Technology

I remember listening to a podcast that’s about explaining stuff according to what we know today (scientifically). The guy explaining is just so knowledgeable about this stuff and he does his research and talk to experts when the subject involves something he isn’t himself an expert.

There was this episode where he kinda got into the topic of how technology only evolves with science (because you need to understand the stuff you’re doing and you need a theory of how it works before you make new assumptions and test those assumptions). He gave an example of the Apple visionPro being a machine that despite being new (the hardware capabilities, at least), the algorithm for tracking eyes they use was developed decades ago and was already well understood and proven correct by other applications.

So his point in the episode is that real innovation just can’t be rushed by throwing money or more people at a problem. Because real innovation takes real scientists having novel insights and experiments to expand the knowledge we have. Sometimes those insights are completely random, often you need to have a whole career in that field and sometimes it takes a new genius to revolutionize it (think Newton and Einstein).

Even the current wave of LLMs are simply a product of the Google’s paper that showed we could parallelize language models, leading to the creation of “larger language models”. That was Google doing science. But you can’t control when some new breakthrough is discovered, and LLMs are subject to this constraint.

In fact, the only practice we know that actually accelerates science is the collaboration of scientists around the world, the publishing of reproducible papers so that others can expand upon and have insights you didn’t even think about, and so on.