alt Hacker NewsI will respectfully disagree. All "new" ideas come from old ideas. AI is a tool to access old ideas with speed and with new perspectives that hasn't been available up until now.
Innovation is in the cracks: recognition of holes, intersections, tangents, etc. on old ideas. It has bent said that innovation is done on the shoulders of giants.
So AI can be an express elevator up to an army of giant's shoulders? It all depends on how you use the tools.
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Imagine a human had read every book/publication in every field of knowledge that mankind has ever produced AND couldn’t come up with anything entirely new. Hard to imagine.
The article is discussing working in AI innovation vs focusing on getting more and better data. And while there have been key breakthroughs in new ideas, one of the best ways to increase the performance of these systems is getting more and better data. And how many people think data is the primary avenue to improvement.
It reminds me of an AI talk a few decades ago, about how the cycle goes: more data -> more layers -> repeat...
Anyways, I'm not sure how your comment relates to these two avenues of improvement.
> I will respectfully disagree. All "new" ideas come from old ideas.
The insight into the structure of the benzene ring famously came in a dream, hadn't been seen before, but was imagined as a snake bitings its own tail.
Exactly!
Can you imagine if we applied the same gatekeeping logic to science?
Imagine you weren't allowed to use someone else's scientific work or any derivative of it.
We would make no progress.
The only legitimate defense I have ever seen here revolves around IP and copyright infringement, which I couldn't care less about.
Access old ideas? Yes. With new perspectives? Not necessarily. An LLM may be able to assist in interpreting data with new perspectives but in practice they're still fairly bad at greenfield work.
As with most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. LLMs can be helpful as a way of accelerating certain kinds and certain aspects of research but not others.