[great_psy]

I wouldn’t be so dismissive. Research is just a loop of hypothesis, experiments, collect data, make new hypothesis. There’s so creativity required for scientific breakthroughs, but 99.9% percent of scientists don’t need this creativity. Just need grit and stamina.

[didericis]

I wouldn't be so dismissive of the objection.

That loop involves way more flexible goal oriented attention, more intrinsic/implicit understanding of plausible cause and effect based on context, and more novel idea creation than it seems.

You can only brute force things with combinatorics and probabilities that have been well mapped via human attention, as piggy-backing off of lots of human digested data is just a clever way of avoiding those issues. Research is by definition novel human attention directed at a given area, so it can't benefit from that strategy in the same way domains which have already had a lot of human attention can.

[XenophileJKO]

I think the whole idea of "original insight" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Most innovative is derivative, either from observation or cross application. People aren't sitting in isolation chambers their whole lives and coming up with things in the absence of input.

I don't know why people think a model would have to manifest a theory absence of input.

[morsecodist]

> I think the whole idea of "original insight" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

This is by biggest issue with AI conversations. Terms like "original insight" are just not rigorous enough to have a meaningful discussion about. Any example an LLM produces can be said to be not original enough and conversely you could imagine trivial types of originality that simple algorithms could simulate (i.e. speculate on which existing drugs could be used to treat known conditions). Given the amount of drugs and conditions you are bound to propose some original combination.

People usually end up just talking past each other.

[wholinator2]

And insight. Insight can be gleaned from a comprehensive knowledge of all previous trials and the pattern that emerges. But the big insights can also be simple random attempts people make because they dont know something is impossible. While AI _may_ be capable of the first type, it certainly won't be capable of the second

[radioactivist]

I think this comment is significantly more dismissive of science and scientists than the original comment was of AI.

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

Awfully bold to claim that 99.9% of scientists lack the need for "creativity". Creativity in methodology creates gigantic leaps away from reliance on grit and stamina.