Comment by dvt
4 hours ago
Because by definition LLMs are permutation machines, not creativity machines. (My premise, which you may disagree with, is that creativity/imagination/artistry is not merely permutation.)
4 hours ago
Because by definition LLMs are permutation machines, not creativity machines. (My premise, which you may disagree with, is that creativity/imagination/artistry is not merely permutation.)
I prefer to think of it as they’re interpolation machines not extrapolation machines. They can project within the space they’re trained in, and what they produce may not be in their training corpus, but it must be implied by it. I don’t know if this is sufficient to make them too weak to create original “ideas” of this sort, but I think it is sufficient to make them incapable of original thought vs a very complex to evaluate expected thought.
This "new math" might be a recombination of things that we already know - or an obvious pattern that emerges if you take a look at things from a far enough distance - or something that can be brute-forced into existence. All things LLMs are perfectly capable of.
In the end, creativity has always been a combination of chance and the application of known patterns in new contexts.
> This "new math" might be a recombination of things that we already know
If you know anything about the invention of new math (analytic geometry, Calculus, etc.), you'd know how untrue this is. In fact, Calculus was extremely hand-wavy and without rigorous underpinnings until the mid 1800s. Again: more art than science.
Newton and Leibniz were "hand-waving"?
If anything, they were fighting an uphill battle against the perception of hand-waving by their contemporaries.
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And yet nowadays you can restate all of it using just combinations of sets of sets and some logic operators.
god of the gaps
non overlapping magisteria
What is creativity if not permutation? A brain has some model of the world and recombines concepts to create new concepts.
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This is really not an acceptable reply. How about actually engaging with the point the commenter made instead of stamping your foot and throwing a tantrum.
Innovation it's just another word for the term 'enhanced copy'. Everything it's a copy, except for nature.
It pretty much is, otherwise it is randomness or entropy.
LLMs by themselves are not able to but you are missing a piece here.
LLMs are prompted by humans and the right query may make it think/behave in a way to create a novel solution.
Then there's a third factor now with Agentic AI system loops with LLMs. Where it can research, try, experiment in its own loop that's tied to the real world for feedback.
Agentic + LLM + Initial Human Prompter by definition can have it experiment outside of its domain of expertise.
So that's extending the "LLM can't create novel ideas" but I don't think anyone can disagree the three elements above are enough ingredients for an AI to come up with novel ideas.
You're proving the GP's argument - LLMs aren't creative you say as much, it's the driving that is the creative force
You can tell an agentic system. "Go and find a novel area of math that has unresolved answers and solve it mathematically with verified properties in LEAN. Verify before you start working on a problem that no one has solved this area of math"
That's not creative prompt. That's a driving prompt to get it to start its engine.
You could do that nowadays and while it may spend $1,000 to $100,000 worth of tokens. It will create something humans haven't done before as long as you set it up with all its tool calls/permissions.
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I believe when we have AI Agents "living" 24/7, they will become creative machines. They will test ideas out their own ideas experimentally, come across things accidentally, synthesize new ideas.
We just haven't let AI run wild yet. But its coming.
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If that’s a requirement, aren’t LLMs driven by pretraining which was human driven?
Who decides at which the last point it’s OK to provide text to the model in order to be able to describe it as creative? (non-rhetorical)