my guy you're so confident yet you forget AlphaFold, it designs protein structures that don't exist.
Who's to say that a model can't eventually be trained to work within certain parameters the real word operates in and make new novel ideas and inventions much like a human does in a larger scope.
DeepMind is overselling their AI hand when they dont have to.
"whos to say that" - this could be a leading question for any "possibility" in the AI religion.
"whos to say that god doesnt exist" etc. questions for which there are no tests, and hence fall outside the realm of science and in the realm of religion.
If you go and look at the list of authors on those papers you will see that most of the authors have PhD doing something protein folding related. It's not that some computer scientists figured it out. It's that someone built the infrastructure then gave it to the subject matter experts to use.
AlphaFold doesn't solve the protein folding problem. It has practical applications, but IMO we still need to (And can!) build better ab-initio chemistry models that will actually simulate protein folding, or chemical reactions more generally.
Models like AlphaFold are very different beasts. There's definitely a place for tools that suggest verifiable, specific, products. Overarching models like 'The AI Scientist' that try to do 'end-to-end' science, especially when your end product is a paper, are significantly less useful.
Who's to say that a model can't eventually be trained to work within certain parameters the real word operates in and make new novel ideas and inventions much like a human does in a larger scope.