Thread

1. lubujackson · 1789675061 · focus · HN ↗

   Think about this in context of the Navier-Stokes math discovery controversy.

   Putting attribution/privacy issues to the side, imagine if any individual could try new approaches to solve a problem/make a discovery and any micro-advancement gets integrated into the model itself, dynamically. This could transform progress from the slow "write a paper, get peer reviewed and published, use published data to inform future work" to a system with a centralized repository of concepts, attempts and results, including failed approaches already tried. How much work do humans waste replicating failed approaches?

   Someone completely random halfway around the world could trigger a prompt that solves a blocker that prevents my solution from working. Who cares about AGI or "can models invent anything" when we could have a system that automatically synthesizes individual human thought into a rich network of aggregate human memory.

   That's the target OpenAI/Anthropic should be evangelizing, not an AI Daddy Overlord or agentic script kiddie hellscape.

   1. Retr0id · 1789675591 · focus · HN ↗

      You could try out some version of this today, with a wiki. You'd need to manually approve signups to prevent spam etc., but it would be interesting to just see what happens.

      1. unrented7977 · 1789678739 · focus · HN ↗

         Using a wiki for this is only one step above using stone tablets and messenger pigeons.

         You'd want an enormous vector database at minimum. Text is just completely wrong for models at this scale, you must work in the latent space directly.

         1. unholiness · 1789703900 · focus · HN ↗

            Humanity has built every capable institution, every scientific discovery, every technological innovation, without mind-reading. Quite the opposite: By putting thoughts from our latent spaces into words, we better separated the good arguments from the bad ones, placed trust where it was more deserved, and learned to stand on giant's shoulders so well we thought thoughts the giants never would have.

            Anyway, I'm much more optimistic about the worlds with AIs that make the effort to properly explain themselves.

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