monobot12

Sure, but their peers (who do use AI) will out-publish them soon enough and solve the open problems before they do.

My takeaway is it's much easier to embark on huge side projects as a tenured professor.

If you don't mind a speed of 1 token per second, you can run the largest R1 model on a 2021 iMac, as I just did.

While AI is powerful, it’s also computationally expensive. Unless someone decides to rewrite the laws of physics, there will always be a limit on how much artificial intelligence humanity can bring to bear. This means that we’ll eventually allocate our scarce AI resources towards the things they are best at, which leaves plenty of things for humans to do.

Unfortunately, this argument doesn't hold up because of "cheap" models such as Deepseek R1.