The chatbots and image editors are just a side-show. The real value is coming in e.g. chemistry (Alpha fold etc all), fusion research, weather prediction etc.

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.

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/

> 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.

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

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).

The real value is coming in warfare.

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

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

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

what gov't in modern day would fall because the leader was assassinated? the next in line would just step up, and now have a pissed population that will be in favor of ratcheting up beyond assassinations.

Any autocratic state would probably have quite a high likelihood I would expect.

I am sure you can think of a few prominent examples.

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.

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

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.

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!

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)

unfortunately all this work on sora has very real military use case. I personally think all this investment in sora by open AI is largely to create a digital fog of war. Now when a rocket splatters a 6 year old palestinian girl's head across the pavement like a jackson polock painting, They will be able to claim its AI generated by state sponsored actors in order to prevent disruption to the manufactured consent aperatus.

You might have said the same thing about GPUs for 20 years when they were mostly for games, before they turned out to be essential for AI. All the entertainment use cases were directly funding development of the next generation of computing all along.

Why are images and video a complete waste? This makes no sense to me.

Right now the generators aren’t effective but they are definitely stepping stones to something better in the future.

If that future thing produces video, movies and pictures better than anything humanity can produce at a rate faster than we can produce things… how is that a waste?

It can arguably be bad for society but definitely not a waste.

Let me phrase it a bit differently, then: AI generated cats in Ghibli style are a waste, we should definitely do less of that. I did not hold that opinion before the documentary

Education-style infographics and videos are OK.

Our family derives a lot of joy from stylized versions of our photos. For us, it is not a waste. If you do not derive anything positive from it, you will likely not use it, hence no energy wasted either. Your argument is objectively wrong.

I'm glad you're not the sole arbiter for what is wasteful and what isn't.

Just because you disagree does not make them wrong though

Homoconsomator brain be like ^

Parent said "entertainment use cases" are a complete waste, not all uses of images and video. I don't agree, but do particularly find educational use cases of AI video are becoming compelling.

I help people turn wire rolling shelf racks into the base of their home studio, and AI can now create a "how to attach something to a wire shelf rack" without me having to do all the space and rack and equipment and lighting and video setup, and just use a prompt. It's not close to perfect yet, but it's becoming useful.

> particularly find educational use cases of AI video are becoming compelling.

compelling graphics take a long time to create. for education content creators, this can be too expensive as well. my high school physics teacher would hand draw figures on transparencies on an overhead projector. if he could have produced his drawings as animations cheap and fast using AI, it would have really brought his teaching style (he really tried to make it humorous) to another level. I think it would be effective for his audience.

imagine the stylized animations for things like the rebooted Cosmos, NOVA, or even 3Blue1Brown on YT. there is potential for small teams to punch above their weight class with genAI graphics

If AI can produce movies, video and art better aka “more entertaining” then humans than how is it a waste?

Because vast amounts of people find Coldplay entertaining. That doesn't mean it's a good thing.

You lack imagination. When ChatGPT just came out people were saying it can never code. Now if you aren’t using ai in your coding you’re biting the dust.

Stop talking about the status quo… we are talking about the projected trendline. What will AI be when it matures?

Second you’re just another demographic. Smaller than fans of Coldplay but equally generic and thus an equal target for generated art.

Here’s a prompt that will one day target you: “ChatGPT, create musical art that will target counter culture posers who think they’re better than everyone just because they like something that isn’t mainstream. Make it so different they will worship that garbage like they worship Pearl Jam. Pretend that the art is by a human so what when they finally figure out they fell for it hook line and sinker they’ll realize their counter culture tendencies are just another form of generic trash fandom no different than people who love cold play or, dare I say it, Taylor swift.”

What do you do then when this future comes to pass and all content even for posers is replicated in ways that are superior?

”What a way to show them. You rock! Unfortunately I can’t create the musical art you requested as you reference multiple existing musical acts by name. How about rephrasing your request in a way that is truly original and unique to you”

Again I’m referring to the future. When ChatGPT came out nobody thought it was good enough to be an assistant coding agent. That future came to pass.

