Comment by awbvious

But regardless, the detection of breast cancer via AI made me think of phlogiston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory . "Phlogiston theory states that phlogisticated substances contain phlogiston and that they dephlogisticate when burned, releasing stored phlogiston, which is absorbed by the air. Growing plants then absorb this phlogiston, which is why air does not spontaneously combust and also why plant matter burns. This method of accounting for combustion was inverse to the oxygen theory by Antoine Lavoisier."

It could be phlogiston. AI is super smart theory states that AI is super smart and that is a single thing can do tasks very efficiently. But it's so smart, we can't understand it, so we humans can't help it, it'll take AI to make it even smarter. That's what's holding it back. But then it'll solve everything.

Or it could be oxygen. AI is super-fast-and-parallel theory states that AI is not a magical monolith but a bunch of pedestrian programs that run fast and in parallel, thanks to hardware (GPUs) that's good at that stuff. But since it's all going so fast and at the same time, something a single human cannot do, humans can't really see how it works. But if we could, we'd probably just see its just doing stuff programs did before. So what's holding it back is that you have to keep throwing hardware at it, and eventually you run into the limits of how fast you can build that hardware or power it.

It all might be stuff humans were better at, when approached one-on-one, but against a swarm it loses. You get a billion doctors together to look at a single mammogram, then tell them if it cancerous, then do that again a billion times with each doctor. Then ask those billion doctors on the billion-and-one mammogram to give a diagnosis. Heck, do that with a billion toddlers. I think either might be able to beat the AI. I don't have a billion doctors or a billion toddlers--frankly I don't know which would be more difficult to handle.

To know if it's oxygen or phlogiston takes probably a demonstration like this "Phlogiston remained the dominant theory until the 1770s when Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier showed that combustion requires a gas that has mass (specifically, oxygen) and could be measured by means of weighing closed vessels." Maybe the data center financing trouble will be the demonstration that the mass in the gas is just VC-money hardware.

I know why you got a billion cages with a billion birds and a billion bird listeners to compare a billion songs to the few songs we like to hear, and then packaged all that into a single bird-looking thing to make singing-like sounds: So Altman can get that VC money.