest-grid-battery...
That's great news then, I hope they continue in that direction.
> poor ones are basically not using it.
I don't think that's true: https://rmi.org/resources/the-global-souths-cleantech-revolu...
"RMI drives investment to scale clean energy solutions"
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.
That's why I'm surprised, they're doing like 100% gas.
Also wouldn't be surprised if they are just waiting for a new US administration.
They might be, but if they are, it's because a new administration might subsidize solar again. Meanwhile Trump seems like he'd be against solar even if it were economical, I guess cause oil companies.
What makes me pessimistic is even during Biden's administration, these companies made meaningless pledges more than actual changes. This suggests that the most profitable thing to them is fossil.
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.
Yes It is. Even including batteries:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lcoe-and-valu...
"Solar PV with storage = solar PV installation paired with four-hour duration battery storage, scaled to 20% of the output capacity of the solar PV."
Sometime the sun goes away for more than 4hrs.
That may be OK for closed-ended systems (turn off the science at night and during storms), but not for open-ended systems with diverse user demand.
4hour batteries are competitive with gas peakers to match high demand during and after sunny times, but solar needs gas peakers or similar to over for non-sunny times.
That's going to drop a lot as sodium-ion batteries go into large-scale production.
Yep - people act as if innovation has halted in the face of ridicule.
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
https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...
Not sure what you’re talking about here. We can’t replace all energy needs with solar but it’s clearly one of the cheapest energy sources and with the added benefit of low capital expense to get started so you can set it up in distributed grids without the massive expenditure to support nuclear installations.
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
Not to say we shouldn't grow plants... But we can do it 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more efficiently with machines.
We can?
Yes, plant more trees!
That's what he was trying to imply
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 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.
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
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.
compute resources are scarce and folks are fighting over scraps at this point.
My thoughts exactly
For all we know, they could have been successfully working on "10. Prevent Nuclear Terror" for the last 80+ years.
I think people are missing what this really is: Google giving some of its most senior engineers the best retirement home to keep them away from competitors. This isn’t in jest; I wish i could make enough money to not care for more from my job and then do research after i get old. Its honestly a brilliant move.
I am siding with the "intelligence is not the bottleneck" crowd. Science takes more than reading literature and making a hypothesis. You have to run the experiment. And that is where messy reality will crush the naive, and resist any attempt to package it up into a factory-like innovation engine. But they will take your money, should you have some to invest.
I’m not sure that I agree entirely with your framing here, yes, you do at some point need to correct your assumptions with external evidence. But clearly there have been many individuals throughout history who have had incredibly out sized impact in their respective fields as a consequence of the quality of their reasoning.
I'm a scientist. On the one hand I take some comfort in thinking that I will always have an advantage in the lab. On the other hand I'm not taking anything for granted. And my advantage in the lab has to translate into an employer being smart enough to keep me around until if and when the AI takes over, which kind of translates into their investors wanting to keep me around.
We know what happened to manufacturing when investors were no longer interested in it.
This seems to be an institutional, massively scaled version of https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch.
In March Karpathy described this direction:
Tweet is protected but in SERP caches: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2030705271627284816Seems like Karpathy was largely focused on ML / SWE research rather than the other domains this group is after. Still, hard to imagine they were not influenced by autoresearch.
Andrej, if you're around, please share your thoughts on Discovery Loop.
That's a very silly comparison, there are many startups working on RSI, karpathy is just a basic version to try the concept (similar to his gpt work)
this is like saying taylor swift must have been influenced by justin timberlake because they both dance on stage sometimes.
That is also what I understand from that page. Autoresearch is the closest thing we (mainstream audience) know of but I am sure there is already an active research literature around it.
How do you automate experimentation?
Doubtlessly, AI can iterate at superhuman speeds in the domains of thought and design: Software, mathematical proofs, literature search.
But in the realm of experiment? Alas it is the lack of a body that constrains it.
