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.

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'"?

> 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.

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.

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.

Agree. Same for better medicines. We could get pretty far just by getting existing medicines that work to people who need them.

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.

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.

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!

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

  3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods

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).

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?

Satellite/drone detection of nuclear material? Shooting missiles out of the sky?

> 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?

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.

agreed

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.

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.

My thoughts exactly

For all we know, they could have been successfully working on "10. Prevent Nuclear Terror" for the last 80+ years.

"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."

Beauty of human writing.

More like someone taking LessWrong postings too seriously.

Building "simulators" that use ML/AI instead of running the calculations every step is a thing.

Yeah. ML is all well and good, but how are they going to do the science their machines design? Atoms cost money.

I think it was a Neal Stephenson quote from cryptobimicon.

It certainly increases shareholder value.

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.

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.

x2

All the "bad guys" of today were the "good guys" at some point in time. You even cheered for them back then.

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.

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.

$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

Not really. Grad students are already essentially working for free.

Skynet.

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.

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.

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.

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 seems to be the one unchanged variable of time.

The change is that it'll be owned by the top 0.0000001% who control the LLMs that will be your new boss.

Google is literally at the same stock price it was on Monday. This is a normal daily fluctuation for them.

yes perhaps, although I think the best option for a enterprise is to train a model on it's own data.

FHE

Then why is it published on a public website?

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...

They would argue they are focused on more important stuff, but marketing shouldn't be underestimated.