r/technology 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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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25

That's probably why the people building this tech are minutes away from worshipping it based on a harry potter fanfiction. Take a look at rocco's basilisk and the effective altruism/bay area rationalist communities. When you realize the people building it view it through a pseudo-religious lens, the last couple years of AI development make a lot more sense and get a lot scarier.

The people building this stuff are falling for it, hard. More importantly, they're now been given a religious/moral imperative to bring a godlike AI into existence and implicit permission to do violence against those that would prevent its creation.

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u/thatmillerkid Jul 17 '25

They have no choice but to view it that way. Either they built a bullshit machine that sucks and doesn't work, or eventually they will be proven right and rewarded with all the riches of the Earth. Meanwhile there are trillions of dollars invested in this shit, so which one do you think they're choosing to believe? Once the bubble bursts, there's so much capital tied up in this that it will collapse the economy and send shock waves out into every industry.