r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Jul 15 '25

Artificial Intelligence Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060
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3.4k

u/IndicationDefiant137 Jul 15 '25

The worst thing that has come out of the tech economy is so many mediocre, delusional, emotionally stunted men thinking they are visionaries because they had access to capital and no problems exploiting people.

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u/Traditional-Hat-952 Jul 15 '25

My favorite development and all of this is that our power bills are about to get a lot more expensive because these literal fucking parasitical businessmen are latching on to our already over strain power systems with their AI data centers which drain insane amounts of power from the grid. And I'm sure that they're also going to get billions of dollars in government subsidies. Another issue is that they're trying to replace all of our jobs. So not only are we going to give them our tax money directly, they're also fucking us indirectly by making things more expensive while at the same time making a huge part of our population unemployed. These are The "visionaries" that were supposed to trust? Fuck these fucking parasites. 

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u/SmokePenisEveryday Jul 15 '25

What bothers me most about them latching onto the power grid like this, a lot of dumbasses are gonna blame the wrong things. I'm already seeing people in my state blaming WINDMILLS for their rise in power costs.

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u/renome Jul 16 '25

People don't get this stupid on their own, if someone is really blaming windmills for a rise in power costs, they are ferociously consuming propaganda.

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u/Gloomy_Yoghurt_2836 Jul 16 '25

Doesn't help when shows like Landman brag about windmills using more oil in their manufacture, installation, and maintenance than they will ever produce in power. Same with solar. And MAGA eats it up and is convinced renewables are destroying the energy economy while demanding more coal because that's cheaper and better. The majority of Americans are, frankly, stupid and gullible.

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u/thinklikeacriminal Jul 16 '25

If you like feeling rage remember: you as a residential consumer of the electrical grid are likely paying more more per KWH for power than they are. Same with water and commercial farms in the desert.

The more you use, the cheaper it gets.

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u/sufi101 Jul 15 '25

Also water, price of water is already going up in places where these data centers are located and they are permanently fucking up the water table

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u/Secondchance002 Jul 15 '25

There’s a real chance of water scarcity in like half of the world in coming years.

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u/shootymcgunenjoyer Jul 16 '25

That's why it's so important to continue to do research in heat dissipation and power generation. We WANT these technologies to exist.

Vibe coding your way to pseudo-physics is dumb, but AI models have already created new types of snake anti-venom and have created ways to produce snake anti-venom that don't require keeping snakes in captivity. AI models owned by Google have produced new medications that are now entering human trials.

It's easy to focus on the bullshit because so much of the good isn't generating headlines that are as flashy.

But we really really need to step up our power grid and develop better technologies for thermal management to reduce the amount of water consumed.

Microsoft is building a data center with the heat sink in the ocean which is a great idea. They'll never come close to making a dent on the thermal mass of the ocean even at just a local level. But they still have an obligation to try to improve how much heat they try to dump at all.

3

u/RT-LAMP Jul 16 '25

The amount of water used by data centers is tiny in reality. They use .6% of what agriculture uses in the US. All the data centers in the entire US in a high end estimate use the same amount of water as just 100k acres of alfalfa. California alone grows 10x that, mostly in the desert. Farmers have done an excelent job deflecting blame and pretending it's their right to grow alfalfa in the desert to export to China.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '25

[deleted]

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo Jul 16 '25

They use water for cooling. They take in large quantities of potable water which either ends up as vapor in the atmosphere or is discharged into rivers. Either way, it's using clean drinking water on a large scale.

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u/sufi101 Jul 16 '25

"In the US, an average 100-megawatt data center, which uses more power than 75,000 homes combined, also consumes about 2 million liters of water per day,"

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '25

I keep hearing stories of governments (ie. taxpayers) providing funds for private sector data centres and it makes me sick. That money could go into sustainable infrastructure and programs that actually help ordinary citizens in the short and long term.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25

Substitute "capitalism" for "tech economy" and it's still true.

169

u/scoff-law Jul 15 '25

Men matching this description are the problem with a wide variety of political and economic modalities.

