Comment by adamzwasserman
5 days ago
I'm afraid I'd need to see evidence before accepting that humans navigate 'pre-carved channels' in the same way LLMs do. Human learning involves direct interaction with physical reality, not just pattern matching on symbolic representations. Show me the equivalence or concede the point.
Language and math are a world model of physical reality. You could not read a book and make sense of it if this were not true.
An apple falls to the ground because of? gravity.
In real life this is the answer, I'm very sure the pre-carved channel will also lead to gravity.
You're proving my point. You know the word 'gravity' appears in texts about falling apples. An LLM knows that too. But neither you nor the LLM discovered gravity by observing reality and creating new models. You both inherited a pre-existing linguistic map. That's my entire argument about why LLMs can't do Nobel Prize-level work.
Well it depends. It doesn't have arms and legs so can't physically experiment in the real world, a human is currently a proxy for that, we can do it's bidding and feedback results though, so it's not really an issue.
Most of the time that data is already available to it and they merely need to a prove a thereom using existing historic data points and math.
For instance the Black-Scholes-Merton equation which won the Nobel economics prize was derived using preexisting mathematical concepts and mathematical principles. The application and validation relied on existing data.
2 replies →