Color me skeptical. LLMs seem to make writing code faster, so of course that means that people can iterate on ideas faster, but I have yet to see actual creative output from an LLM that wasn't coached into it or random juxtaposition.
People are always using this example because of the "LLMs can't jump paper". Suffice to say - it's not that simple, and special relativity was definitely an incremental improvement to well-studied theory that was being developed by dozens of the leading physicists of the day.
I’ve never heard of that paper - I went to that example because it’s an example of creativity that most people agree required both a deep understanding of a complex and abstract concept, and unusual and creative thought.
Perhaps I don’t understand relativity and its precursors well enough to see how it was incremental, but either way i’ve yet to see anything remotely like relativity, or even anything like more traditional examples of creativity like picasso or van gogh, come out of an llm
Michelson Morley experiment 1887 confirmed that we could not observe frame dependent speed of light (a suggested consequence of Maxwell's equations 1865). Time dilation and length contraction were well developed as explanations for this experiment by 1892 (FitzGerald, Lorentz, Larmor, Poincare).
Einstein contributed an argument (relativity) in 1905 for why this should be the case, which lead him to make important inferences such as mass energy equivalence. i.e. he took existing maths (derived from experiments) and was able to extrapolate it to other cases.
General relativity 1915 is similar. Starting from general covariance (the equations should look the same in all frames, even if the numbers/coefficients change) and his equivalence principle (acceleration indistinguishable from gravity) there are only so many places in the equations where a simple formula for gravity can fit (and there were sound reasons to expect the formula is simple). Einstein (and others) developed several of the possibilities before he settled on the famous field equations.
I say all this because once you realize each of these ideas was built up incrementally by dozens of people over the course of years/decades and was deeply rooted in experimental observations, then it's harder to believe that it is beyond the capacity of AI. In fact, AI is contributing to cutting edge understanding of gravity <a href="https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/ai-first-breakthrough-theoretical-physics/" rel="nofollow">https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/ai-first-breakthroug...
> In fact, AI is contributing to cutting edge understanding of gravity
After the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_priority_controversy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_priority... it's pretty hard to take stories like that at face value. There is ample motivation to bend the truth. Maybe it is what it looks like, maybe it isn't.
kennywinker · · focus · HN ↗
aflinik · · focus · HN ↗
kennywinker · · focus · HN ↗
skew-aberration · · focus · HN ↗
kennywinker · · focus · HN ↗
Perhaps I don’t understand relativity and its precursors well enough to see how it was incremental, but either way i’ve yet to see anything remotely like relativity, or even anything like more traditional examples of creativity like picasso or van gogh, come out of an llm
skew-aberration · · focus · HN ↗
Einstein contributed an argument (relativity) in 1905 for why this should be the case, which lead him to make important inferences such as mass energy equivalence. i.e. he took existing maths (derived from experiments) and was able to extrapolate it to other cases.
General relativity 1915 is similar. Starting from general covariance (the equations should look the same in all frames, even if the numbers/coefficients change) and his equivalence principle (acceleration indistinguishable from gravity) there are only so many places in the equations where a simple formula for gravity can fit (and there were sound reasons to expect the formula is simple). Einstein (and others) developed several of the possibilities before he settled on the famous field equations.
I say all this because once you realize each of these ideas was built up incrementally by dozens of people over the course of years/decades and was deeply rooted in experimental observations, then it's harder to believe that it is beyond the capacity of AI. In fact, AI is contributing to cutting edge understanding of gravity <a href="https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/ai-first-breakthrough-theoretical-physics/" rel="nofollow">https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/ai-first-breakthroug...
kennywinker · · focus · HN ↗
After the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_priority_controversy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_priority... it's pretty hard to take stories like that at face value. There is ample motivation to bend the truth. Maybe it is what it looks like, maybe it isn't.