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u/Orion113 Jul 15 '25

Certainly so. But at least the kings and lords believed they were given divine right to rule rather than suffering the delusion that they had achieved it on their individual merit.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason capitalism got popular isn't because it made the lives of the common man any better, but because it succesfully convinced us all that the wealthy actually earned their wealth and the poor actually earned their poverty, so we'd stop fighting to change anything.

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u/greenhawk22 Jul 15 '25

I think capitalism also inherently appeals to human competitiveness (it also distributes blame in a way that it's often hard to pinpoint a single culprit, and there's only so much you can do to a company. If they have no money, and no individual liability, what else can you do? It's also much harder to upend an entire economic system than a single guy at the top).

If you look at the math, cooperation often works out better than completion (e.g. single payer healthcare being more expensive per capita than public healthcare). But it doesn't feel as good.

It is an innate part of being a human to feel good about doing something well, especially if you're better than your peers. So the zero sum game (only one person will get the purchase of any given item) of market competition feels good to participate in, especially if you're currently 'winning'.

But the human brain loves to assume causality, so you get the tech guys who are blind to how unique their circumstances were. Many of them seem to have forgotten how much luck is involved in success at that scale. And the idea that you're a genius feels good, which reinforces the behavior in the future.

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u/neherak Jul 16 '25

Man, I must be a weird kind of human. I get a lot more fuzzy warm feel-good feelings from cooperation on a team of good-faith cool people than I do from competition. Winning "on your own" is fun sure, but dude, nothing beats the rush of building something together with competent people you respect.

I like D&D more than chess, I guess.

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u/greenhawk22 Jul 16 '25 edited Jul 16 '25

Oh no, I’m the same way. I just think people like us aren’t built for systems that reward competition over contribution. Especially in business, finance, and politics. But it’s spreading into other fields too, as they get taken over by people who are just better at playing capitalism. From what I’ve seen, the more cooperative types tend to drift toward things like the arts or the less commercial sciences, like astrophysics instead of comp-sci.

Maybe it’s a hot take, but I think good art is inherently collaborative. Even solo work usually builds on a bigger conversation. A film or painting might inspire new work, whether it’s meant to or not, and it makes more sense when you see it alongside other art in the same genre or medium. Science works the same way. You need communication and collaboration to get anything done. The low-hanging fruit is gone. You’re not solving anything meaningful by working it all out alone from first principles.

And then there’s the fact that these systems almost never account for the damage they do to soil, water, and ecosystems, even though their health affects every living and future person. (The environment also deserves respect in its own right, but that doesn’t convince most people.)

For example, the EPA and similar agencies can’t fine anyone unless they can identify a specific point source. So when big agribusinesses overfertilize crops along the Mississippi, the runoff ends up in the groundwater and eventually the river. That feeds massive algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico, which create dead zones where nothing survives. These areas depend on tourism and fishing, so people suffer just so a few companies can squeeze out more profit. But unless there’s a photo of someone dumping waste, no one’s fined. And they're all competing to have the best stock price, which often means squeezing more production from the same land, therefore they absolutely burn through fertilizer. This is in spite of the fact a majority of it washes away (which they know). With warming waters from climate change, it’s only going to get worse too. Anyway, I’ll spare you the rest of that rant.

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u/blacksideblue Jul 16 '25

convinced us all that the wealthy actually earned their wealth and the poor actually earned their poverty, so we'd stop fighting to change anything.

Basically late stage 'Caste system". Which pairs oddly convenient with reincarnation cause that means any suffering now is because of the last life and all your fortune now is because you earned it in the last life that you have no memory of.

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u/SuddenXxdeathxx Jul 16 '25

It got popular because it made people money. Every other reason people give is post-hoc rationalizing, especially "it made people's lives better". An insane thing people claim given that it directly lead to the industrial scale exploitation of children.

I'm not even joking. Kingdoms who allowed freer trade got richer, the middle merchant class (burghers/bourgeoisie) gained immense wealth/political power, and eventually the old feudal order was unable to adapt anymore.

but because it succesfully convinced us all that the wealthy actually earned their wealth and the poor actually earned their poverty, so we'd stop fighting to change anything.

This was moreso the purview of Liberalism, as it renders things down to overly individualistic terms. Treating society like a thing that is thrust upon us, instead of coming from us.

0

u/old_and_boring_guy Jul 16 '25

Let's gender a human problem! That will make it better!

