Fuck AI

I'll just focus down on one example, but I've seen this amount of success with non llm AI elsewhere. Protein folding. I'm not directly in the space but my understanding from friends who are researchers is this has solved massive problems for them. Cutting years of time down to potentially days (it's still in early adoption so not fully proven. But I trust their judgement).

Alphafold uses an attention network to determine potential fold patterns and fairly well. This let's them cut research time and materials as they can very quickly actually predict likely outcomes without having to directly test things in an experimental environment. (Where they go from there I get lost, I've helped friends write script to sort data so my knowledge of this area ends at the computer phase)

Yes you can argue we technically could do it manually before AI,, but ultimately you could say that about most any tool. The cotton gin didn't do anything we couldn't do before, but it sure changed things with it's speed and utility.