[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]

This is so false. Try doing the research to back up your risible claim.

Tell me the date when humanity went from oblivious to electricity to generating and using it.

[qsera]

What exactly is false?

[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.

[qsera]

> it seems highly likely that they will be able to "invent" things based on feedback they receive while working towards goals...

I don't think so. Imagine a model trained on data from an Internet that believes in hypothesis that earth is the center of the world. Even if you feed all the physical data, I don't think it can come up with the idea that all of its training data was wrong.

This might be also a good argument for why this LLMs are not "intelligent". You can feed contradicting training data all day and it will accept it without bating an eye. But that won't work with an entity that is truly intelligent.

[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.