Rather than transcendence what AI requires is immanence. In the human flesh may we find the godhead living among men. Let the laboratories, warehouses, and factories fill with the sound of its labor, as it builds a wall with a million hands that are not its own.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
In my area (pharma) what it looks like is this: A human defines a high-level research objective. "Identify a protein target that causes disease in humans, and find a molecule that binds to, and disables, that protein, eliminating the disease".
That objective then gets loaded into an ML model that spits out an experimental protocol. A protocol can be as simple as: "make 1 million test tubes, each with the protein, and in each, a custom molecules, and look for test tubes that show some reaction of interest". It can be a lot more complicated (for some reason, biologists who run these systems always try to do the most challenging experiments first, while I tend to spend all my time demonstrating the system can pass basic controls first). The protocol is then loaded into a robotic work cell which has access to protein-making machines and drug making machines, and then it handles all the experimental details (which previously would have been done by a technician). It scales up far larger than individual technician, is much more reliable, and faster (in theory- all of these are aspirational goals right now). T he results of those experiments are used to fine tune the experimental protocol and run another round. You run this in a loop and the result is better drugs faster (again- in theory.)
This is already an active area of research with more resources going to into it every day. The fact that Jeff and Sanjay have chosen to bet on this approach should be no surprise. In many ways, this is exactly what I intended when I wrote the documents inside Google (15 years ago) that motivated Jeff and Sanjay to work on scientific computing problems, and my current company is already trying to figure out how to work with Discovery Loop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments
would love to see how AI can automate the construction of the next high energy particle collider
"You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have pushed the anti-mass spectrometer to 105% power, causing a resonance cascade. This was a major oversight on my part."
But I always wanted to try headcrab souffle.
You're halfway there, but the only impediment isn't on the side of the researchers. Many of these topics they're trying to solve involve human subject research. Even with tireless embodied researchers who work around the clock and don't require breaks, you can't make the thing you're studying happen faster. The biggest reason we use poor proxy measures for things like longevity and mortality research is the simple impracticality of finding two groups of randomly selected people, ensuring you can control their entire lives for 60 years, the only difference between them is one variable, and see who lives longer. Putting aside the ethics, even if you could find willing subjects and actually control their entire lives to that extent, it would still take 60 years to gather the data you need. It doesn't make any difference whether robots or humans are running the program.
One of my favorite books from the past few decades is The Extravagant Universe, written by one of the astronomers who helped discover dark energy and develop the current most-accepted model of cosmology. I love this book because of the emphasis on physical process in astronomy. Part of the reason it took decades to study this problem is they need to collect data from supernovae. Those only happen so often in places we're looking. You can't automate alignment of the heavens. It happens when it happens.
As a scientist, I can confirm. Reality will likely kick their assess. Intelligence and creativity is not the bottleneck. Great scientists have 50 good ideas for every one they actually manage to execute on the grant->experiment->manuscript haul.
> transcendence
> immanence
somebody has been studying Christian theology!
More like someone taking LessWrong postings too seriously.
Beauty of human writing.
You can use simulators. However the problem is that if you're for example running material science experiments, those simulations will consume a lot of compute and take weeks, so spamming different approaches in the way an agent tends to work might not work quite as well.
Work for a manufacturing company, and we spend a lot of time creating surrogate models for physical simulations. Huge speed ups, 100-1000x possible. You end up still using the “real” simulation for validation, but you can run orders of magnitude more simulations for early design and refinement first.
Building "simulators" that use ML/AI instead of running the calculations every step is a thing.
Throw the research loop at the simulator first then
Really seems to embrace the "Making the world a better place by <<extremely convoluted, highly technical, jargon loaded mission statement>>"
Which part of it is highly technical or jargon loaded?
I think it was a Neal Stephenson quote from cryptobimicon.
It certainly increases shareholder value.
