[makaking]

Fair. But that 1/10 continues to get more and more impressive. Say, Claude 7 creates a new, brilliant scientific idea every 1 out of 1000 times. Anthropic reports "Claude figured out how to tie general relativity with quantum mechanics." Would you hand-wave it away saying that it's cherry-picked?

[haldujai]

> Say, Claude 7 creates a new, brilliant scientific idea every 1 out of 1000 times.

I would not hand wave that away - but Claude 5 feels closer to Claude 1 than the hypothetical Claude 7 you propose. I do not believe one can extrapolate LLMs that far ahead despite the very substantial progress so far.

[fourseventy]

Like two days ago Claude solved a century old math conjecture

[haldujai]

If you are referring to the Jacobian conjecture Claude only provided a counterexample, not a disproof, neither of which is necessarily a “new brilliant scientific idea”.

[fourseventy]

A counterexample proves that the conjecture is false, not sure what you are talking about. And we can play word games all day about what counts as a "new brilliant scientific idea" but the fact is that no human had been able to solve it.

[throw-the-towel]

The whole "AI is a parrot" argument feels like moving the goalposts so quickly, you could actually hear the whooshing sound they make as they move.

[haldujai]

No, that’s not my argument. Rather it is that a counterexample to a mathematical proof whether produced by human or AI may be a scientific discovery but it is not inherently new and brilliant by definition.

The case for AI is also weakened when the model is steered by an expert.

[throw-the-towel]

So what is your definition of "new and brilliant"?

[mistercheph]

It wouldn't surprise me that a company with an effectively unlimited budget could fund enough researchers to solve breakthrough problems, all while using LLM's (which are excellent research and exploration tools!) and then claim that the LLM found the breakthrough. The amount of money Anthropic has to play with is >10,000x what entire fields of research have, I think people don't appreciate how few resources we spend to support people working on hard problems that don't have clear commercial applications.

Very similar story with security research, LLM's are a super useful tool while hunting vulnerabilities, but it turns out when the entire software industry starts throwing tens of billions of dollars at vuln. research, a lot of stuff gets unearthed, something security people have been insisting on for years and complaining that their work is underfunded and under-resourced.

[cardboard9926]

> Say, Claude 7 creates a new, brilliant scientific idea every 1 out of 1000 times

Sadly, general public (us) is never seeing that model