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Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem
(www.technologyreview.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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I thought this was interesting bc it's an instance where a LLM has done something undeniably novel and unique while expanding human understanding. It's a chink in the armor of the idea that a LLM is a "stochastic parrot" that can only regurgitate and never create.
I've been toying with this idea that LLM are showing us that what we thought of as creativity, learning, and problem solving aren't as rarefied as we thought. We know that AI isn't conscious, maybe consciousness isn't as prerequisite to behaviors and cognition as we thought.
I'm not so sure, it feels a lot more like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem, but with a model helping limit the outputs so they are mostly usable. As is stated in the article, it took millions of runs and couple of days to get the results. So its more like brute forcing with a slightly modified genetic algorithm than anything else.
I didn't see a link to the full article, so maybe something more creative is happening behind the scenes, but it seems unlikely.
Your interpretation is correct. There’s no new logic here, just new special cases of a problem whose general solution is still unknown. I think it’s pretty cool and has a lot of value in places like design theory where the getting examples to try and play around with general solution ideas is really tough. But all it did was creatively crunch numbers.
This approach sounds more like selective breeding to me.
If you do this with cats and select in each generation until you obtain a particularly fluffy cat, the cat doesn't get the credit. Nobody says "wow, how smart are cats for achieving this", they praise the breeder instead.
Which is as it should. The people who seed and select these algorithms and can recognize a breakthrough deserves the credit not the churning machine that goes through millions of permutations blindly.