I’ve gone down a rabbit hole here.
I’ve been looking at lk99, the potential room temp superconductor, lately. Then I came across an AI chat and decided to test it. I then asked it to propose a room temp superconductor and it suggested (NdBaCaCuO)_7(SrCuO_2)_2 and a means of production which got me thinking. It’s just a system for looking at patterns and answering the question. I’m not saying this has made anything new, but it seems to me eventually a chat AI would be able to suggest a new material fairly easily.
Has AI actually discovered or invented anything outside of it’s own computer industry and how close are we to it doing stuff humans haven’t done before?
Define AI.
Machine learning, image processing and similar “AI” techniques have been used for decades in sciences. When a telescope does large field survey to detect an transient phenomena like a supernova, you don’t have an astrophysicist looking at the photo, a smart astrophysicist (well several ones) used image processing and machine learning to teach the computer that there is something interesting on the image and send an automated message to every telescope about : Something is happening at this position so they can watch it immediately. Is it AI ?
What about the LHC who takes so much data that they need very advanced algorithm to store them and process them, is that AI ? What about protein folding which is a very complex problem relying on machine learning to find the proper solution
The big and recent breakthrough is that it’s now accessible on an ordinary computer and that the training of large model is cheap enough to use it for less complicated topics