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ViscountPenguin a day ago

I dunno, this screams of goal post moving. Even if LLMs lack whatever nebulous definition of "creativity" that someone favours, there's no inherent reason for "creativity" to be required to solve any problems at all, "creativity" could just be a human method for solving problems that evolved because of it's broad applicability but is suboptimal at any given task.

mathisfun123 a day ago | parent [-]

> could just be a human method for solving problems that evolved because of it's broad applicability but is suboptimal at any given task.

Ya sure let's just posit another random hypothesis about evolutionary biology in order to substantiate the claim that LLMs are intelligent.

Or (bear with me) you can recall your (likely) experience proving stuff like SAS triangle identities and reflect on whether that required intelligence or just computation.

What's more reasonable?

gmadsen a day ago | parent [-]

Why is your example SAS triangles and not something like the modularity theorem?

mathisfun123 a day ago | parent [-]

Because SAS triangle identity proofs are relatable and I'm trying to make a point...?

gmadsen 19 hours ago | parent [-]

And my point is it’s a strawman. Advanced math is obviously creative to those who practice it, and it’s disingenuous to boil it down to grade school triangle proofs

That would be like saying Shakespeare isn’t creative , since grade school grammar doesn’t feel creative

ViscountPenguin 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I have at least some level of experience with advanced maths, but the thing that always struck me was how amenable to automation that a lot of it seemed. While it might be creative for a human to come up with the Schreier refinement theorem, for example, I don't think it fundamentally requires creativity.

On some level, I think the most straightforwardly creative work in maths comes from building up useful generalizations; I can't see current LLMs inventing even something as straight forward as a manifold from first principles; but I also don't think that's fundamentally required to prove useful things, I think it's more of a shortcut for humans.