8 ms·
Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas?
- Circlecrypto2 2y agoEven if they can't, individuals are prone to inspiration from an LLMs attempt. Worth giving it a shot at least.
- ModernMech 2y agoThis is true, I find LLMs to be the best mental lubricant ever created. Cures writers block and gets me out of creative and technical jams all the time.
- marmaduke 2y agoDevils advocate, writers block and jams are symptoms not bugs to fix
- roninorder 2y agoCould you elaborate? Symptoms of what?
- Comma2976 2y agoWriter's traffic congestion
- throwanem 2y agoNot OP, but much writing advice with which I'm familiar, and my own experience, both suggest these are symptoms of an error made earlier and not yet recognized. If I can't figure out where the plot could possibly go from here, go back and look for where I sent it off the rails earlier such that there's nowhere to take it now; if I can't find dialogue or action that fits, go back and find where I put the character in a situation they'd never get themselves in, or miswrote them to respond to it in a way they never would. Stuff like that, especially once it's had you stuck too long for inspiration latency still to be tenable as the cause.
- marmaduke 2y agoYep and in general I think the matrix got it right when discussing Trinity and Neo's visions, the Oracle states: "We can never see past the choices we don't understand".
- throwanem 2y agoOr have yet to realize that we made, yeah.
- roninorder 2y agoGood advice, thanks!
- marmaduke 2y agoLots of things I think, lack of understanding, lack of motivation. Typical suspects. I think We look for easy solutions like using LLMs for instance (but not exclusively) doing busywork when we shouldn’t be doing the busywork in the first place. Busywork is just example, but in creative non-busywork it could also be the extensive, time intensive exploration required to advance. In jazz for instance spending hundreds if not thousands of hours on scales and arpeggios over the instrument is a non-negotiable expense to access fluidity. So while I think LLMs are great fun and I don’t judge anyone using them, personally wanting to use one for a difficult problem is a flag that I should allow more time to think before going ahead.
- dageshi 2y agoI'm outlining a fantasy story I want to write, I've found using image generation (leonardo.ai) very helpful in nailing down what the world looks like and how it'll work, I've actually changed my mind on a few things based on what the AI generated. Plus honestly it's just genuinely fun! I've resisted moving to one of their paid packages just yet because I think I'd spend all day on it!
- kelseyfrog 2y agoEven if we've essentially created a rubber duck that slightly more easy to engage with, that sounds like a win.
- vunderba 2y agoStrongly agree. Back in high school, I put together a program called DreamPool that would just literally pick out a few nouns from a gigantic dictionary file and bubble them up in a little graphic of a well, and then I would sit quietly and spin those concepts around attempting to connect them together. LLMs are like a version of this on steroids and the potential as a tool for augmentation is huge.
- influx 2y agoDreampool sounds very cool, almost like brain excercise!
- amelius 2y agoNo. Perhaps we can use LLMs to invalidate patents. Want to check a patent? Just download the LLM model from before the issue date, then ask the LLM to produce the work. If it succeeds, you have invalidated the patent because the work was not novel.
- bee_rider 2y agoHuh. Regardless of folks opinions on the actual plan, does this idea imply an interesting question? In some sense all of the ideas in a book already exist. Before I read the book, they haven’t been put through a process of being interpreted by my eyeballs and ingested into my brain. But, they do already exist. Do the ideas in an LLM latent space (or whatever) already exist? They haven’t been read or interpreted yet, but the sentient cognition that goes into creating the idea has already happened. What does it mean for an idea to exist anyway?
- ninetyninenine 2y agohttps://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/ https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/
- amelius 2y agoConversely, you may ask: do we really want to grant patents for ideas that can be generated simply by asking an llm?
- bdhcuidbebe 2y ago[flagged]
- throw310822 2y agoThere once was a user online, Who thought AI verse wasn't fine. "These LLMs can't reason!" He cried with displeasure, "Their rhymes are just data, not mine!" - He typed with furious might, Certain robots can't versify right. But with each posted screed, The irony grew indeed - His arguments lacked the insight. - For while he debated with zeal, AIs composed with appeal. They reasoned through meter, Made metaphors sweeter, And rhymed with poetic ideal.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jedberg 2y agoAn LLM is like a well read college student with a nearly photographic memory that sometimes mixes things up. It's great for bouncing ideas off of and getting feedback on them. And yeah, it might product "novel ideas" by mixing and matching existing ideas, but LLMs will never create truly novel ideas. Not in their current form. The paper didn't really answer the question sadly: their conclusion was just that humans rate LLM answers as more novel than human ones, but less feasible.
- Zambyte 2y ago> And yeah, it might product "novel ideas" by mixing and matching existing ideas, but LLMs will never create truly novel ideas. Not in their current form. Can you give a historic example of a human creating "truly novel ideas" that is not the product of mixing and matching existing ideas?
- jedberg 2y agoI mean, it depends on how pedantic you want to be. I'd say e=mc2 was pretty novel, but yes, it was based on existing math concepts. But I don't think an LLM could ever come up with something like that.
- bongodongobob 2y agoWhy? Just a gut feeling?
- michaelt 2y agoPerhaps it's specific to present-day LLMs and things will improve in the future - but when I ask my favourite LLM to suggest creative, novel marketing options for a coffee shop it suggests a tenth-drink-free punch card. Which is pretty much the least novel answer imaginable. It's such a banal suggestion it makes me think there could be a tension between the requirement to be creative, and the requirement that the next token be among the most probable.
