Comment by somethingsome
14 hours ago
In my experience, LLMs are becoming very good at executing, but not a creating novel ideas or being creative.
Most of programming is reusing existing ideas in new shapes to solve new problems, but all the building blocks are there in the training set. Or new blocks can (easily) be derived from existing ones.
Math is different, it requires quite a bit of creativity, it's not just 'reuse all existing blocks'.
For the moment LLMs are good at discovering things that we overlooked in maths, or apply cleverly existing math blocks to make new results, but making a new theory that is really useful is out of reach for the moment in my opinion.
"making a new theory that is really useful is out of reach for the moment in my opinion."
Curious how this ages.
Recursive self improvement, self-play and multi-agent RL could make useful new theories, eventually.
Sure, and I hope LLMs will at some point be able to do it. It would simplify greatly my work.
However, at the moment I consider that they stay in the 'convex hull' of their training set + a provided context, and I don't see that much research that made real improvements to the situation.