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 AIs we have at our disposal can’t invent a thing - yet - because they aren’t true AIs - again: yet.
They are merely, and should be perceived as tools, nothing more. It’s the people who use them that may apply them to tasks that will result in invention, but on their own, they are closer to the Chinese Room principle, than to thinking and inventive constructions.
I agree with the basic idea, but there’s not some fundamental distinction between what we have now and true AI. Maybe we’ll find breakthroughs that help, but the systems we’re using now would work given enough computing power and training. There’s nothing the human brain can do that they can’t, so with enough resources they can imitate the human brain.
Making one smarter than a human wouldn’t be completely trivial, but I doubt it would be all that difficult given that the AI is powerful enough to imitate something smarter than a human.