While that’s kind of true in some sense, I think there’s an argument to be made for the contrary: that the mechanism for generating new ideas in humans is not quite as special as we would like to think.

In other words, creativity in humans is arguably just as derivative as in machines.

I hear this sentiment a lot but it doesn’t ring true for me.

What is an idea really and what’s your definition of new?

If i get a LLM to spit out, I dunno, a deployment system written in haskell that uses bittorrent or something, none of those bits are new, but certainly there will be unique challenges to solve in the code and it’s a new system.

Where is the line for new? Is it in combining old ideas? If not then does any software have “new” ideas? It’s all combinations of processor instructions after all…

What I am excited about is the possibility of LLMs to draw conclusions from the last 150years of scientific papers.

There have been lots of instances of knowledge being rediscovered even when it was previously published but sitting on some shelf forgotten. LLMs ability to digest large volumes of data will I think help with this issue.

We will still need to reproduce and verify conclusions but will be interesting to see what might come from this.

i don't think all sides of this discussion agree on what a "new idea" is. i am a very creative person but i've never had a truly original thought and i don't know how having one would be possible

that's only partially true.

AI can innovate in synthetic-realm of novel ideas, while real-world novelty will remain untouched.

There are different types of novelties