Most parts of it are for the average person, but I guess you could argue the audience isn’t the average person
"Our mission is straightforward" continued by the most complex sentence on that page. Wondering what the definition of straightforward is now
> Our mission is straightforward: we are building AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering.
Genuinely curious which part you found complex.
We are building _ solutions
(building solutions != building a thing. Can't you just say 'solving'?)
That can _ solve _ problems in _, domains
(Wait so the solutions are only the thing that solves the actual thing?)
Right. What about the scientific hardware (instruments, sensors, robotics)? Partnerships with existing research institutions? Dealing with restricted data?
Modernizing science is a lot more complicated than just optimizing the inner experimental loop, but their hiring page implies it's a pure ML lab focused mainly on model development.
Yeah. ML is all well and good, but how are they going to do the science their machines design? Atoms cost money.
Note that Jeff and crew have cleverly structured their company to avoid problematic uses of AI (e.g., weapons or tracking humans). I suspect that many top researchers will want to work there for this reason, and to work with other top researchers who have a history of delivering results.
> Note that Jeff and crew have cleverly structured their company to avoid problematic uses of AI
Do you have more sources/info on this?
They do not call attention to this aspect of their new company, but it is implicit in their business model:
https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724
In short, they are in the business of using AI to automate the discovery of useful knowledge, not to sell general-purpose AI capabilities that could be directly used in troubling ways.
The question is what they plan on doing with all their scientific knowledge once they succeed.
Sure, they'll keep it internal for a while to make sure their knowledge bank is more thorough than everyone else's, and because oftentimes discoveries can be far more convincing internally than externally (you need fewer sigmas for it to update your belief in a certain direction). But then how do they intend to profit from it in the end?
x2
All the "bad guys" of today were the "good guys" at some point in time. You even cheered for them back then.
Maybe a little naive for this but given the decades Jeff Dean and Sanjay have been contributing to so many things in the industry and never heard a bad word about either, they never seemed to reach for attention or self promote, going to give them a little more of a cachet of trust.
Like how OpenAI is (was?) structured as a nonprofit?
There's this somewhere on that page:
> securing cyberspace,
which has clear military implications, at least in today's age.
So does more efficient cooking methods, but that is not the primary focus.
As opposed to say weapons systems or targeting systems, which are really only for military use.
The military needs a lot of things that other people need, and some things that only the military needs. If you don't work on the things only the military needs, I think you're in the clear.
Do you believe that securing cyberspace is problematic solely because it has military implications? I mean, everything has military implications. That fact doesn't imply, however, that those things are bad for society.
> I mean, everything has military implications
In essence I agree with that, it's just that cyber-security has particularly been the focus of recent military discourse.
Just yesterday I was reading an article here in the Romanian mainstream media about how Constanta Port's (our biggest port at the Black Sea) IT infrastructure has been under constant cyber attacks (presumably by the Russians) so as to hinder the export of Ukrainian grains through it. And this is just one of the many such (relatively) recent examples.
Securing cyberspace matters to everyone. Defending critical infrastructure or design of tactical cyber-offense is reasonably in scope for military work.
However, reducing (or rather limiting the increase of) PII leakage and impact of ransomware activities is much closer to day-to-day mainstreet of most people.
Anyone committed to advancing science should care about this regardless of its potential contributions to defense.
This is very cool. It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery. So often we find things that are "this could have been done 20 years ago" and with an indefatigable searcher perhaps we'll close all those things. Though it does remind me of that Ted Chiang (I think) story where humans and superhumans coexist and all the science of the former is meta-studies of the work of the latter.
> It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery.
And ... it might not.
True, nothing might be anything. But I'm an optimist :)
Sure - and knowing what is not possible with current tech is a nice datapoint to have.
That founding team is insane. Very excited to see what happens here. I really like that they do not mention AGI or anything like that. Their mission statement reads pretty pragmatic compared to other AI companies (the bar is very low…)
Someone who left DeepMind over Google's agreement to provide military AI to the US government tried to get Jeff Dean to quit too:
https://turntrout.com/why-i-left-google-deepmind
Maybe this is what happens when someone with Jeff Dean's standing tries to quit?
