“They used physics to do it” is just a laughably pathetic motivation. Nobel hated “abstract wankery” or “intellectual masturbation” and wanted to promote results which benefitted the common man and society directly. This is incidentally also why there doesn’t exist a Nobel prize in economics. The nobel prize comitte has since long abandoned Nobel’s will in this matter and it is anyones guess what the order of magnitude of spin Nobel’s corpse has accumulated.
The nobel prize comitte has since long abandoned Nobel’s will in this matter
How long? Wouldn’t this just kind of suggest that criteria is simply different at this point? Maybe complex electronic devices didn’t exist back then, so one can really only guess as to what he would think. Because he’s been dead for a very long time…
The prize is named after the dude, he doesn’t get to decide the rules of its award in perpetuity.
The prize is named after the dude, he doesn’t get to decide the rules of its award in perpetuity.
Yes he does. It’s the law.
it is anyones guess what the order of magnitude of spin Nobel’s corpse has accumulated.
I’m guessing it’s nearing the theoretical limits of “abstract wankery.”
Physics’ Nobel prize awarded for a Computer Science achievement, actual physics is having a dry spell I guess
i’m here to remind you that for last 20ish years half of the time chemistry nobel goes to biologists, and now they doubled down on ai wankery with giving it to alphafold
To be fair, AlphaFold is pretty incredible. I remember when it was first revealed (but before they open sourced parts of it) that the scientific community were shocked by how effective it was and assumed that it was going to be technologically way more complex than it ended up being. Systems Biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi captures this quite well in this blog post
I’m a biochemist who has more interest in the computery side of structural biology than many of my peers, so I often have people asking me stuff like “is AlphaFold actually as impressive as they say, or is it just more overhyped AI nonsense?”. My answer is “Yes.”
Beyond recognizing the laureates’ inspirations from condensed-matter physics and statistical mechanics, the prize celebrates interdisciplinarity. At its core, this prize is about how elements of physics have driven the development of computational algorithms to mimic biological learning, impacting how we make discoveries today across STEM.
They explain the flex at least
Seems like a pretty extreme flex, I’m worried it’ll snap.
To be fair, regardless of one’s stance on the utility of current AI or the wisdom of developing it, it is an extremely difficult and potentially world changing technical achievement, and given there isn’t a computer science prize, physics is probably the most relevant category to it
not really. A lot of techniques have been known for decades. What we didn’t have back then was insane compute power.
and there’s the turing award for computer science.
Predictive text algorithms will not wipe out humanity. 🙄
The Artificial Intelligence field is much broader than that limited definition of yours.
And yet the only tech any company is interested in using is LLMs, which are about to fall flat on their face. What tech in the field is close to being able to think for itself and truly act autonomously?
I can tell you don’t use AI. It’s frightening how good it is. Edited "good"😂
That’s just true believer talk. It really is trash.
It’s frightening how God it is.
Intentional?
Written by AI?
The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is the people losing their minds about it.
I guess some people are genuinely concerned about AI wiping out humanity. Do not worry, that will never happen. We are already doing a fine job fostering our own extinction. If we keep going down our current path, those soulless robots will never even get the chance.
Now, in truth, I do not know what will kill us first, but I reckon it is important to stay positive
What’s laughable are the “terminator” scenarios where it suddenly comes to life in an instant and in that moment already has the power to wipe us out, and then does so.
A more likely scenario is that we come to rely heavily on AI more and more as time goes by, until it truly does have a grip on resource supply chains, manufacturing facilities, energy plants, etc. And I don’t just mean that machine learning gets used in all of those contexts because we are already there. I’m talking about custodial authority. We’ve ceded those duties to it in large part - can’t do those jobs without AI.
Then a malicious AI could put a real squeeze on humanity. It wouldn’t need to be a global war. Just enough disruption that we starve and begin to war among ourselves. Has anyone ever noticed how many of us there are now? Our population would absolutely fall apart without our massive industrial and agricultural complexes running full time.
I mean it’s definitely helping, but not in the way I imagined. It is becoming a major driver of CO2 emissions due to the large computational power if needs, which will only increase in the future. The planet is boiling, and they will keep building more server farms for the next LLM upgrade, giving up on stopping/controlling climate change.
To clarify: AI is NOT a major driver of CO2 emissions. The most pessimistic estimations place it at a fraction of a percent of global energy consumption by 2030.
Ah, the crypto bro creed.
I mean it is also true for crypto. BTC, the most energy-hungry blockchain, is estimated to burn ~150TWh/year, compared to a global consumption of 180 000TWh/y.
Now is that consumption useless ? Yes, it is completely wasted. But it is a drop in the bucket. One shouldn’t underestimate the astounding energy consumption of legacy industries - as a whole the tech industry is estimated to represent just a few percents of the global energy budget.
Meh. Feelings are louder than facts apparently.
some myths are hard to kill honestly