Yes, the very explicit plan of both OpenAI and Anthropic is to use the not particularly efficient LLMs to automate their own AI engineering. That seems to be going well - on coding front and model tuning front so far. They have more planned.
And then use those to find fundamentally better new architectures for AI - that perhaps are as efficient as the human brain.
It might not work, but I didn't think it'd solve maths problems... So it might work. And if it happens, they'd use the data centres to run millions of instances of it.
It's scary, TBH.
> but I didn't think it'd solve maths problems
Finding counterexamples is low-hanging fruit, the automation of which isn't shocking.
I recall them saying they use models to write CUDA kernels and whatnot. Makes sense, and unsurprising that models are good at writing code.
But I think calling this “automating AI research” is misleading. I’m not sure there’s evidence yet that they do creative research work. Even in mathematics, but they are finding counter-examples by intelligent brute-forcing. Not to downplay the results, as they are incredible, but this is one very specific kind of proof and not the most creative type, which arguably requires generalisation.