The original tweet is immensely dishonest and has a poor understanding of science. Key advancements in science often come because the environment allowed it to happen. This notion that scientists sit in the room and have some brilliant breakthrough in a vacuum is pure fiction and a really damaging stereotype because it causes young people to not pursue career in science because they think they can't think of any brilliant idea. Even Einstein very likely would have not discovered special and general relativity if key advancements in astronomy in late 19th century did not gave us much more accurate data about the universe. I mean look at the field of AI, you think it's a coincidence that all these advancements came right as the physical hardware, the GPU allowed us to test our theories? Of course not.

I do think a very early sign of ASI will be if model will independently solves a long-standing and well-understood problem in science or mathematics. Like for example one of the Millennium-Prize Problems, but absolutely nobody is claiming AI as we have it now is anywhere near that. The person is being immensely dishonest to either justify perpetuating hate or more likely in this case just drifting. There is a lot of money to be made if you take stance on any issue and scream it loud enough, regardless how much it has to do with reality.

A personal anecdote from my life. I have a friend who is very very successful, he is finishing up his PhD in computer science at one of the top universities in the world. He is actually not that keen on transformers or machine learning through a mass amount of data, he finds it a pretty dumb and inelegant approach, but week ago we were discussing GPT-4 and I was of course gushing over it and saying how this will allow all these things, his opinion still hasn't changed, but at that moment he surprised me he said that they've had access to GPT-3 for a long time through university and he and others have used it to brainstorm ideas, let it critique the research papers, discuss if there is something they missed they should have covered etc. If someone so smart, at the bleeding edge of mathematics and computer science, finds this tool useful (GPT-3 no less) as an aid for their research, then you have absolutely no argument. Cope and seethe all day but if this thing is useful in real-world doing real science, then what is your problem? Yeah, it isn't Einstein, nobody said it was.