alt Hacker NewsOn one hand, yeah, I agree.
On the other hand, using AI to trawl through all the grunt work, experiments, and well trodden areas means I can crawl up pretty close to that giants shoulder and spend way less effort myself answering the actually important questions so I can stand on it.
(This isn't supposed to sound self aggrandising - the giants whose shoulders I'm standing on aren't very tall, and they probably have bigger brothers and sisters, but the idiom was too good of a match to pass up using)
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That's not AI R&D though, that's you using AI to help your r&d
True. History of Science isnt part of most curiculums. So most people dont see the path and time it took to work out why the magnet points north. But LLMs can actually show you the whole path and a map of different paths people have taken.
The proper term is: "On the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits." The concept is the very core of human intelligence, also known as cultural evolution. I can't resist to recommend Joseph Henrich's book "The Secret of Our Success" every few years here, to anyone interested in human intelligence, and how it is different from other primates.
There was a critical review article with a title that summarizes the book well: "On the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits, or why we are not just very smart chimps. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter." Obviously I got triggered by your comment, which was eerily close to that title.
The thing is, without doing the grunt work you usually don't have enough understanding to answer the big questions.
Ask anyone who has an advanced degree in math or physics. They will tell you that doing the boring practice problems over and over is usually the key to understanding, not reading the high level theorems.