3 ms·

> 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

> 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Why? Just a gut feeling?
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Perhaps 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.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      I mean if that's how you're prompting it that's your problem. What are marketing options? Do you mean campaign? Campaign to do what? Increase repeat business? Get new customers? Expand into a new market? "Hey make me a cool like marketing thing or whatever" isn't going to work.
- gmaster1440 2y ago
  Relevant to this discussion is the fact that if an LLM can’t come up with that, it wouldn’t be due to the inability to mix and match to form novel ideas, but something else, and that something else hasn’t been clearly articulated yet.
- moralestapia 2y ago
  What does `e=mc2` mean?
  - mbivert 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc... > Mass–energy equivalence states that all objects having mass, or massive objects, have a corresponding intrinsic energy, even when they are stationary. In the rest frame of an object, where by definition it is motionless and so has no momentum, the mass and energy are equal or they differ only by a constant factor, the speed of light squared (c²).
    - moralestapia 2y ago
      Thanks. Now go check the "History" section of that article; which, by the way, takes up about half of it.
      - mbivert 2y ago
        Alright. I'm trying to come up with other examples, but as the parent said, it then depends how pedantic we want to be e.g. take Poincaré's spacetime, but he'd still be working from two pre-existing ideas, "space" and "time"; the idea of combining the two is (feels?) quite novel and unexpected. Going back some more, the notion of "space" (or that of "time") feels more primitive, less explainable in terms of other notions.
        moralestapia 2y ago
        Yes, but the whole "combine things and see if they make other thing make sense" seems to me like a procedure that may be reproduced by pattern matching at a very large scale.
- staticman2 2y ago
  I think every major idea was truly novel at some point. Even an idea like "I will write down the things that happened, so when I am dead, other will know what has happened from my writings" was novel at some point. Which means that an LLM can probably technically come up with novel ideas, since novel ideas aren't some special category of things, it's just that LLMs are not very good at it.
- ajross 2y ago
  > I'd say e=mc2 was pretty novel Well, the rest mass notion in special relativity is just a natural derivation. It appears once you have the "real" ideas in place. And those aren't really "existing math" at all. It was a pure physics idea at root: "the universe's laws don't change if you are in motion" (or alternate framings like "you can't tell if you're moving from inside a moving box"). Well, it turns out that if you try to construct such a theory, you end up needing some different (pre-existing) math to help describe it. But the idea isn't math at all. Then the question is "Can LLMs propose new well-framed, evocative theories like relativity", and the answer is sort of open. In point of fact human beings, to first approximation, can't do this either!
  - Validark 2y ago
    Considering the fact that we know the names of the individuals who came up with new ideas in physics, it's extremely rare. If every other college kid was in that category, then we could call it "human ability".
api 2y ago
This argument can be applied recursively. For example: the information in the human genome is just information from the environment transferred into the genome by evolutionary learning. Ultimately you get back to some kind of first cause argument where everything goes back to God or whatever natural process created information in the universe. Either nothing new is actually new or everything new is new. In the end it becomes moot. A novel rearrangement of existing ideas that does something new or different is creativity. Can LLMs do that? I think they can to a limited extent, but not as well as humans. Is it something we get with scale or does it require a fundamental architectural innovation? Don't know.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
F-Lexx 2y ago
> Can you give a historic example of a human creating "truly novel ideas" that is not the product of mixing and matching existing ideas? The invention of PCR comes to mind: > During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
- regularfry 2y ago
  https://www.iflscience.com/lsd-dna-pcr-the-strange-origins-of-a-biology-revolution-63126 https://www.iflscience.com/lsd-dna-pcr-the-strange-origins-o... would argue that it was exactly mixing and matching at play here, but that the component parts wouldn't necessarily have been called to mind without the hallucination.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    You don't even need drugs... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#Kekul%C3%A9's_dream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#Kekul%C3%A9...
jedberg 2y ago
How about the Transformer models that power LLMs? That was pretty novel.