Nobody gives a fuck about what ChatGPT can currently do. It’s not interesting to talk about because it’s obvious. I don’t even understand why you’re just rehashing the obvious response. I’m talking about the future. The progression of LLMs is leading to a future where my prompt leads to a response that is superior to the same prompt given to a human.

But it’s not. I think most can agree that there really has not been any real entertainment from genAI beyond novelty crap like seeing Lincoln pulling a nice track at a skate park. No one wants to watch genAI slop video, no one wants to listen to genAI video essays, most people do not want to read genAI blog posts. Music is a maybe, based on leaderboards, but it is not like we ever had a lack of music to listen to.

Eventually it will be good enough that you won't know the difference.

I have a feeling that's already happened to me.

Bro. You and your cohorts said the exact same thing about LLMs and coding when ChatGPT just came out. The status quo is obvious. So no one is talking about that.

Draw the trendline into the future. What will happen when the content is indistinguishable and AI is so good it produces something moves people to tears?

Bro, it sure if you noticed. ChatGTP isnt that great at coding end to end. It can regurgitate common examples well, but if your working on large technical code bases it does more harm that good. It need constant oversight, why don’t I write the code myself. We are at an infrastructure limit, not sure we are going to see order of magnitude improvements any more.

I no longer write code. I’ve been a swe for over a decade. AI writes all my code following my instructions. My code output is now expected to be 5x what it was before because we are now augmented by AI. All my coworkers use AI. We don’t use ChatGPT we use anthropic. If I didn’t use AI I would be fired for being too slow.

What I work on is large and extremely technical.

And no we are not at an infrastructure limit. This statement is insane. We are literally only a couple years into LLMs becoming popular. Everything we see now is just the beginning. You can only make a good judgement call of whether we are at our limit in 10 years.

Because the transition hit so quickly a lot of devs and companies haven’t fully embraced AI yet. Culture is still lagging capability. What you’re saying about ChatGPT was true a year ago. And now one year later, everything you’re saying isn’t remotely true anymore. The pace is frightening. So I don’t blame you for not knowing. Yes AI needs to be managed but it’s at a point where the management no longer hinders you and it instead augments your capabilities.

It might be shocking to you but some people believe there is more to life than producing and consuming "content" faster and faster.

Most of it is used to fool people for engagement, scam, politics or propaganda, it definitely is a huge waste of resource, time, brain and compute power. You have to be completely brainwashed by consumerism and techsolutionism to not see it

I see it. But you’re lacking imagination to what I’m referring to. It’s also fucking obvious. Like I’m obviously not referring to TikTok videos and ads and that kind of bullshit every one on earth knows about and obviously hates. You’re going on as if it’s “shocking” to me when what you’re talking about is obvious as night and day. What’s shocking to me is that you’re not getting my point and I’m obviously talking about something less well known.

Take your favorite works of art, music and cinema. Imagine if content on that level can be generated by AI in seconds. I wouldn’t classify that as a “waste” at all. You’re obviously referring to bullshit content, I’m referring to content that is meaningful to you and most people. That is where the trendline is pointing. And my point, again is this:

We don’t know the consequence of such a future. But I wouldn’t call such content created by AI a waste if it is objectively superior to content created by humans.

I actually had a counter thought a few years ago.

We consume A LOT of entertainment every day. Our brains like that a lot.

Doesn't has to be just video but even normal people not watching tv at all entertain themselves through books or events etc.

Live would be quite boring.

DeepMind's new [edit: apparently now old] weather forecast model is similar in architecture to the toys that generate videos of horses addressing Congress or cats wearing sombreros. The technology moves forward and while some of the new applications are not important, other applications of the same technology may be important.

Is it really similar? I was under the impression it's a GNN of a (really dense) polyhedron, not a diffusion model

GenCast is a diffusion model, but it is not the "new" one like I said. Apparently there is another one. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10772

Practical things are probably treating diseases and more abundance of physical goods. More speculative/sci-fi is merging in some form with AI and maybe immortality which I think is the more interesting bit.