Comment by ysavir
4 days ago
Less that AI is cheating and more that we basically found a way to take the thousand monkeys with infinite time scenario and condense that into a reasonable(?) amount of time and with some decent starting instructions. The AI wouldn't have done any of the heavy lifting of the discovery, it just iterated on the work of past researchers at speeds beyond human.
Honest question - how is that not true of those past researchers?
IE, they...
- Start with the context window of prior researchers.
- Set a goal or research direction.
- Engage in chain of thought with occasional reality-testing.
- Generate an output artifact, reviewable by those with appropriate expertise, to allow consensus reality to accept or reject their work.
AI sceptics are on a trajectory towards philosophy.
The difference is that human researchers have agency--for better or for worse.
It sounds like you're saying AI is just doing brute force with a lot of force, but I can't imagine that's actually what you think, so would you mind clarifying?