Comment by matthewh806
3 days ago
I presume that's what the parent post is trying to get at? Seeing if, given the cutting edge scientific knowledge of the day, the LLM is able to synthesis all it into a workable theory of QM by making the necessary connections and (quantum...) leaps
Standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were
But that's not the OP's challenge, he said "if the model comes up with anything even remotely correct." The point is there were things already "remotely correct" out there in 1900. If the LLM finds them, it wouldn't "be quite a strong evidence that LLMs are a path to something bigger."
It's not the comment which is illogical, it's your (mis)interpretation of it. What I (and seemingly others) took it to mean is basically could an LLM do Einstein's job? Could it weave together all those loose threads into a coherent new way of understanding the physical world? If so, AGI can't be far behind.
This alone still wouldn't be a clear demonstration that AGI is around the corner. It's quite possible a LLM could've done Einstein's job, if Einstein's job was truly just synthesising already available information into a coherent new whole. (I couldn't say, I don't know enough of the physics landscape of the day to claim either way.)
It's still unclear whether this process could be merely continued, seeded only with new physical data, in order to keep progressing beyond that point, "forever", or at least for as long as we imagine humans will continue to go on making scientific progress.
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Einstein is not AGI, and neither the other way around.
AGI is human level intelligence, and the minimum bar is Einstein?
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LLMs don't make inferential leaps like that
I think it's not productive to just have the LLM site like Mycroft in his armchair and from there, return you an excellent expert opinion.
THat's not how science works.
The LLM would have to propose experiments (which would have to be simulated), and then develop its theories from that.
Maybe there had been enough facts around to suggest a number of hypotheses, but the LLM in its curent form won't be able to confirm them.
Yeah but... we still might not know if it could do that because we were really close by 1900 or if the LLM is very smart.
What's the bar here? Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?"
I by no means believe LLMs are general intelligence, and I've seen them produce a lot of garbage, but if they could produce these revolutionary theories from only <= year 1900 information and a prompt that is not ridiculously leading, that would be a really compelling demonstration of their power.
> Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?"
It turns out my reading is somewhat topical. I've been reading Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and of the things he takes great pains to argue (I was not quite anticipating how much I'd be trying to recall my high school science classes to make sense of his account of various experiments) is that the development toward the atomic bomb was more or less inexorable and if at any point someone said "this is too far; let's stop here" there would be others to take his place. So, maybe, to answer your question.
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> Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?
Yes. It is certainly a question if Einstein is one of the smartest guy ever lived or all of his discoveries were already in the Zeitgeist, and would have been discovered by someone else in ~5 years.
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> Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?"
Kind of, how long would it have realistically taken for someone else (also really smart) to come up with the same thing if Einstein wouldn't have been there?
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Well, if one had enough time and resources, this would make for an interesting metric. Could it figure it out with cut-off of 1900? If so, what about 1899? 1898? What context from the marginal year was key to the change in outcome?