[drudolph914]

interesting if true, but this isn't the first time we heard of something like this

quanta published an article that talked about a physics lab asking chatGPT to help come up with a way to perform an experiment, and chatGPT _magically_ came up with an answer worth pursuing. but what actually happened was chatGPT was referencing papers that basically went unread from lesser famous labs/researchers

this is amazing that chatGPT can do something like that, but `referencing data` != `deriving theorems` and the person posting this shouldn't just claim "chatGPT derived a better bound" in a proof, and should first do a really thorough check if it's possible this information could've just ended up in the training data

[martinpw]

> what actually happened was chatGPT was referencing papers that basically went unread from lesser famous labs/researchers

Which is actually huge. Reviewing and surfacing all the relevant research out there that we are just not aware of would likely have at least as much impact as some truly novel thing that it can come up with.

[DennisP]

Maybe we should think of current AIs as not so much artificial intelligence, as collective intelligence. Which itself can be extremely valuable.

[xigoi]

It turns out that if you use a fancy search engine to search instead of pretending that it’s intelligent, it will actually be good at its job. Who would have guessed?

[leeoniya]

> but what actually happened was chatGPT was referencing papers that basically went unread from lesser famous labs/researchers

now let's invalidate probably 70% of all patents

[jsw97]

I know this was a throwaway, but finding prior art for a large group of existing patents would be a cool application.

[mhh__]

How would we know it was referencing an old paper versus almost everything trivial already having a derivation somewhere?

[fwip]

One signal is to check the journal. Most reputable journals won't publish a paper claiming a new technique if it's actually trivial and well-known.