I think the reverse is also sometimes the case, I was in a meeting where some academics were talking about ontologies about a specific topic and the semantic web, and the non-IT guy there (correctly) noticed that what they were doing apparently has absolutely no practical use. LLMs strike me as a much more interesting area.

And there are also NLP researchers who don't seem to know about GPT-3, which is very strange considering its very high performance on so many tasks. (But maybe the person I talked to was in some other subarea, he was smart, idk).

(Of course there are also many people doing amazing work in academia.)

Artificial intelligence is already smarter than the average human on Big-Bench Lite (many difficult natural language tasks taken together). Check the leaderboard here: https://github.com/google/BIG-bench#big-bench-lite-leaderboard . And this is only the beginning, the future will be exciting.

It could easily do it, in my opinion. Even current solutions could (if the simulations are right) stop the warming - but maybe not the CO2, but it is not that clear how much of a deal that is. I am talking about aerosols or marine cloud brightening. (Wrote a student paper about it.)

With the scientific breakthroughs that we will have in 40 years? I can't imagine climate change to be much of a challenge anymore. In my opinion people should choose another topic to be freaked out about. Nuclear war is scarier.