Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Is Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok have exploded in popularity as AI becomes mainstream. These tools don’t have the ability to make new scientific discoveries on their own, but billionaires are convinced that AI is on the cusp of doing just that. And the latest episode of the All-In podcast helps explain why these guys think AI is extremely close to revolutionizing scientific knowledge.

Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber who no longer works at the company, appeared on All-In to talk with hosts Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya about the future of technology. When the topic turned to AI, Kalanick discussed how he uses xAI’s Grok, which went haywire last week, praising Adolf Hitler and advocating for a second Holocaust against Jews.

“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 guys on the podcast only briefly addressed Grok’s failures without getting into specifics about the MechaHitler debacle, and none of that stopped Kalanick from talking like Grok was this revolutionary tool that was so close to making scientific discoveries in revolutionary ways.

“I pinged Elon on at some point. I’m just like, dude, if I’m doing this and I’m super amateur hour physics enthusiast, like what about all those PhD students and postdocs that are super legit using this tool?” Kalanick said.

Kalanick suggested that what made this even more incredible was that he was using an earlier version of Grok before Grok 4 was released on Wednesday.

“And this is pre-Grok 4. Now with Grok 4, like, there’s a lot of mistakes I was seeing Grok make that then I would correct, and we would talk about it. Grok 4 could be this place where breakthroughs are actually happening, new breakthroughs,” Kalanick said.

Calacanis asked Kalanick the obvious question of whether Grok was actually on the verge of a scientific breakthrough. Because anyone who actually understands large language models knows that it can’t achieve new ways of thinking. It’s just putting together words in the most statistically likely way, forming connections that may sound like a well-thought-out argument but are actually not a form of true “intelligence” as humans would define it.

“Is your perception that the LLMs are actually starting to get to the reasoning level, that they’ll come up with a novel concept theory and have that breakthrough? Or that we’re kind of reading into it and it’s just trying random stuff at the margins?” Calacanis asked.

Kalanick said that he hasn’t used Grok 4 because he was having technical difficulties accessing it, suggesting that perhaps a later version of Grok might be capable of such a thing. But he admitted the AI couldn’t yet come up with new discoveries.

“No, it cannot come up with the new idea. These things are so wedded to what is known. And they’re so like, even when I come up with a new idea, I have to really, it’s like pulling a donkey. You see, you’re pulling it because it doesn’t want to break conventional wisdom. It’s like really adhering to conventional wisdom. You’re pulling it out and then eventually goes, oh, shit, you got something,” Kalanick said.

Kalanick emphasized that “you have to double and triple check to make sure that you really got something,” making clear he understood that AI chatbots just make things up much of the time. But he still seemed convinced that the thing holding back Grok was “conventional wisdom” rather than the natural limitations of the tech.

Palihapitiya went a step further than Kalanick, insisting that synthetic data could train new AI models.

“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,” Palihapitiya.

Musk revealed a similar line of thinking recently when he suggested “general artificial intelligence” was close because he had asked Grok “about materials science that are not in any books or on the Internet.” The idea, of course, is that Musk had hit the limits of known science rather than the limit of his scientific understanding. The billionaire really seems convinced that Grok was working on something new.

That was how I felt when asking Grok 4 questions about materials science that are not in any books or on the Internet https://t.co/2wEP3mtD2j

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 10, 2025

These guys are hyping up the idea of general artificial intelligence (AGI), which doesn’t even have an exact definition. But it’s far from the only term getting tossed around right now. AI folks also drop words like “superintelligence” without defining what that means, but it sure keeps the investors intrigued.

These AI chatbots are pulling off a magic trick. They can often seem like they’re “thinking” or applying rational thought to a given answer, but they work by spitting out the next word that’s most likely to be next in a sentence, not by actually applying critical reasoning. There’s a reason that people who understand AI the best are the least excited about using it.

Apple has gotten a lot of shit for not committing to AI in a more forceful way, something the All-In guys talked about, but the company understands perhaps better than most that there are limitations to this tech. In fact, Apple released a paper last month that shows how Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) struggle, facing “a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities.”

Apple’s paper won’t dampen the hype, of course. Just about every other major tech company is pushing hard into AI agents and investing billions of dollars into data centers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday that his company was building enormous new data centers to work on superintelligence.

“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher,” Zuck wrote. “I’m looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!”