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?
The AI most regular people are using, you can think of as better at sifting the sea of data to find what you are looking for, and discussing it with you in a more understandable way.
The breakthroughs with AI are often computer programs that are told to look for an answer and change themselves somewhat randomly, but with many, many copies trying the task. The ones that fail are deleted, and the most successful change up again. This is repeated until you reliably get your result.
So basically darwinism?
pretty much, but much faster.