jedberg 2y ago

I 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 ago
Why? Just a gut feeling?
- michaelt 2y ago
  Perhaps 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.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    I mean if that's how you're prompting it that's your problem. What are marketing options? Do you mean campaign? Campaign to do what? Increase repeat business? Get new customers? Expand into a new market? "Hey make me a cool like marketing thing or whatever" isn't going to work.
gmaster1440 2y ago
Relevant to this discussion is the fact that if an LLM can’t come up with that, it wouldn’t be due to the inability to mix and match to form novel ideas, but something else, and that something else hasn’t been clearly articulated yet.
moralestapia 2y ago
What does `e=mc2` mean?
- mbivert 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc... > Mass–energy equivalence states that all objects having mass, or massive objects, have a corresponding intrinsic energy, even when they are stationary. In the rest frame of an object, where by definition it is motionless and so has no momentum, the mass and energy are equal or they differ only by a constant factor, the speed of light squared (c²).
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    Thanks. Now go check the "History" section of that article; which, by the way, takes up about half of it.
    - mbivert 2y ago
      Alright. I'm trying to come up with other examples, but as the parent said, it then depends how pedantic we want to be e.g. take Poincaré's spacetime, but he'd still be working from two pre-existing ideas, "space" and "time"; the idea of combining the two is (feels?) quite novel and unexpected. Going back some more, the notion of "space" (or that of "time") feels more primitive, less explainable in terms of other notions.
      - moralestapia 2y ago
        Yes, but the whole "combine things and see if they make other thing make sense" seems to me like a procedure that may be reproduced by pattern matching at a very large scale.
staticman2 2y ago
I think every major idea was truly novel at some point. Even an idea like "I will write down the things that happened, so when I am dead, other will know what has happened from my writings" was novel at some point. Which means that an LLM can probably technically come up with novel ideas, since novel ideas aren't some special category of things, it's just that LLMs are not very good at it.
ajross 2y ago
> I'd say e=mc2 was pretty novel Well, the rest mass notion in special relativity is just a natural derivation. It appears once you have the "real" ideas in place. And those aren't really "existing math" at all. It was a pure physics idea at root: "the universe's laws don't change if you are in motion" (or alternate framings like "you can't tell if you're moving from inside a moving box"). Well, it turns out that if you try to construct such a theory, you end up needing some different (pre-existing) math to help describe it. But the idea isn't math at all. Then the question is "Can LLMs propose new well-framed, evocative theories like relativity", and the answer is sort of open. In point of fact human beings, to first approximation, can't do this either!
- Validark 2y ago
  Considering the fact that we know the names of the individuals who came up with new ideas in physics, it's extremely rare. If every other college kid was in that category, then we could call it "human ability".

api 2y ago

This argument can be applied recursively. For example: the information in the human genome is just information from the environment transferred into the genome by evolutionary learning. Ultimately you get back to some kind of first cause argument where everything goes back to God or whatever natural process created information in the universe. Either nothing new is actually new or everything new is new. In the end it becomes moot. A novel rearrangement of existing ideas that does something new or different is creativity. Can LLMs do that? I think they can to a limited extent, but not as well as humans. Is it something we get with scale or does it require a fundamental architectural innovation? Don't know.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

F-Lexx 2y ago

> Can you give a historic example of a human creating "truly novel ideas" that is not the product of mixing and matching existing ideas? The invention of PCR comes to mind: > During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

regularfry 2y ago
https://www.iflscience.com/lsd-dna-pcr-the-strange-origins-of-a-biology-revolution-63126 https://www.iflscience.com/lsd-dna-pcr-the-strange-origins-o... would argue that it was exactly mixing and matching at play here, but that the component parts wouldn't necessarily have been called to mind without the hallucination.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  You don't even need drugs... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#Kekul%C3%A9's_dream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#Kekul%C3%A9...

jedberg 2y ago

How about the Transformer models that power LLMs? That was pretty novel.