Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries
Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries
Vibe-physics sounds like something you do just before you flunk out of a STEM program.
Man, has anyone else noticed that LLMs are really knowledgeable about subjects you know nothing about, but useless gibbering idiots about subjects on which you are an expert?
You don't even have to be an expert to spot the insane gibbering. Just ask it about, say, lyrics from a band and watch it generate completely non-existent lyrics. For example:
What are the opening lyrics to The Advert's song "One Chord Wonders"?
The opening lyrics to The Adverts' song "One Chord Wonders" are:
"We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders..."
The song, released in 1977 as part of their debut album "Crossing the Red Sea with The Adverts", is a self-aware punk anthem about being dismissed as musically simplistic. The track humorously embraces the band's raw, minimalist style while critiquing critics who underestimated them.
Would you like the full lyrics or more context about the song?
Sure. Let's see the full lyrics.
Here are the full lyrics to "One Chord Wonders" by The Adverts (1977):
"One Chord Wonders"
We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, that's all we are.
We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, we don't know much,
But we know what we like, and we like it a lot.
We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, that's all we are.
We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, we don't know much,
But we know what we like, and we like it a lot.
They said we were one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, that's all we are.
They said we were one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, but we don't care.
We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, that's all we are.
We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, we don't know much,
But we know what we like, and we like it a lot.
They said we were one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, that's all we are.
They said we were one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, but we don't care.
We must be one chord wonders, one chord wonders,
One chord wonders, that's all we are.
The Adverts, a key UK punk band, wrote this song as a tongue-in-cheek response to critics who dismissed punk as simplistic. Despite the title, the song actually uses more than one chord, making the joke even sharper. It’s both a satire of punk’s detractors and a celebration of raw, energetic music.
Would you like any background on the band or the album?
Note that the only editing I did to this was some very minor formatting changes. (LLMbeciles seem to love dividing lines and don't seem to understand Markdown rules for line separation.) Note also that the "full lyrics" that it cites don't even resemble the real thing:
I wonder what we'll play for you tonight
Something heavy or something light
Something to set your soul alight
I wonder how we'll answer when you say
"We don't like you, go away
Come back when you've learned to play"
I wonder what we'll do when things go wrong
When we're half-way through our favorite song
We look up and the audience has gone
Will we feel a little bit obscure
Think we're not needed here
We must be new wave, they'll like us next year
(The wonders don't care) We don't give a damn
(The wonders don't care) We don't give a damn
(The wonders don't care) We don't give a damn
So I give it the actual lyrics and ask it to identify them. The confabulation continues with breath-taking gall:
Yes! Those lyrics are from "One Chord Wonders" by The Adverts—but they're from the longer, alternate version of the song, which includes additional verses not found in the standard album or single release.
The original 1977 single/album cut is shorter and more repetitive, while this extended version feels almost like a meta-commentary on the band’s place in punk. It’s possible the extra verses were dropped for brevity or punchiness.
Fun fact: Despite the title, the song uses at least three chords (E, A, and B), making the joke even better.
Would you like help tracking down a specific recording of this extended version?
I'm not an expert on early punk. I'm not an expert on lyrics. I'm not really an expert on anything involved in this session beyond being an expert spotter of bullshit. And yet, it was really fucking obvious that it was bullshitting here. (Note that it called the shorter (correct) lyrics the "longer, alternate version". It even bullshits about its bullshit.)
Another example of how little genius has to do with becoming a billionaire. Or even a modicum of sense.
Yup. Reading the Wikipedia article about Travis Kalanick, it seems like he just became a billionaire by coming from a privileged background and getting lucky.
That is literally the success story of nearly every single billionaire.
Starting with wealth also gives more opportunities to get lucky.
It's fucking enraging how stupid these billionaires actually are. How the fuck do you accumulate that much wealth, and still have no basic common sense?
Oh, right...overwhelming greed and a total lack of empathy.
Step 1. Be born in a wealthy family. ??? Profit.
It's also ego. They believe their stolen money can accomplish anything.
these are the same fucking ppl convinced in their own brilliant ideas, except they have none of the skill to accomplish it, so they mooch off of other's skills. "i'm an idea man."
other ppl were always just tools to them, so they want to build a skill machine so they can remove the annoying part of being reminded that other ppl are actually talented.
fucking abhorrently inhuman.
