[qsera]

It does not think at all. It vibes based on its training and any additional bolted on constraints. It is a quite simple automation that only works by huge amount of existing data.

Modern man has grown quite dumb. He only seems to be able to "invent" by massive scaling things that are decades or centuries old..

[brookst]

Out of curiousity, can you share a human invention that is not merely scaling things that were decades or centuries old at the time?

Fire? The wheel? Archimedes screw, maaaaybe?

[qsera]

Electricity, RF communication, LASERS, Transistors....

[brookst]

What specific inventions in those areas?

Electricity runs from simple batteries (600 BCE) to today’s power grids.

RF was predicted but not demonstrated by Maxwell in the 1860’s. His work built on Faraday’s (1840’s) and Coulomb’s (1780’s). Coulomb built on Franklin and Newton, among others. Or do you mean Marconi and Tesla, who merely implemented what Maxwell predicted?

The same is true for lasers and transistors but it’s tedious. There was no single “back in the day people invented things from whole cloth” moment.

[qsera]

Those are the specific inventions.

[addaon]

> Those are the specific inventions.

In what way is electricity an invention? Electricity is a physical phenomenon. Various machines for doing work with electrical energy, storing electrical energy, converting other types of energy to electrical energy, etc. are certainly inventions... Heck, rubbing an amber rod with a fur is an invention. The static charge transferred is not.

[qsera]

Invention, discovery..does not matter. There was a point in time when humanity was oblivious to the phenomenon and then there was a point when we were not and we could generate and use it.

[brookst]

Great. So when you say electricity, do you mean the batteries of 600BCE and the precursors before them?

[antonvs]

I would put it differently. Those inventions came from humans interacting with the physical world.

When LLMs were first introduced, they didn't have much of a feedback loop. They wrote code, but they couldn't compile it. Not surprisingly, the code had bugs.

Now, they run with harnesses that allow them to compile the code, and react to the issues they observe. They can fix their own bugs and solve problems that they create, just like humans.

Give an agent access to the physical world, and it seems highly likely that they will be able to "invent" things based on feedback they receive while working towards goals.

Of course, there are some well-known limitations of LLMs, one of the biggest being that they're pretrained. So there may be some things where they're not as good. Just like how some humans aren't as good at certain tasks, depending on their genetics and/or how they've been trained.

[skydhash]

Those are not merely scaling. I can get “build upon other works”, but there’s a lot of scientific insights needed for observing and modeling a phenomena. It may even requires a boost of creativity to theorize an effect based on that model and then make it possible in an experiment.

[pixl97]

>Modern man has grown quite dumb

Ah yes, that's why it only took 50 years instead of 100,000 years for homosapients to reach the space age....

Dude, there was no glorious past, we've always sucked.