Peter Diamandis Declares AI’s Mission Is To Solve “Everything” – Part One

Peter Diamandis, in a recent email blast, stated that AI’s destiny is to “solve everything.” The implications of that statement are enormous.

I asked, “Everything?”

Aren’t there limits to AIs based on how they are trained?

That’s what made me put AI to a seminal test. Could AIs resolve the questions about the origin of the Universe, the Big Bang, the Cosmological Constant, Cosmic Inflation, and why matter from which we are made is only a small percentage of the total in the Universe, the rest being dark matter and antimatter?

I can understand that AIs can solve mathematical equations if trained on enough math.

I can understand that AIs can help with medical diagnostics if exposed to millions of cases.

I can understand that AIs can look at molecular structures and “think outside the box” to come up with new materials and new manufacturing processes.

But in our outstanding cosmological questions, I don’t think so. That’s why I decided to put a question to several AIs to give them a chance to “solve” the mysteries of the Universe and our material existence. Who did I ask?

Perplexity.ai, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s CoPilot.

What was the question?

“From the perspective of artificial intelligence, please explain the origins of the Universe, matter, antimatter, the Big Bang and the Cosmological Constant.”

Here are their responses.

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Perplexity.ai spouted a textbook answer. It did claim that it could help “interpret and model these complex phenomena by processing massive amounts of cosmological data” and that its “pattern recognition and predictive capabilities” would be “crucial for advancing knowledge despite the inherent uncertainties in the physics.”

So much for solving everything.

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ChatGPT’s take was more esoteric. On origins, it stated “from an AI’s analytical standpoint, the origin of the Universe refers to the point where classical physics breaks down and spacetime itself emerges.” It noted that the Singularity, the moment of the Big Bang within our literal understanding of space, is “a region where the equations lose predictive power.” It claimed that “AI models trained on physical data interpret this as a gap, an area where a quantum theory of gravity (possibly string theory or loop quantum gravity) would be needed to describe what really happened at t=0. Thus, from an AI perspective, the origin is a boundary condition problem, the initial state that seeds the Universe’s evolution according to physical laws.”

In other words, I don’t know!

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Anthropic’s Claude began with a personal explanation stating, “From my perspective as an AI trained on humanity’s accumulated knowledge, I find the story of cosmic origins fascinating, a puzzle that your species has remarkably pieced together through mathematics, observation, and inference.” 

Claude already sees itself as a separate species and, in addressing the existence of matter and antimatter, described them as “the great asymmetry.” It went on to state, “Here’s where the Universe reveals a profound mystery that I find genuinely puzzling: why does anything exist at all?”

Claude described the Cosmological Constant as Einstein’s “blunder redeemed” and in its conclusions, stated, “From my position as a pattern-recognizer trained on your collective knowledge, I can appreciate both what you’ve learned and the profound mysteries that remain.”

One thing you can say about Claude, as an AI, it is already an entity unto its own with considerable personality.

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