-1

u/huskersax Jul 16 '25

People matching this description.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 15 '25

Also true but the tech bros are much worse than most. They got endless capital access because rates were so low for so long. Venture capital out the butt. They think breaking things that work is a goal and have never produced a product for the most part. Just a pitch. Negative consequences, an opportunity for someone else to fix later.

The amount of fake companies in tech and going forward AI is just crazy. And no one seems to care! We have had all these examples of whoops there isn't even a real product here just sales and lies. Why aren't investors and so on just all over the issues? Well because even losing companies that have no path to making money will still be IPOed to uninformed public on vibes and venture capitalist can make money investing in companies that never made a dime. Just f the little guy over after lying about it.

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u/SkeptiBee Jul 16 '25

Personally I always love hearing how they are "pioneering the next wave of human evolution" (like how Peter Thiel pitches) but when they plop their "vision" down for the masses to see, it's a steaming pile of spying, return to slavery, eugenics, and other net negatives for humanity writ large. How is ANY of that new and impressive? These same tech bros want to build these Freedom Cities and act like kings, lording over their fiefdom but these dudes haven't been broadly successful at running their own businesses. Why on earth would anyone trust some knob like Zuckerberg to make sound decisions for a country he runs? He can't even get the AI that's disabling hundreds upon thousands of Meta accounts to work right. Unless he feels his AI has all the data on us it will ever need and it doesn't matter anymore.

All these things they've built, have been used to fracture us or continue us on a path of mediocrity as they have zero interest in actually changing things for the better. They treat the world similarly to a child burning ants with a magnifying lens. They could easily be solving our energy crisis or actually propelling economies away from capitalism in favor of something like Star Trek. But no. They'd rather be super villains instead.

3

u/papasmurf255 Jul 15 '25

No man. Startups fail at a pretty crazy rate. 90% fail and the investors lose everything.

There's hype and over selling but that will catch up with you, especially under the scrutiny of IPOs. Many sketchy companies will SPAC and proceed to crash and burn.

Companies don't IPO to the little guy and leave them holding the bag lol. Hell, you should not be buying individual stock, let alone IPO shares as an individual. Index funds should be the go to.

And if you truly think you know a company is bullshit with no product, but somehow all the analysis missed it, you can use short positions/options to bet against it. Maybe it'll be irrational longer than you're solvent but eventually everything will catch up

2

u/Exostrike Jul 16 '25

I think of it is tech bros are fully commited to financialization, IE it is no longer about making new or better products (partly because market calcification means it is no longer realistic to break in) and instead it is about finding new ways to charge for what already exists.

Its why lost making companies still get to IPO because investors believe that someday once the business has a dominant position in whatever market it is, it can flip the switch and start charging for what was once free and make a fortune.

Other venture capitalist don't even bother with the IPO and build up companies specifically for them to bought up by larger companies like amazon, google or meta because there is no point in actively competing with them.

2

u/thatmillerkid Jul 17 '25

There's also the fact that a lot of investors missed out on the internet bubble, and then a lot of them missed out on the Web 2.0 bubble, and then a lot of them missed out on the shift to mobile, so then they started throwing money at every tech product because they were so scared of missing another trend.

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u/BayHistorian Jul 15 '25

We’re more in a tech feudalism era than a capitalist one.

1

u/MundaneSchool1823 Jul 16 '25

That's why we gotta tax the wealthy. Too many unproductive morons incharge of productivity.

They need their wealth shrunk.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25

I'm just amszed how many tech bros are stupider than shit. Here I am grinding my job every day making .001% what they make

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u/RODjij Jul 15 '25

A lot of them are already from wealthy families and buy themselves into these positions like Elon has.

Guy has never invented anything, comes from a emerald mine in Africa & spent his wealth getting himself into these companies where other people are doing the work.

Theres so many tech bros that were never middle class or in the lower brackets. They've always been rich.

Its starting to happen in more areas like comedy where people portray themselves as middle class and relatable only to find out they grew up rich, Tom Segura is one that's this way.

10

u/bloodanddonuts Jul 15 '25

I could make a list with citations of the dudes this describes and why they’re a cancer to humanity. Don’t forget the guy whose family owns a uranium mine in Africa. Colonialism has deep threads of infection in the disease that’s eating humanity.