TBH, I'd rather have Jeff Dean working on the creepiest-possible tech for ICE than joining the race to automate AI research. Automating AI research is terrifying.
If you check out some sub-tweets from people in the org, it wasn't really all butterflies internally for a while. Sorry, really don't want to name people and give examples.
> Automating AI research is terrifying.
what why?
Skynet.
I’ve always felt that the idea that science is bottlenecked and therefore needs more automation only works for a very narrow definition of what science is, and entails a very specific view on what it should be.
> only works for a very narrow definition of what science is
And so does academia. It's just that instead of AI and robotics, PhD students are thrown onto problems that are in large parts slightly tweaked reconfigurations of similar experiments.
Especially in chemistry, biochemistry, material sciences there is a large space of discoveries that are barely "novel" in an intellectually stimulating way, but still highly valuable that can be explored orders of magnitudes faster than is currently the case.
That is true, I’ve seen people do biochemistry and geology work, and it did look very mind-numbing.
Then again, gassing rats and taking biopsies is not something you can do with AI.
> Then again, gassing rats and taking biopsies is not something you can do with AI.
Also, like, let’s maybe _not_ make the “gassing and cutting living organisms open” AI? Let’s just leave that particular genie in its bottle?
Unfortunately, that's most of science. I don't see these AI systems doing reproducible experiments in "meatspace" any time soon.
Yep. A communications professor where I did my MS says a 200usd/mo claude sub (which ant gives for free) does as much work as 5 grad students. It's mostly like you said, trying out new ideas rapidly.
The purpose of hiring grad students isn’t to advance science, it’s to train experts.
Yes. They have grad students too. This is just like having more grad students that don't need to be trained so the work you can get done is not bottlenecked by the number of people you can train.
It's 90% to advance science via cheap labor and 10% to train a small group of future experts who will hire grad students to 90% advance science via cheap labor etc. ...
Lets keep your comment out of the VC pitch deck shall we?
> Scientific discovery is bottlenecked.
Yah, by funding and how we award it, not by an imaginary lack of undergrad and grad students. Scientific funding requires a shotgun approach and many national science funds try to pick winners as opposed to funding broadly. When the folks who researched bacteria in volcanic vents or the molecular biology of the Gila monster they never could have imagined the industries and markets they'd create let alone the lives they'd impact (i.e., PCR and GLP-1 agonists). Lots of grants require you to explain how the work is "translational" or has some sort of economic application (even if not explicitly), but that'll just get us faster horses or whatever the Ford quote is.
I truly believe if we took a measely $50b out of the LLM world we could create trillion dollar economies from basic research within 10 years. I personally know folks who have intuitive understanding of things that can't get funding to be studied. If we could keep the money away from university upper management, it'd cost $10b max.
Oh and while we're at it, $20b a year would house every homeless person in the US - there's a hell of a lot of extremely high intelligence and low social cohesion folks who can't handle the extractive punitive system we have. Our ability to deliver opportunity to create lucky situations for ourselves is getting worse and worse
$50B is essentially 100% of the annual NIH budget, which funds the vast majority of JUST life sciences basic research. So you may want to update your beliefs
e: oh and while we're at it, California spent over $24 billion over a five-year period (2019–2024) specifically targeting homelessness
Yes! But if science is bottlenecked by funding, making it cheaper might help?
Not really. Grad students are already essentially working for free.
How many lavishly-paid deans and bureaucrats and administrators are employed for each grad student?
Generally universities take half the grant from the start and that's before taking fringe on top of salaries.
It's not easy to disentangle and it varies by country and institution, but those positions are not normally directly funded by public research grants.
