alt Hacker NewsWhat's the bar here? Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?"
I by no means believe LLMs are general intelligence, and I've seen them produce a lot of garbage, but if they could produce these revolutionary theories from only <= year 1900 information and a prompt that is not ridiculously leading, that would be a really compelling demonstration of their power.
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> Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?
Yes. It is certainly a question if Einstein is one of the smartest guy ever lived or all of his discoveries were already in the Zeitgeist, and would have been discovered by someone else in ~5 years.
> Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?"
Kind of, how long would it have realistically taken for someone else (also really smart) to come up with the same thing if Einstein wouldn't have been there?
> Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?"
It turns out my reading is somewhat topical. I've been reading Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and of the things he takes great pains to argue (I was not quite anticipating how much I'd be trying to recall my high school science classes to make sense of his account of various experiments) is that the development toward the atomic bomb was more or less inexorable and if at any point someone said "this is too far; let's stop here" there would be others to take his place. So, maybe, to answer your question.