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Remember when the guys over at the All-In podcast talked with Uber founder Travis Kalanick about “vibe physics“? Kalanick told viewers that he was on the verge of discovering new kinds of science by pushing his AI chatbots into previously undiscovered territory.
It was ridiculous, of course, since that’s not how an AI chatbot or science works. And Kalanick’s ideas got ridiculed to no end by folks on social media. But the gentlemen of All-In now seem to be distancing themselves from Kalanick’s ideas, even suggesting it could be related to the rise of “AI psychosis,” despite the fact that they were more than happy to entertain the Uber founder’s rambling nonsense when he was on the show.
Kalanick appeared as a guest on the July 11 episode of All-In, explaining very earnestly how he was on the cusp of discovering exciting new things about quantum physics, previously unknown to science.
“I’ll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I’ll start to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics and then I’m doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it’s vibe physics,” Kalanick explained. “And we’re approaching what’s known. And I’m trying to poke and see if there’s breakthroughs to be had. And I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.”
The reality is that AI chatbots like Grok and ChatGPT are not capable of delivering new discoveries in quantum physics because that’s beyond their capabilities. They spit out sentences by remixing and rehashing their training data, not by testing hypotheses. But All-In co-host Chamath Palihapitiya thought Kalanick was on to something, taking it a step further by insisting that AI chatbots could just figure out the answer to any problem you posed.
“When these models are fully divorced from having to learn on the known world and instead can just learn synthetically, then everything gets flipped upside down to what is the best hypothesis you have or what is the best question? You could just give it some problem and it would just figure it out,” said Palihapitiya.
This kind of insistence that AI chatbots can solve any problem is central to their marketing, but it also sets up users for failure.