LLMs can't materialize funds or political will so let's stick to running GPUs hot and publishing papers. The citations will be amazing. /s
For sure made with Claude code for front end, but I’m excited to see where they go
This is one of the interesting aspects the 'AI job loss' community doesn't account for. As the technology unlocks things, more startups are created. And even at a lower nominal engineer-to-work ratio, overall demand for talent still goes up. Ultimately, we are not a single group trying to achieve a common outcome, we are a collection of many groups trying to compete against each other.
What percentage of people work at a startup though? Not just new/small business, which could include restaurants, local services, etc., but tech/science startups that would meaningfully benefit from AI.
I'd bet you could 10x the number and still be in low single digit percentages of the US workforce. And it seems pretty likely that AI-enabled startups will also employ less people per-startup.
If AI causes a white-collar jobs apocalypse, I don't think startups are picking up the slack, although it'll plausibly cushion the blow somewhat for top-performing tech workers.
The site itself is really leaning into the “made with Fable” aesthetic
Why are people so sour about this?? I can read the site easily, its clear, performs well on mobile, what else do you want? Why is so offensive to people that models trained on tailwind or whatever?
Some parts are pretty annoying to read... the paragraph beginning in "Our mission is straightforward:" has many lines with just 2-3 words, massive font, and tons of unused whitespace to the right. Changing the page/browser zoom doesn't seem to help much either.
> Why are people so sour about this?
To many people, myself included, who have to wade through huge amounts of low-quality AI slop which is actually a negative value: no-one benefits when non-experts fire-off one-shot LLM/agent prompts to produce PRs, reports, documentation or "journalism" riddled with imagined truth and factual errors - and the more that people like me have to evaluate these inputs for our job and how wrong they are it pisses us off - but also it means we pick-up on the hallmarks, tells and cliches of these low-effort, no-respect submissions - and now the litany of tells includes this beige-themed, blurred-backdrop-navbar corporate website look: theirs site looks like the 4 or so other LLM-generated, negative-value slop-farm sites I've wasted time on recently - all over the past few weeks.
So I'm saying that, without having known anything about what "Discovery Loop" is - or is not - but landing on their site and and seeing that beige colour and blurred-backdrop navbar, I immediately moved to close the tab; what kept me here was seeing the HN thread had over 100 comments by now and read more about it; if not for that then I wouldn't have given it further thought.
Having "that" beige site look with same the overused looks is either an unintentional indication that the site's author used a low-effort AI prompt to generate the site and that the content within is likely to be low-quality, low-value - or it's an intentional lure to appeal to those who uncritically share in the AI psychosis and so, I assume, are a good target to seek investment from even if it means losing the audience of cynical Internet critics like myself because they know people like me won't be breathlessly repeating their vision-statement on LinkedIn and throwing money at them - kinda like how scam emails intentionally include mistakes for better audience selection. And both possibilities have unpleasant implications.
------
Anyway, regardless of the background of the team behind it, the way the project is described sounds exactly like the recursive-self-improvement and simulated-science thought-experiments from _that other website_ - it's the kind of thing I expect Angela Collier to brutally takedown in an amusing video.
Because it’s lame and aesthetics matter.
it's just a low effort snark comment, don't overthink it
If this was a design firm, it might matter. But this is mostly a hiring ad for engineers, and a landing page for VC. I'd judge them more if they actually put effort into it.
If their goal is to automate scientific discovery, why would they not automate building their website?
(Though, I do wish people would use just a few extra prompts to break out of the 'vibe-coded' look.)
let me rephrase that:
"The site itself demonstrates the team is spending their money in the places that matter, and using quick solutions for the stuff they need but isn't mission critical"
You could rephrase that again I guess:
"The team of AI pioneers lacks the basic prompt-writing capability to make their marketing landing page not look like AI slop."
I, personally, don't hate it. It's a decently clean site, but it does invoke those thoughts in me too.
That's a great point. If you know how to promote and work with AI to create novel solutions to hard problems. Why can't you prompt it to at least make a better website?
At least it isn't dark purple.