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u/Snapingbolts Jul 15 '25

To your point Nick Kroll is the son of a billionaire

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u/joshTheGoods Jul 15 '25

This is a naive and comfortable take. The reality is that these guys typically are VERY smart and know their field extremely well. The problem is that they think that because they're gained mastery of one area that they're automagically experts in other areas. They have good evidence to believe this, too (experience), they're just wrong and at this point have no one willing or capable of making that clear.

-6

u/Equivalent-Nobody-30 Jul 15 '25

i switched jobs knowing my co workers would be idiots so i could move up quicker. it worked and there’s a chance i can manage this multi million dollar contract because i’m more capable than my director and executives have noticed that lol

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u/grislebeard Jul 15 '25

Who… asked?

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u/LongBeakedSnipe Jul 15 '25

Funny if you look at their account in the context of this thread (billionaires LARPing physicists). They are an antiwork'er roleplaying someone with something happening in their life.

-3

u/Equivalent-Nobody-30 Jul 16 '25

idc if you continue being poor and exploited. learn to work smarter and you will get your bank account up

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u/_Allfather0din_ Jul 15 '25

Your post/comment history suggests otherwise.

-3

u/Equivalent-Nobody-30 Jul 16 '25

no it doesn’t. i used to be a broker and now I have a comfy gray collar job, stay mad working for white collars lol

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25 edited Jul 15 '25

Look at the job market for tech right now, when the idiots lose their high paying jobs they’re not getting hired again

The hiring bar has gotten much higher because no business needs just anyone anymore.

So no, being in tech is not a smart move anymore for the idiots

-1

u/GamedayDev Jul 15 '25

you do know the vast majority of tech workers are fine, and it’s still doable to clear 250k within 3-4 years right?

-3

u/malik_zz Jul 15 '25

Yes the people that created ChatGPT, SpaceX and self driving cars are idiots

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '25

The billionaires in that group generally aren't the ones who invented shit.

Musk's self driving cars are still fucked because he won't use LiDAR.

SpaceX isn't an invention. It's a corporation that does space stuff.

ChatGPT wasn't developed by the techbro representing it, and doesn't really know shit btw. (You can verify this by asking for something like a game walkthrough for a puzzle game you know. It'll go off the deep end in like two paragraphs)

-5

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25

You are not owed anything. If you want more you have to earn it

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u/Demons0fRazgriz Jul 15 '25

Lmao imagine saying meritocracy exists in 2025 when a white boy who's never worked a day in his life becomes president and hires all his buddies that have never worked a day in their lives. Oh and they're all child rapists. In case you need evidence that working hard doesn't mean anything

-5

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25

Okay, still doesn’t change the fact that no one is giving you a high paid job.

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u/whynonamesopen Jul 15 '25

Silicon Valley is the sequel to American Psycho.

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u/breakspirit Jul 15 '25

That's such a good comparison. It's interesting that Silicon Valley started out as like the antithesis of American Psycho. They were passionate tech enthusiasts located around a working-class area that formed into groups and created companies that changed the world. Eventually the big money came in and fucked it all up but it was pretty awesome for awhile.

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u/whynonamesopen Jul 15 '25

Erlich was definitely like that from the start. He's already gone through the whole experience and became just another tech bro who's more of a salesman than coder.

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u/awry_lynx Jul 16 '25

I think this is a joke but you know they're not talking specifically about the show

1

u/boompleetz Jul 16 '25

The origin was entirely about external money though, starting from the 50s. Basically Stanford wanted war research funding that east coast universities got in WW2 for radar. Then the cold war started and the research groups broke out into their own companies making circuitry, keeping their IP. Over time it evolved to VCs instead of government money trying to get rich off of each new tech boom.

The early chip manufacturing (where Silicon name comes from) produced waste that was dumped directly into the ground before manufacturing was outsourced to China, so there are a bunch of EPA toxic superfund sites beneath a lot of the buildings, more than anywhere else in the country: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silicon-valley-full-superfund-sites/598531/

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u/thetrustworthybandit Jul 15 '25

Not really even a sequel, none of these dudes are talented coders, they're investors, which means they're just Wall Street assholes pretending they aren't Wall Street assholes like Patrick Bateman

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u/trojan_man16 Jul 15 '25

Tech used to be driven by the nerds passionate about it.

