[suthakamal]

LLMs aren’t the end all be all of anything. But they’re clearly a step towards augmenting human cognition and in giving machines the ability to perform cognitive tasks. And when Google says a quarter of its code is being written by LLMs, and DeepMind is making tremendous progress on protein folding and DNA understanding with fundamentally the same technology, it seems pretty clear that we’d miss out on a lot without this.

Full disclosure: I think protein folding and DNA prediction could quite possibly the biggest advancements in medicine, ever. And still, all the critiques of LLMs being janky and not nearly sufficient to be generally intelligent are true.

So yes, I think it’s absolutely on the scale of electrification.

[yupitsme123]

When I look at the problems in my life, in my country, or in the world around me, not once has it occurred to me that they were due to a lack of advanced pattern recognition or DNA prediction.

When people were dying of hunger then being able to create more food was obviously a huge win. Likewise for creating light where people used to live in darkness.

But contemporary technologies solve non-problems and take us closer to a future no one asked for, when all we want is cheaper rent, cheaper healthcare, and less corruption.

[suthakamal]

You don’t think protein folding and dna prediction will yield better healthcare?