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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

If constrained by existing human knowledge to come up with an answer, won’t it fundamentally be unable to push human knowledge forward?

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Depends on your understanding of human knowledge I guess? People talk about the frontier of human knowledge and if your view of knowledge is like that of a unique human genius pushing forward the frontier then yes - it'd be stuck. But if you think of knowledge as more complex than that you could have areas that are kind of within our frontier of knowledge (that we could reasonably know, but don't actually know) - taking concepts that we already know in one field and applying them to some other field. Today the reason that doesn't happen is because genius A in physics doesn't know about the existence of genius B in mathematics (let alone understand their research), but if it's all imbibed by "The Model" then it's trivial to make that discovery.

I was referring specifically to the parent comments statements around current AI systems.

Reasoning is essentially the creation of new knowledge from existing knowledge. The better the model can reason the less constrained it is to existing knowledge.

The challenge is how to figure out if a model is genuinely reasoning

Reasoning is a very minor (but essential) part of knowledge creation.

Knowledge creation comes from collecting data from the real world, and cleaning it up somehow, and brainstorming creative models to explain it.

NN/LLM's version of model building is frustrating because it is quite good, but not highly "explainable". Human models have higher explainability, while machine models have high predictive value on test examples due to an impenetrable mountain of algebra.

There are likely lots of connections that could be made that no individual has made because no individual has all of existing human knowledge at their immediate disposal.

I don't think many expect AI to push knowledge forward? A thing that basically just regurgitates consensus historic knowledge seems badly suited to that

But apparently these new frontier models can 'reason' - so with that logic, they should be able to generate new knowledge?

O1 was able to find the math problem in a recently published paper, so yes.

Then much of human research and development is also fundamentally impossible.

Only if you think current "AI" is on the same level as human creativity and intelligence, which it clearly is not.

I think current "AI" (i.e. LLMs) is unable to push human knowledge forward, but not because it's constrained by existing human knowledge. It's more like peeking into a very large magic-8 ball, new answers everytime you shake it. Some useful.

It may be able to push human knowledge forward to an extent.

In the past, there was quite a bit of low hanging fruit such that you could have polymaths able to contribute to a wide variety of fields, such as Newton.

But in the past 100 years or so, the problem is there is so much known, it is impossible for any single person to have deep knowledge of everything. e.g. its rare to find a really good mathematician who also has a deep knowledge (beyond intro courses) about say, chemistry.

Would a sufficiently powerful AI / ML model be able to come up with this synthesis across fields?

That's not a strong reason. Yes, that means ChatGPT isn't good at wholly independently pushing knowledge forward, but a good brainstormer that is right even 10% of the time is an incredible found of knowledge.

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