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al_borland 3 hours ago

When it comes to LLMs doing novel things, is it just the infinite monkey theorem[0] playing out at an accelerated rate, helped along by the key presses not being truly random?

Surely if we tell the LLM to do enough stuff, something will look novel, but how much confirmation bias is at play? Tens of millions of people are using AI and the biggest complaint is hallucinations. From the LLMs perspective, is there any difference between a novel solution and a hallucination, other than dumb luck of the hallucination being right?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

stavros 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This argument doesn't go the way you want it to go. Billions of people exist, but maybe a few tens of thousands produce novel knowledge. That's a much worse rate than LLMs.

al_borland 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m not sure how we equate the number of humans to AI to determine a success rate.

We also can’t ignore than it was humans who thought up this problem to give to the AI. Thinking has two parts, asking and answering questions. The AI needed the human to formulate and ask the question to start. AI isn’t just dropping random discoveries on us that we haven’t even thought of, at least not that I’ve seen.