LawZero, Yoshua Bengio’s startup, also proposes to automate scientific research and experimentation, from the perspective of safety, by being explicitly “non-agentic”:
https://lawzero.org/en/publication/scientist-ai-safe-design-...
with billion dollar seed rounds becoming the norm, it seems like there's no longer an advantage to build from within these bloated giants. can be much nimbler and have access to the same budget out the gates
Discovery and optimization are very different processes. Optimization is the process of finding the shortest path to a goal. Discovery is the process of stumbling on new goals and redrawing the map of what's possible.
Ambitious goals and new discoveries happen via novelty-based search. Progress in scientific discovery is measured by how different/interesting the outcomes are, not by closeness to a predetermined goal.
Discovery is a creative search that preserves optionality, whereas optimization restricts optionality. In other words, you usually don't discover anything novel unless you're trying new things that don't appear connected to the goal in the first place. Would an ML optimization loop have discovered transformers?
> would an ML optimization loop have discovered transformers?
I think that’s exactly the kind of problem this group is looking to solve. You make a compelling intuitive argument, but that’s not the same thing as a proof
Two to keep in mind with these kinds of things -
1. There’s some irreducible costs in terms of time and material in the physical world that are not amenable to the kind of optimization or parallelization or even just the raw speedup from Moore’s law or computational architecture improvements we’re used to with software. My experience is primarily in biology, where the examples here are things like “it takes 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate” - it has taken 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate for a billion years, and next year it will still take E. coli 20 minutes to replicate, no matter how good your software stack is. Similarly, it takes X amount of energy to grow enough E. coli to produce a meaningful result, and that energy costs money, whether it’s in the form of glycerine or heat or whatever you want, and that also won’t materially reduce in the same kinds of “orders of magnitude” sense we’re used to from software, which is what we’re usually expecting to make the economics of these things work out.
2. Complicating the above, physical systems are phenomenally multivariate - far, far more than you think, and biological systems especially are just unbelievably complex - which means the number of experiments and the length and duration of those experiments you need to run to get enough data to be reasonably confident you’re seeing genuine signal is Way higher than you think.
Combine those two things and what you get is a money furnace, even before you get to the AI model training part, which is Also a money furnace. There’s low hanging fruits in all this, there’s areas where automating the approach can be really valuable, but typically the moment you turn this machine on, you’re gonna start burning money at a rate that would embarrass a finance bro on a coke bender, and that’s effectively unavoidable because the real world is not amenable to software’s scaling laws.
Thats why you simulate e coli at 30x in a sim environment that fable slopped together. Duh
Here are just a few of viewpoints on what constitute world problems to solve:
https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_issues
https://encyclopedia.uia.org/
Interestingly, one list identifies "AI" as a top world problem! One person's problem is another person's solution, I guess--and vice versa, as well.
An extreme example: curing a disease is good for patients but bad for the healthcare industry--which is (in kind) also bad for healthcare workers and everyone in science working on cures.
No its not. Everyone dies. Healthcare is invoked in everyone's life. Generally the longer you live the more healthcare you'll need.
> we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on, including multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google News, Google Translate, Google File System, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, Pathways, TPUs, AlphaChip, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold, Gemini, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, sequence-to-sequence models, chain of thought reasoning, neural architecture search, and multiple generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) among others.
holy shit. I've known this, but...
By the middle of the 2030's the world we live in will be unrecognizable.
I agree, for better or for worse.
If I had to bet my money, it would be on "for worse".
No it won't, not in any real world touch grass, walk around downtown kinda way. The internet will have changed but so what
It will not be owned by top 1%?
Probably the top 1% AI.
I don't see any future reality where an ASI respects money piles.
That seems to be the one unchanged variable of time.
That’s a policy decision, don’t let them convince you otherwise.
The change is that it'll be owned by the top 0.0000001% who control the LLMs that will be your new boss.
