echelon 3 days ago

None of that has reached the market yet. If it was up to the sciences alone, AI couldn't bear the weight of its own costs.

It also needs to be vertically integrated to make money, otherwise it's a handout to the materials science company. I can't see any of the AI companies stretching themselves that thin. So they give it away for goodwill or good PR.

  • tim333 2 days ago

    Science in general tends to be subsidised and given away because as basic understanding of the world is hard to monopolise. I'm not sure how Einstein would have done a general relativity startup.

    That said Deepmind are doing a spin-off making drugs https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/

  • bayindirh 2 days ago

    > None of that has reached the market yet.

    AI for science is not "marketed". It silently evolves under the wraps and changes our lives step by step.

    There are many AI systems already monitoring our ecosystem and predicting things as you read this comment.

  • incognito124 3 days ago

    That's not really true. Commercial weather prediction has reached the market, and a drug (sorry, can't find the new s link) that was found by AI-accelerated drug discovery is now in clinical testing

    • aoeusnth1 3 days ago

      The reason why vertical integration is important for AI investment is that if AI is commoditized, then that AI-acceleration will costs pennies for drugs that are worth billions.

      I don't see how OpenAI or Google can profit from drug discovery. It's nearly pure consumer surplus (where the drug companies and patients are the consumers).

poszlem 3 days ago

The real value is coming in warfare.

  • awaythrow999 3 days ago

    Right. More accurate predictions for meta-data based killings which as championed by US in their war on terror

    • walletdrainer 3 days ago

      Metadata based killings are most likely a huge improvement from the prior state of affairs

      • modeless 3 days ago

        Yeah. Let the leaders assassinate each other with drone strikes instead of indiscriminately bombing whole cities as they used to.

    • [removed] 3 days ago
      [deleted]
epolanski 3 days ago

ML is used in weather prediction since the 80s and is the backbone of it since almost a decade.

Not sure what are LLMs supposed to do there.

  • danpalmer 3 days ago

    No one is suggesting using LLMs for weather. DeepMind is making significant progress on weather prediction with new AI models.

    • neumann 2 days ago

      oh god - please tell BoM in Australia. Either ML is not keeping up with clime change unpredictability, or SOTA is worse than what we had 10 years ago.

      • danpalmer 2 days ago

        I relocated to Australia last year. This country is obsessed with the BoM and I don't know why. The few times I've used it, it was either outright wrong, or I couldn't even find the weather info I wanted (like, is it going to rain tomorrow), and they only added TLS in 2025!

  • Glemkloksdjf 2 days ago

    LLMs in general are ML based, need a lot of data and compute. The same infrastructure as any other ML based system.

    The AI/AGI hype in my opinion could be better renamed to ml with data and compute 'hype' (i don't like the word hype as it doesn't fit very well)