Comment by rnijveld
6 hours ago
I would say there is a significant difference between AI discovering this completely on its own versus AI creating the finishing connecting part by connecting relevant data. Maybe this claim is too strong, but if part of it is true then the claims that OpenAI have made would be too strong as well.
To me it would feel more like how LLMs seem to work for me personally: incapable of unique work, but very capable of capturing large amounts of data and connecting the dots.
But this is what we do. Nobody ever invented or discovered anything in a vacuum - all discovery is synthesis of existing ideas and concepts applied to a novel domain. We laud Einstein for instance, but his work was a logical extension of Riemann - Riemann had a neat mathematical toy, Einstein described the universe with it - should we say Einstein was incapable of unique work?
The difference is that Einstein didn't literally have someone prompting him towards his result.
Uh, he did. Marcel Grossmann.
“It was Grossmann who emphasized the importance of a non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian geometry (also elliptic geometry) to Einstein, which was a necessary step in the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Abraham Pais's book on Einstein suggests that Grossmann mentored Einstein in tensor theory as well. Grossmann introduced Einstein to the absolute differential calculus, started by Elwin Bruno Christoffel and fully developed by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita. Grossmann facilitated Einstein's unique synthesis of mathematical and theoretical physics in what is still today considered the most elegant and powerful theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity.”
7 replies →
In this domain, an apparent single unique piece of work is often composed of several breakthroughs. For example, when Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, he had to develop multiple new pieces of mathematical technology to get there.
The claim here seems to be that the human mathematicians, working with AI, developed technology to go A->B->C. By training on those conversations, OpenAI was then able to encourage the model to go A->B->C->D.
In my opinion that situation should be acceptable, if it were openly disclosed, because it is in the public interest to make progress on these problems and because AI is clearly an amazing tool for making progress. But the human mathematicians are saying that OpenAI is presenting as if the model got from A->D entirely independently, without acknowledging their background contributions.
It's disappointing if this is true, because the fact that OpenAI's models can get C->D independently is already sufficiently impressive to me. I don't need to see proof of AGI to be convinced that these things are changing the world.