Could we train a GPT3 like model with the entire corpus of astronomical research and try to answer some questions that way?
ChatGPT-4: How many roads must a man walk down?
GPT3 can regurgitate, and, in my opinion, even use knowledge, but I don't think it can synthesize knowledge.
But what it definitely cannot do is seek new abstractions. It can't be curious about an inconsistency and probe its own knowledge for possible resolutions, or design an experiment that might shed further light in an unknown area. It can't even play a board game after ingesting the rules to it, much less identify contradictions or problems in such a ruleset. And a board game is a tiny microcosm compared with the laws of physics.
It's conceivable that one or more scientists could work in conjunction with an AI to help augment their own abilities, co-pilot style, but I don't think we have a picture yet of what exactly that kind of thing would look like.
Thinking of mathematics, an abstraction is only as valuable as what it can tell us about the underlying system— a laplace transformation into the frequency domain isn't particularly interesting unless we either a) happen to care about some frequency domain property of the function, or b) we can manipulate the transformed function and then un-transform it afterward, yielding a novel insight in the original time domain.
My layman's assessment is that the current state of the art for machine cognition is about on the level of identifying that such a transformation might be possible, but not actually applying it or doing anything about it, much less unapplying it afterward.
Maybe we disagree about whether that last point means it can meaningfully “do abstraction” or not.
But the beauty of science (and the human mind driving it) that important progress happens with creative jumps that invent completely new things (e.g., new mathematics) and frequently bear little resemblance to the past
There's a depth to explaining things that GPT still can't do. It's still astonishing, and has completely changed my idea on what AI can do, like write plays with very incredible context (better than most humans!) but there are still major limits.
The hell are you talking about? I've been doing this literally any time I need something fixed and it does just fine.
From the external point of view, the goalposts moved, but from within the GP's poorly expressed mental model, they haven't moved. But, that's just a guess.
Things like, what happens if I shoot two bullet at c/2 in opposite directions on a train going at c/2? Now suppose, I'm an outside observer. And then trying to introduce quantum gravity.
My thought was that perhaps it could 'reason through'. Unfortunately, it was unable to. Eventually, it said that this is an unsolved problem. In other words, it 'recognized' the thought experiments. Perhaps if you use a phrasing that's not in the literature.
EDIT: Actually, just checked again, and chatgpt can't reason through relativity anymore:
Me: Imagine I'm on a train traveling at half the speed of light. I'm in the middle of a car and I fire bullets going at half the speed of light towards the front and back of the car. Do the bullets arrive at the front and back of the car at the same time?
ChatGPT: No, the bullet fired towards the front of the car will arrive at the front of the car first, while the bullet fired towards the back of the car will arrive at the back of the car later. This is because the front bullet is moving in the same direction as the train and the back bullet is moving in the opposite direction of the train. The relative velocity of the bullet and train will determine the time it takes for the bullet to reach the front or back of the car.
That said, I can imagine a chatbot can help as a rubber duck, bring up things that weren't considered yet, or be so wrong as to kickstart the human into a breakthrough.