A Business Opportunity for Some Failed VCs?
June 26, 2025
An opinion essay written by a dinobaby who did not rely on smart software .
Do you want to open a T shirt and baseball cap with snappy quotes? If the answer is, “Yes,” I have a suggestion for you. Tucked into “Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Miracle Cure: Nobel Laureate Raises Questions about AI-Generated Image of Black Hole Spinning at the Heart of Our Galaxy” is this gem of a quotation:
“But artificial intelligence is not a miracle cure.”
The context for the statement by Reinhard Genzel, “an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics” offered the observation when smart software happily generated images of a black hole. These are mysterious “things” which industrious wizards find amidst the numbers spewed by “telescopes.” Astrophysicists are discussing in an academic way exactly what the properties of a black hole are. One wing of the community has suggested that our universe exists within a black hole. Other wings offer equally interesting observations about these phenomena.
The write up explains:
an international team of scientists has attempted to harness the power of AI to glean more information about Sagittarius A* from data collected by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Unlike some telescopes, the EHT doesn’t reside in a single location. Rather, it is composed of several linked instruments scattered across the globe that work in tandem. The EHT uses long electromagnetic waves — up to a millimeter in length — to measure the radius of the photons surrounding a black hole. However, this technique, known as very long baseline interferometry, is very susceptible to interference from water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere. This means it can be tough for researchers to make sense of the information the instruments collect.
The fix is to feed the data into a neural network and let the smart software solve the problem. It did, and generated the somewhat tough-to-parse images in the write up. To a dinobaby, one black hole image looks like another.
But the quote states what strikes me as a truism for 2025:
“But artificial intelligence is not a miracle cure.”
Those who have funded are unlikely to buy a hat to T shirt with this statement printed in bold letters.
Stephen E Arnold, June 26, 2025
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