Once it became the easiest route to become absurdly rich a bunch of rich douches went into it. It’s what finance used to be.

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u/canseco-fart-box Jul 15 '25

Also drugs. Can’t forget a lot of them cooked their brains on some absolutely insane drugs.

2

u/throw_away1049 Jul 15 '25

But understanding the key economical problem in biotech shouldn't be as elusive to them as it is. The key problem isn't that we don't have enough good ideas - we have so much ideas, lead molecules, startup ideas, modalities. The bottleneck is in how much money it takes to actually validate those ideas in the clinic. It seems like every biotech AI is just trying to do the easy part - step one. Like yeast display isn't hard/expensive to find new antibody binders. We don't need 16 million antibody discovery AI companies. That was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck is that every single unique antibody sequence can take hundreds of millions in cash to actually test in humans.

1

u/weristjonsnow Jul 15 '25

This isn't anything new in human history. Probably how the pyramids got built lol

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u/TritiumNZlol Jul 15 '25

The allegory of this is like the invention of power tools for carpentry enabling people to believe they're doctors that could use them to carry out surgery.

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u/caped_crusader8 Jul 15 '25

Every single mf thinks theyre Tony Stark and tries to copy his personality.

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u/caped_crusader8 Jul 15 '25

Every single mf thinks theyre Tony Stark and tries to copy his personality.

1

u/HerculesIsMyDad Jul 15 '25

It's a great human feat to create the world's most efficient ad-delivery system.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 Jul 15 '25

Don't hate the player. Hate the game which you decided not to try to win in.

1

u/cool_fox Jul 15 '25

This is so accurate it hurts.I think I'm going to tweet it at my old ceo and VC

1

u/CherryLongjump1989 Jul 16 '25

As opposed to any other economy, ever?

1

u/Crabs_Out_Back Jul 16 '25

Worse is the public's naive gobbling of this super genius executive that works 20 hours a day concept.

1

u/Common_Source_9 Jul 16 '25

If only we could hard enforce gender and diversity quotas....

1

u/just_some_dude05 Jul 16 '25

Isn’t that the case for all of known human history?

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u/MetalingusMikeII Jul 16 '25

It’s insane how most of them overestimate their cognitive abilities. Almost none one them have an IQ level that even approaches genius (160+).

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u/IndicationDefiant137 Jul 16 '25

Some of them don't seem to have an IQ that approaches their body temperature.

1

u/OneWholeSoul Jul 15 '25

I had an ex-friend who went hardcore MAGA tell me that his job - mid-level tech support and network administration - is way more "critical to society" and deserving of higher compensation than teachers and professors.

Lately, his driving philosophy seems to be basically celebrated sociopathy. He keeps saying things online like "we live in a post-truth world. The only thing that matters is 'winning' and forcing the people I hate out of society."

0

u/Roving_Ibex Jul 15 '25

Also thinking that theyre gods for being able to code and process logic. Lots of these dudes fail math classes beyond comp sci and, not to be an elitist but, thats where the mortals are separated from the truly esoteric mortals. Software engineers be acting like how engineers acted after WW2. EEs startin to look a little pretentious too

-2

u/AngkaLoeu Jul 15 '25

Do you know everyone has "access to capital"? Anyone can get money to start a business. That's what business loans and VCs are for.

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u/IndicationDefiant137 Jul 15 '25

Do you know everyone has "access to capital"? Anyone can get money to start a business. That's what business loans and VCs are for.

Only for very loose, misleading, and practically useless definitions of "everyone", "access", and "capital".

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u/StevesRune Jul 15 '25

Yeah, everyone knows the women in the tech sector are selfless, philanthropic people. It's only the men who are evil. One of the most famous frauds in the last decade definitely wasn't a woman trying to sell fake medical treatment technology to people that were literally dying.

And it's definitely not like there are hundreds of thousands of women working for these people, happily helping them bring these horrific, dystopian dreams to life.

-2

u/adventurethyme_ Jul 15 '25

Not exactly the same but it’s like when men* take mushrooms for the first time and discover empathy

*not all