Is your assertion that no one has ever written "we tried some stuff on the small inexpensive platform first, then moved to the bigger more expensive platform with the more promising options" in a research paper or literally anywhere else?
Seems to me the commenter was asking: what observations led us to conclude that original affirmative statement that “the AI did this entirely on its own”.
Given that this is a common technique and not a novel invention, it’s probably present in the training set.
The “surely” reads like it’s referring to the presence of that information in the training set. But your response casts it as saying “surely the AI has not invented something on its own”.
The original question stands IMO, the burden of proof is on whoever is asserting that the AI has invented something on its own, with or without training data that surely already mentions this approach
In this case, using a cheap(er) signal or heuristic as an initial filter before spending more resources on cases that pass the filter is a pattern that shows up all over the place, and LLMs are good at picking up on patterns like that and generalizing them. AFAICT.
I'm not sure how people say this so confidently. I have a rather esoteric haskell library that I've written and published for years. ChatGPT and Claude both know about it and frequently help me improve it, and propose completely novel approaches. I'm really not sure how people are so confident that they can't think of anything new. This seems like wishful confirmation bias.