- breck 2y agoYes. LLMs have helped me generate 1 novel discovery: that every top 10 programming language has a single creator (https://pldb.io/blog/aSingleCreator.html https://pldb.io/blog/aSingleCreator.html). They also helped me generate this map yesterday (https://pldb.io/blog/whereInnovation.html https://pldb.io/blog/whereInnovation.html), which is the most comprehensive map of programming language creation and software innovation ever created.
- svieira 2y agoApache is credited with things it didn't initiate, but accepted after they were given up by another company (e. g. Cassandra)
- smokel 2y agoHow do you define single creator? The person who typed the first keystroke? It seems pretty silly to claim that Algol 60 has thirteen creators. Sure, Wikipedia lists that many names in some table, but that is not really a significant statistic, now is it? Java 22 probably has hundreds of people who contributed to it. Fun exercise though :)
- breck 2y ago> How do you define single creator? The creators define how many creators there were. It's all open source and anyone can fix any mistakes by updating one line (for example, here's the creators entry for Python: https://github.com/breck7/pldb/blob/b8ae74253733e4aa0fb57d26cb2abb503fa06ee3/concepts/python.scroll#L6 https://github.com/breck7/pldb/blob/b8ae74253733e4aa0fb57d26...). We generally don't have any disputes but there's the occasional error and always open to pull requests to fix those. But you do bring up a good point about contributors/maintainers. Adding that data is definitely on the priority list, but might be a 2025/2026 thing.
- mercurialsolo 2y agoThe difference between novelty and hallucination is feasibility. With integrated critique and feasibility checks you can eventually map the hallucination space into novelty.
- uludag 2y agoI'd be curious what an LLM would be able to accomplish if it was given all pre-modern texts we have access to. Would it be able to come up with ideas we know as modern (political theories, philosophical ideas, scientific theories, etc.)? I have a hard time believing that if we fed an LLM all prehistoric speech uttered from humans that no matter what, it would never escape the paradigms of those people. If that is the case, than would relying on LLMs just get us stuck in our own paradigms and prevent true "progress"?
- Teever 2y agoI've wondered that too. If we trained an LLM on only the scientific content that predates Einstein could it come up with general relativity? How much coaxing would it require to get it there? What would that process be like? Can we learn from that and get an LLM trained on all scientific material pre Einstein and post to discover new physics stuff from what we learn from that process?
- staticman2 2y ago>> Can we learn from that and get an LLM trained on all scientific material pre Einstein and post to discover new physics stuff from what we learn from that process? The parts of an LLM that teach it language is not disconnected from the parts that teach it facts. Good luck teaching it language with only pre Einstein data.
- Teever 2y agoWhy can't you just omit all modern content related to physics? There's lots of training data that doesn't mention any of Einstein's work.
- staticman2 2y agoMaybe you could, but any influence these concepts had on general culture might still leak in.
- nullc 2y agoshuf -n 3 /usr/dict/words will also sometimes generate novel research ideas.
- browningstreet 2y agoHarmony Korine, the poet (done at SXSW 2010 with GordonandtheWhale.com) https://youtu.be/PqvAmlnJTfU?si=C8M7IGnJ_iYJE-8_ https://youtu.be/PqvAmlnJTfU?si=C8M7IGnJ_iYJE-8_
- MaxDorkroom 2y ago[flagged]
- pfannkuchen 2y agoWould you be able to tell if it did? There could be an obscure document in the training set that contains the idea. It seems like a very hard problem to definitively detect whether a concept came from the training set.
- valine 2y agoA single document doesn’t contribute much to the loss during base training. LLMs can absolutely memorize text if it’s duplicated in the training set, not so much if the document in question is obscure.
- fzeindl 2y agoCould rolling dice with matching phrases generate novel research ideas? (ok the metaphor is slightly off, but not a lot)
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoMaybe yes. If you give it phrases from, say, the last five years' worth of published research papers, and it combines phrases at random and spits out the words, yes, in that there will be some interesting research ideas, and maybe even some that a human would not have come up with. Unfortunately, they'll be buried in a blizzard of stuff that no human would come up with, because they are totally meaningless combinations. Finding the good ones is the issue - and it's not an issue that LLMs can currently solve.
- 6510 2y agoFor some reason my mind maps concepts from chess onto the real world and the other way around. The novel AI ideas in chess are usually combinations of several... well... bad ideas. People usually take on one bad idea at a time and try to make it work. If they succeed it is quite surprising because objectively it was a bad idea. Our thinking is a lot less error prone than that of the LLM's but we have to study for years to absorb prior art that LLM's mostly receive at birth by osmosis. It won't be able to take on the truly stupid ideas but it can combine large numbers of the somewhat stupid. Like a chess position with lots of possible moves followed by lots of possible responses.
- Incipient 2y agoTaking a step back. Define "novel". I have the idea for an induced draft umbrella. Stick a fan at the top under an opening. Is that idea novel? I haven't seen it anywhere, it's just something I came up with. But it's not entirely novel, I'm just borrowing the concept of a fan, and an umbrella. I don't feel this is entirely out of scope for what an LLM could describe in words?
- jrsharma 2y agoLooks like @sama's o1 is killing PhD science questions. https://x.com/sama/status/1834283100639297910?t=iCRehNoBofMPO-69t3DCjg&s=19 https://x.com/sama/status/1834283100639297910?t=iCRehNoBofMP...