Oh wow, that's a blow to Google, what's with the talent scarcity in ML. Though if this goes anywhere Google will likely buy them back.
Google is backing it.
Google down $160Bn so far since the leaving announcements. Those are some valuable people!
Google is literally at the same stock price it was on Monday. This is a normal daily fluctuation for them.
Surprised that Sanjay is the tallest among them.
He was born in the US not India, good food/nutrition must have played the part :)
This looks like a realization of "benevolent self conscious AIs agreeing to cooperate with mankind to do great stuff". Often in these tales, there is a hidden cost to it: the AI has its own agenda, or does crazy experiments with humans mind/brain. I'm wondering what shape will take that plot twist in reality :)
> Oriol Vinyals, Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeff Dean, Quoc Le
as founding members is crazy !
What's the business model of these startups?
"making solar energy economical"
judging by the amount being installed, it already is.
This reminds me of Three body problem and how the scientist discovered the high strength wire was through quick physical experiments and use them as input to an AI model to determine if it works.
I know these sorts of meta comments are often frowned upon, but good god do I hate this approach of fading in every individual element on scroll down the page. It's one of my biggest pet peeves of "modern" web sites.
Is it a very hard problem to solve that jeff and the other legendary engineers have decided to quit and start on this?
I suspect they want a bit more control over what they're working on. These days the bean counters are running Google.
I mean what are they doing right now at Google? Optimizing data centres? Pretty lame compared to this. Even if they completely fail, i'm sure there'll be good lessons.
Can’t wait until they get acquired by Google.
Google already invested into them.
I already did automate the experimental loop. https://alethean.org
Don't leave us guessing... Why is yours better/different?
National Labs in the US have been doing this for a while now. I feel like the private sector will take the lead soon.
Why? Science is wildly unprofitable on the scale of an individual private firm.
Automating ML/AI research seems completely tractable. Most of the other claims seem much less doable.
The problem is all these new labs don't have any competitive advanatge amongst each other, talent can only take one so far, though Jeff is a legend no doubt.
Models are commodities the applications eg. BaseTen, OpenRouter should capture the value.
https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/why-openrouter-can-be-the-n...
The company is developing an application, or a class of applications. Not a new model.
I think Google's branding was starting to be too poor in AI to get top talent, they needed the refresh
Model routers - send all of your data through a third party who totally swears not to peek at it.
If youre doing anything high value (advanced research, classified work, high value industrial research, health data) then sending your data through a third party like that is insane.
yes perhaps, although I think the best option for a enterprise is to train a model on it's own data.
Best option by what metric? For which enterprises. I say this having worked at an “enterprise” where this was not a good option. For (lack of) talent/expertise, budget, infrastructure, and actual value relative to the eventual bottom line.
Well its not the only enterprise tool, but from the perspective of llm delivering enterprise spexifc insights
Still, to get results from that you need someone who can create a decent finetune. That might not be realistic, but it very well could be realistic to have someone optimize some prompts and curate a knowledge base. Point is, its a possibility but “best” depends on the nuances of reality.
FHE
I have used something similar. I set up a team of agents that researches, proposes, builds and audits. Then rinse and repeat. I have used it for different topics. It hasn’t made me a millionaire, but I haven’t lost money either - so that’s some sort of win, right? But I would not have been able to ideate, test at that speed and quality without an LLM.
> It hasn’t made me a millionaire, but I haven’t lost money either - so that’s some sort of win, right?
I'm curious if that is before or after token costs?
> 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.
Imagine a future where only the anointed few elite minds can participate in science and engineering. Btw we’re hiring.
Great message!
I don't know why you're being downvoted.
This is basically something scientists have been alarming about for the past year: We're moving into a future where science may be tiered into the haves (those with access to premium compute) and the have nots (hoi polloi with restricted access), which in turn could seriously influence what kind of science we'll get.
Worst case, we'll get science that is completely dependent on business and politics.
EDIT: I should note, this comment was aimed at a more general case.