I worked at a company run by a wealthy woman who was owner or part owner of several other businesses, and this sounds just like her. Her contribution to company operations was to run around screaming, making nonsensical/unrealistic demands. She expected other people to do whatever it took to make her demands a reality, but was convinced that she was the most valuable person there.
run around screaming, making nonsensical/unrealistic demands
Aka "seagull" management.
It's almost as if a big part of the current hype is just sociopath CEOs being sociopaths, but not being self aware about it.
Can't wait for AI peer(AI) reviewed papers to set the standards for health (eat rocks) cooking (add glue to pizza) and physics (gravity is just buoyancy)
This fuck face claims to be doing "vibe physics"
This is the stupidest fucking timeline
I have an aunt who is a bit of a kook. She once bragged that while she lacked formal training in particle physics, she had a “strong intuitive grasp” of quantum mechanics, a famously counter-intuitive subject.
We laughed about it for years, but the joke is on me i guess. Here is a billionaire vibe-physicist channeling my quirky aunt in front of a global audience.
The possibility that somewhere, someone might not recognize that this guy is a mountebank disturbs me greatly.
“I pinged Elon on at some point. I’m just like, dude, if I’m doing this and I’m super amateur hour physics enthusiast, like what about all those PhD students and postdocs that are super legit using this tool?” Kalanick said.
Dude is right here on the Dunning Kruger curve.
Not the Dunning-Kruger. That's a reversed uncanny valley graph given names to match.
This is the actual Dunning-Kruger graph:
That curve is bullshit both in its original "hype cycle" formulation and in this one.
Because most things crash and burn in the Valley of Despair. Hyped technologies almost always hit the Valley of Despair and then collapse and fail, never reaching enlightenment or sustainability. And the Dunnning-Kruger version you've put here has the very risibly optimistic view that people break out of the know-nothing stage.
Always remember kids...just because you are rich doesn't mean you are smart.
One trillion. That's the amount of money that has been invested in AI.
Nah. 80% of it went to billionaires pockets, the rest of it buying power plants, funding ChatGPT wrappers, maybe less than 1% goes to researchers.
Also, the article is a year old. It's VC investments mostly. So billionaires are fleecing billionaires.
Because they just ask some research questions to an LLM of which they know nothing about and when the LLM flaunts all the technical jargon with complete confidence they get amazed (they also feel a kind of kinship I suppose since their literal biggest skill is to bs about stuff which they know nothing about).
The scary part is that theyve actually lost it. Thwy concinced themselves that AI is the future even though the whole thing is a fad. And they will die for ai, actually kill their companies for it. It actually got to the point where a new business strategy is just "do normal stuff until all the competition just kills themselves because the shareholders are delulu"
This is also known as "late stage capitalism".
They're getting high on their own supply
AI is like good old alchemy. “Making money out of thin air?” “How much do you need?”
If they don't, they'll just make one up.
Ai+
It's the same shit, just, uh... just buy it! Yeah!
Its almost like billionaires shouldn't fucking exist!
I hope they get it to build them a nice big ship and then get onboard.
We've had two maritime billionaire (comparative) disasters, time to reach for the stars
Golgafrinchian Ark style.
Except they're the ones who can die from a dirty handset
It's like someone telling you about a dream they had.
Actual scientists say the opposite. I'd have a many long words thing to say but ai can't word it rightly, but what needs to be knowm is that LLM can slow down many things. Once I had the intuition that I was babysitting a machine, instsad if doing things.
Nah, they’re just tugging each other off so the VCs will keep making it rain
Well, with all those scientists putting documents in clouds like google / aws, and with those companies happily using that data to train their models, it's totally plausible that they'll announce potential breakthroughs before the scientists officially do... without crediting the source... making it seem like the LLM did a science.
The discovery is that people will accept any discovery without knowing how the discovery was made, then use another fallible LLM to verify it.
ML is actually amazing for science.
LLMs however are absolute horseshit at science.
None of this bullshit is AI.