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by esafak 16 days ago
Are you following the news?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863490

LLMs don't just 'average' their data.

2 comments

That doesn't disagree with this article. Proving a theorem that a human already proposed in an existing discipline of math - math, the most formalized and easiest discipline to involve computers in even before LLMs - is very different from expanding the boundaries of science.
How is it different? Before there was no proof, and now there is. What counts as expanding the boundary to you?
Identifying what questions to ask is often much harder than answering them. Proposing new theorems - and new areas of investigation - is what expands boundaries. Proving them is confirmation.

Once the Pythagorean theorem was proposed, many different proofs have been identified. In art, once a new style is created it's often straightforward for others to replicate. In physics, the idea of Relativity was what enabled the design of experiments to demonstrate its correctness. Proposing the idea is what's essential.

They interpolate data in an XYZ dimensional space. The implications of that is beyond our comprehension.

I have a hard time believing that all novel concepts yet to be discovered are contained within that space, though.

You might as well say AI can only think of things humans can, so even if they invent new maths or science they can't go beyond the space of human thought.