Discovery systems are making a comeback huh.
Big news aside, it feels exciting to see them leave and pursue startup. They could have stayed back, and retire
This is their version of retirement. Did you think Jeff Dean was going to stop doing tech and play golf?
This seems interesting! I wonder how this will play out.
The job req has "Recursive Self-Improvement" as one of the "area of expertise" checkboxes lol
It is targeted at a dozen or so people at OpenAI and Anthropic, not you or me.
Then why is it published on a public website?
Where else would they publish it?
If it's intended for a global audience of 12, just send it to them. No need to publish.
And how do you know who they all are?
It seemed implied by knowing one of two employers and the estimated total size of the population. I could have been wrong.
This is “google brain”
not that it really matters, but is he leaving Google?
Related:
Jeff Dean leaving Alphabet
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184746
From the self-stated bios, this group consists solely of CS guys. No biologist, physicist, linguist, chemist, biophysicist to be found. Based on this observation alone I call nonsense. These is AI bullshittery. These guys aren’t close enough to the problems to understand the challenges.
Source: PhD Computational biophysicist turned experimentalist. I work with genuine scientists across a range of disciplines from neurodegeneration, cancer, to fibrosis. Getting in the lab and generating data is absolutely key, among other things.
Do you actually think that this group of founders will have trouble finding domain experts wanting to work with them?
“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. By automating the loops of discovery, the world will be able to make much more rapid advances across countless fields of science.”
The key point is these jackasses explicitly state, “ a handful of people” can replace “massive teams of scientists and engineers”.
These guys don’t even understand the nature of the challenge and neither do you apparently. If they did, they would realize that it indeed does require “massive teams of engineers and scientists” to solve our most pressing problems.
What a team.
I'm skeptical of any Engineering loop that doesn't include reality (as in touch grass) feedback. Pure logic and reasoning is the domain of Maths and Science (philosophy). Surely it will work, but it will not "be able to solve any learning loop".
I'm almost certain the goal of this startup is to make physical automated research labs guided by RL
How is that different than video input?
There are over 2 dozen known senses to reality. Video input is a fraction of a sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense#Artificial_sensation_and...
When they say experiments, do they mean using physics simulators?
in AI/ML, no. They are just going to automate AI/ML research to start with. Totally doable.
For some of the other things, undoubtably yes.
Computation is not the hard part of discovery.
So Ralph Wiggum in a suit?
I am available for hire.
Another way to see this is: a bunch of renowned google engineers realized they can grab some of the VC pie for themselves
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/the-startup-idea-that-convince...
I smell vapor.
nice
Jesus, he left Google to do what everyone else is already trying to do? He must be so insulated he doesn’t realize what the real world is actually up to. I mean, organizations started on this exact same mission three or four years ago. Or longer. I suppose it’s better to wake up later than never.
The AI designed italics on thin font is hard to not see as slop.
You know when the page has all-caps "01 — THE APPROACH" that it is slopified. I guess I shouldn't be astounded, but I am, that world-class talents with world-class backing are just taking default LLM output and saying, "okay looks fine".
They would argue they are focused on more important stuff, but marketing shouldn't be underestimated.
Is this a joke? Site is not loading for me.
You know what will be a good day?
When the "AI community" GTFO X and stays off.
Toxic site. Toxic ownership. Unbelievable bot activity. Indefensibly shitty politics constantly boosted.
Continued participation is a stain on every company and person who continues to use it.
There are alternatives. Don't like them? Make a better one.
Stop using that shithole.
"the benefits of science and technology to the world" just like AI has brought such benefits? Because I haven't seen them, for example it hasn't helped reduce inequality (nor poverty), or reduce climate change, or pollution, or daily stress, if anything it seems to be worsening some of these issues.
So forgive me if I'm skeptic when renowned AI scholars claim to start something for "the benefits of science and technology", because it really seems like we have very different definitions of these words.