Something Funky is Happening in Stockholm
The 2024 Nobel Prizes were announced a few weeks back. I think the folks who decide who becomes a laureate need to have their heads checked.
I have gripes about the chemistry prize. But I usually do. By my count, of the 20 prizes awarded since I took my first chemistry course as a sophomore in high school, 11 have been for something other than chemistry. That thing is biology.
Okay, so maybe click chemistry is chemistry. Even though the real innovation was being able to attach stuff to DNA or whatever in cells. But conservatively, 50+% of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry in the last 20 years have gone to people doing biology, analytical techniques for biology, or chemical tools specifically for use in biology. And hey, guess what. There’s a prize for that: Physiology or Medicine. Which, since 2005, has gone to biologists doing work in things like RNA and protein interactions and stuff several times.
But the physics prize this year takes the cake. They gave it to the AI guys.
Not particles, or waves, or stars and planets, or materials. Nope. They gave it to the guys who invented algorithms that led to ways of turning massive copyright theft into energy guzzling slop factories. You can generate a lewd image of your favorite anime character with improbable anatomy. You can generate paragraphs of text to email to everyone in your department that nobody will read. You can work on a way to do "full self driving" with cheap hardware, and someone randomly dies only once in a while. All it takes is putting artists out of work, putting carbon into the atmosphere like you’re trying to win a diesel truck idling contest, and sending GPU prices into the stratosphere.
Three years ago they gave it to the people modeling global warming. Now, they’re endorsing the guys saying climate change targets are unreachable because you have to burn a lot of energy to run a chat bot that lies.
When this sort of thing became available to the public, I played around with it for a bit. But it didn’t really make anything useful unless I let my Mac crank for an hour at full blast, and even then I had to pick one okay image out of a pile of slop. And then people I know started getting let go of their writing jobs. Some were offered new jobs, at lower wages, to edit the bot’s output. That put an end to any flirtation I had with the garbage factory.
This weekend, I got to review a paper for OPRD. The abstract, introduction section, and conclusions were (as far as I can tell) written entirely with LLM tools. Complete with misattributed citations and, in one instance, a citation to an article that did not even exist. I'm guessing it took me a lot longer to review that piece of crap than it took the LLM to generate it.
Pretty soon, it’s gonna be on my phone. iOS 18.1 dropped this week. Generating bad caricatures of my friends. Writing emails to people that won’t read them and instead autoreply with their own bot. Making new emojis, I guess. For what reason? Supposedly “everyone” knows it’s the new hotness. Nobody wants to be perceived as being behind. Even if they don’t understand it, they have to pretend to. Or at least be enthusiastic, so dumb guys with money will invest.
I think the folks in Copenhagen got caught up in the “don’t be left behind” hype cycle.
The prizes are a way to say “this is important.” For chemistry, usually that means it was invented a while ago and now plays an important role. Physics tends to be more recent. Physiology or Medicine varies, sometimes it’s older but often it’s more like Time appointing a Medicine of the Year. Literature is something I’ll pass on commenting on too much, but I know they gave it to Bob Dylan a few years back and I’ll always think that was hilarious.
So maybe the physics prize committee members thought well, this is our chance to confirm that this prize is meaningful. We can give it to the AI guys. Everyone knows it’s important. Maybe it’s not physics. Who cares?
The thing is, when you start applying enough energy to a biological system, it stops being biology and starts being physics. All the energy being poured into AI data centers is gonna result in carbon emissions that speed that process up for us. Maybe we’ll get blown away by hurricanes and tornadoes, flooded, or burned earlier than we otherwise would have. At least we had anime boobies to look at. And the unemployed time to look at them.