It cant "invent new things". It can only reuse what it already knows about.

Thats why the math breakthrough a few weeks ago was so hotly debated. Because OpenAI is desperate to demonstrate that AI isnt just a fancy regurgitation machine, but it can actually develop novel thought. Because that would be the stock price jumps to end all stock jumps.

But then it turned out it was really just listening in on a math professors supposed-to-be-private conversations with another instance of openai, and it used his novel work as the trigger to prove the breakthrough first.

The reason people conclude AI 'thinks' is because tt can reference obscure or poorly documented things quickly (which is its primary advantage along with processing natural language prompts into tasks), which is why a lot of people with emotions confuse that action with inventing things.

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besterman23 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I just don’t know enough to agree with you, but I would argue, probably poorly, that an AI or collection of agents could “invent things” simply by virtue of trying essentially everything in a reasonable bound and stumbling into a solution.

Call that brute force perhaps, but I would consider it technically inventing something on the merit that it would at least be an abstraction above naively throwing everything against a wall to only throwing things that would most likely be sticky.

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pixl97 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Nature brute forces a ton of problems. Hell, humans also do it by having 1 to 8 billion copies of ourselves around too. Even then we are the most guilty species of "copying someone else's work" right behind viruses. We copy things nature has figured out by brute force, then use slightly more targeted methods of forcing to see if it creates new things.

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seki285 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"AI" is a token generator, it does not think while the human brain is a lot more complex with a lot more sensory inputs.

	▲	hackyhacky 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> the human brain is a lot more complex with a lot more sensory inputs How are you measuring complexity here? How are you measuring inputs? Your average llm is trained on a corpus that vastly exceeds the amount of data I could read in my lifetime.
	▲	Marha01 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> "AI" is a token generator, it does not think 2024 called, it wants its talking points back. I don't think claims like these are defensible after all the progress we have witnessed in the last year alone.

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timacles 13 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

a human has motivation and agency.

An "AI" is a box which lies dormant until a human, with motivation and agency, enters a prompt into it.

A person or company can use it in a way where it might invent something. but at the end of the day, its a tool, and its actually not doing anything on its own.

Its not solving math problems, a mathetmatician is using it to solve math problems. Just cus OpenAI is acting like its AI is solving stuff, its really not. They're just paying people to use AI to hammer problems.

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menaerus 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're overconfident in what you're saying. Nobody really knows (yet) if LLMs can or cannot "think" or can or cannot "invent" new things. I'm inclined to think the opposite from you but smart people actually try not to hold the absolut stances and present them as facts when they're in fact not. What I have seen so far throughout a daily use on complicated things suggests that humanity developed a new form of an intelligence.

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viraptor 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> then it turned out it was really just listening in on a math professors supposed-to-be-private conversations

No, it didn't turn out to be that. Someone made a claim, which is silly for many reasons. There's no serious support for this happening.

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_heimdall an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure how you'd land on an LLM being unable to invent anything new. You'd have to both understand exactly what LLMs are and aren't capable of today and what allows human creativity. I don't think there are good answers to either.

It seems unlikely that recursively predicting the next word would lead to creativity or invention, but it doesn't seem impossible. Similarly, it seems unlikely that human thought works in a similar prediction loop, but it doesn't seem impossible.

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r14c an hour ago | parent [-]

Human ingenuity is creative by definition, that's where the concept arises. The burden of proof is on AI labs to prove that their models are rising to the level of actual synthesis, rather than very impressive 200-level regurgitation that looks like synthesis if you squint a bit; because the model has access to more raw data than your average sophomore student.

	▲	ben_w 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Human ingenuity is creative by definition, that's where the concept arises Sure, but until we can turn that tautology into something more rigorous, we can't tell if the thing humans do is more or less than what some arbitrary non-human (machine, animal, or eventually perhaps alien) does.

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hackyhacky 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It cant "invent new things"

I've heard that before but it just doesn't make sense in context of what I've seen llms do. If I ask an llm to write a poem about magnetic resonance and vampire rabbits it can do that it created a new thing. I can ask it to build a website for managing rabbit breeding that's also a new thing.

Another way of looking at it is that human beings, just like llms, can produce output based on their inputs. Most literature is inspired by other literature. Most music is inspired by other music. Most software is inspired by other software.

So I think we need to work on defining " new things" before we can definitely exclude them from llm's capabilities

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BryantD an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You’re assuming the “listening in” aspect, which as far as I know is not proven (even in the less loaded “the model was trained on sessions including the ones in question” form of the claim.

Plausible? Absolutely. Did OpenAI behave badly in other ways regarding this issue? Yes. Does it help to assume unproven facts and then accuse people of reaching emotional decisions? Nope.

	▲	MomsAVoxell an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe the conditions of the singularity are not going to be recognized, at first, for having produced new original decisions, and thus thought. Perhaps it is going to be more like, we will see the singularity predict the future. While “the model was trained on sessions including the ones in question” is one aspect; ‘the model produced an accurate prediction of future human thought’, I think, is another very interesting facet. Models predicting future things might be how we see, actually, how we ourselves formulate thought - by saying, in big and small words, ‘something is about to happen’. >unproven facts This isn’t a court room. We’re discussing ways by which we humans both succeed and fail at reigning in our creations. The OpenAI kerfuffle is pretty much irrelevant already. Of course AI will fill in the gaps of human thought - it is literally constructed from the stuff, in every squeeze of the curd and whey.

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cyanydeez an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

i think the proper understanding of LLM based AI is "contexting"; we describe the world we want them to fill, we build/direct the outside context for them to understand, then "they" take off from there.

If we do a bad job building context, they do a horrible job contexting. People who have trouble working with AI have the same problem people have in general: if they can't figure out the context of the direction, then they make random decisions of doing anything. On the flip side, if you can build the proper context around a sufficiently powerful LLM, they can derive the context via the contexting they're good at.

This is why building documents, tests, and code all in some intent pattern via prompting allows them to do a significant amount of work a normal person would have a great effort t