I would maybe argue that Einstein was the most LLM-like of great thinkers.

A lot of his great discoveries were mostly that he was very knowledgeable about the bleeding edge research in a number of disparate areas, and was able to have the aha moment where he could make the connections for how to integrate them.

A lot of other thinkers who created new fields from scratch are probably way harder for an LLM to crack.

That is very aligned with an LLMs ability to have superhuman knowledge in wide areas.

This is as good a time as any to note that we might be closing in on a new conceptual revolution in our own time as it relates to holography and an information centric approach to spacetime. Obviously It's the furthest possible thing from a guarantee, but it has much of the enthusiasm and motivation that string theory had previously enjoyed in prior decades.

So it could be a natural experiment for whether AI can contribute to novel physics. Specifically, there's a big question about weather. Something like our informational understanding of black holes where information inside it is equivalent to information on its boundary (which I'm sure I'm not saying correctly), might be generalized to regular space-time. More people should be freaking out with excitement about this and perhaps it's something to which AI can contribute.

There was symbolic AI programs in the 1980’s that “discovered” Kepler’s laws and the resulting solar system model from just tycho brache’s astronomical observations. That was the the very first “new physics” ever.

i wonder if we could train a modal, and omit all data prior to 1899, and see what happens?

as always, as good as its prompt...

That’s already been done. I know of at least one novel result contributed by Claude to frontier physics. I’m sure there is more.

Would this be possible without it being able to run novel real-world physics experiments autonomously?

(Note: I am not suggesting we let it do this. Please don't, in fact)

For it to be like a human it wouldn't just need to solve existing phsyics problems, it would need to push the field forward and introduce new paradigms.

What do you mean by bearing no real responsibility for its actions? If I use a model to accomplish a task and it fails, I use something else to try to accomplish the task. If it's my responsibility to complete the task, it can't be the model's responsibility unless I've agreed to some sort of guarantee from the provider.

If the provider says "the model will always be right or your money back" then the provider has got responsibility. If there's no guarantee, there's no responsibility on their part, just on the person whose job it is to try and solve a problem with the model.

I don't think we should count the lower tier models if we're discussing what the top ones are capable of. No one was suggesting that Sonnet is AGI.

Anyone know why they aren't good at this?

Meanwhile Qwen3.8 27B got both the 'f's and the 'i's questions right.

which just brings us back to the whole birds vs planes thing.

turns out that flapping wings is not the right way to unlock human flight.

computers could count the Rs in strawberry since vacuum tubes. that measure is irrelevant.