alt Hacker NewsThere is no such thing as knowledge that has never even been written down a single time by anyone or anything. Those are simply called ideas, they are not unique to humans, and they are more likely to be wrong than right compared to anything OpenAI just produced. It would be bold and almost certainly spectacularly wrong to assume that multi-trillion-parameter AI models could not possess their own such ideas, generated during the training process as part of their internal model of the world. Beyond that, if we assume that such knowledge does exist in humans, its marginal value is clearly nearly zero now, as AI systems without access to it are vastly outperforming all human mathematicians combined by multiple orders of magnitude.
Replies
> There is no such thing as knowledge that has never even been written down a single time by anyone or anything.
They aren't just ideas, i read that in semiconductor manufacturing these old heads have a tremendous amount of process knowledge that's never been written down.
So you're saying there was no knowledge before the invention of writing?
This feels like a very rigid ontology. I know what type of food my dog prefers. An executive assistant has intimate knowledge of their boss’s needs. Neither of these would become knowledge if they were written down for the first time; they already are.
You’re distinguishing “knowledge” from “idea” in a particular way that doesn’t correspond to common usage (see my counter examples). Without you being explicit about your definitions, I can’t tell whether what you’re saying is meaningful. It feels tautological.
Given that an executive assistant has unwritten knowledge that is necessary to do their job, where your evidence that no mathematician has analogous knowledge (using the word in the common way, not whatever way you mean it)?
It’s possible, but it’s not as obvious as you seem to think.