Standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were
It's still unclear whether this process could be merely continued, seeded only with new physical data, in order to keep progressing beyond that point, "forever", or at least for as long as we imagine humans will continue to go on making scientific progress.
These two are so above everyone else in the mathematical world that most people would struggle for weeks or even months to understand something they did in a couple of minutes.
There's no "get down and dirty" shortcut with them =)
However, what I'm saying is not mere nitpicking either. It is precisely because of my belief in Einstein's extraordinary abilities that I find it unconvincing that an LLM being able to recombine the extant written physics-related building blocks of 1900, with its practically infinite reading speed, necessarily demonstrates comparable capabilities to Einstein.
The essence of the question is this: would Einstein, having been granted eternal youth and a neverending source of data on physical phenomena, be able to innovate forever? Would an LLM?
My position is that even if an LLM is able to synthesise special relativity given 1900 knowledge, this doesn't necessarily mean that a positive answer to the first question implies a positive answer to the second.
This would absolutely be very good evidence that models can actually come up with novel, paradigm-shifting ideas. It was absolutely not obvious at that time from the existing facts, and some crazy leap of faiths needed to be taken.
This is especially true for General Relativity, for which you had just a few mismatch in the mesurements like Mercury's precession, and where the theory almost entirely follows from thought experiments.
However, you could also argue that it's actually empirical evidence that general relativity and 19th century physics wasn't truly a paradigm shift -- you could have 'derived' it from previous data -- that the LLM has actually proven something about structurally similarities between those paradigms, not that it's demonstrating general intelligence...
For instance spectroscopy enables one to look at the spectra emitted by another 'thing', perhaps the sun, and it turns out that there's little streaks within the spectra the correspond directly to various elements. This is how we're able to determine the elemental composition of things like the sun.
That connection between elements and the patterns in their spectra was discovered in the early 1800s. And those patterns are caused by quantum mechanical interactions and so it was perhaps one of the first big hints of quantum mechanics, yet it'd still be a century before we got to relativity, let alone quantum mechanics.
But the whole question is whether or not something can do that synthesis!
And the "anyone who read all the right papers" thing - nobody actually reads all the papers. That's the bottleneck. LLMs don't have it. They will continue to not have it. Humans will continue to not be able to read faster than LLMs.
Even me, using a speech synthesizer at ~700 WPM.
If it's true of everything, then surely having an LLM work iteratively on the pieces, along with being provided additional physical data, will lead to the discovery of everything?
If the answer is "no", then surely something is still missing.
> And the "anyone who read all the right papers" thing - nobody actually reads all the papers. That's the bottleneck. LLMs don't have it. They will continue to not have it. Humans will continue to not be able to read faster than LLMs.
I agree with this. This is a definitive advantage of LLMs.
Excellence at any given task is not indicative of intelligence. I think we set these sort of false goalposts because we want something that sounds achievable but is just out of reach at one moment in time. For instance at one time it was believed that a computer playing chess at the level of a human would be proof of intelligence. Of course it sounds naive now, but it was genuinely believed. It ultimately not being so is not us moving the goalposts, so much as us setting artificially low goalposts to begin with.
So for instance what we're speaking of here is logical processing across natural language, yet human intelligence predates natural language. It poses a bit of a logical problem to then define intelligence as the logical processing of natural language.
I'm sure, without any uncertainty, that any generalist model able to do what Einstein did would be AGI, as in, that model would be able to perform any cognitive task that an intelligent human being could complete in a reasonable amount of time (here "reasonable" depends on the task at hand; it could be minutes, hours, days, years, etc).
(1) - A major part of the challenge is in not being directed towards something. There was no external guidance for Einstein - he wasn't even a formal researcher at the time of his breakthroughs. An LLM might be able to be handheld towards relativity, though I doubt it, but given the prompt of 'hey find something revolutionary' it's obviously never going to respond with anything relevant, even with substantially greater precision specifying field/subtopic/etc.
(2) - Logical processing of natural language remains one small aspect of intelligence. For example - humanity invented natural language from nothing. The concept of an LLM doing this is a nonstarter since they're dependent upon token prediction, yet we're speaking of starting with 0 tokens.
(3) - LLMs are, in many ways, very much like calculators. They can indeed achieve some quite impressive feats in specific domains, yet then they will completely hallucinate nonsense on relatively trivial queries, particularly on topics where there isn't extensive data to drive their token prediction. I don't entirely understand your extreme optimism towards LLMs given this proclivity for hallucination. Their ability to produce compelling nonsense makes them particularly tedious for using to do anything you don't already effectively know the answer to.
Simply because I don't see hallucinations as a permanent problem. I see that models keep improving more and more in this regard, and I don't see why the hallucination rate can't be abirtrarily reduced with further improvements to the architecture. When I ask Claude about obscure topics, it correctly replies "I don't know", where past models would have hallucinated an answer. When I use GPT 5.2-thinking for my ML research job, I pretty much never encounter hallucinations.
THat's not how science works.
The LLM would have to propose experiments (which would have to be simulated), and then develop its theories from that.
Maybe there had been enough facts around to suggest a number of hypotheses, but the LLM in its curent form won't be able to confirm them.
I by no means believe LLMs are general intelligence, and I've seen them produce a lot of garbage, but if they could produce these revolutionary theories from only <= year 1900 information and a prompt that is not ridiculously leading, that would be a really compelling demonstration of their power.
Kind of, how long would it have realistically taken for someone else (also really smart) to come up with the same thing if Einstein wouldn't have been there?
I personally doubt that this would work. I don't think these systems can achieve truly ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting work. The homeworld of these systems is the corpus of text on which it was trained, in the same way as ours is physical reality. Their access to this reality is always secondary, already distorted by the imperfections of human knowledge.
Yes. It is certainly a question if Einstein is one of the smartest guy ever lived or all of his discoveries were already in the Zeitgeist, and would have been discovered by someone else in ~5 years.
Einstein was smart and put several disjointed things together. It's amazing that one person could do so much, from explaining the Brownian motion to explaining the photoeffect.
But I think that all these would have happened within _years_ anyway.
It turns out my reading is somewhat topical. I've been reading Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and of the things he takes great pains to argue (I was not quite anticipating how much I'd be trying to recall my high school science classes to make sense of his account of various experiments) is that the development toward the atomic bomb was more or less inexorable and if at any point someone said "this is too far; let's stop here" there would be others to take his place. So, maybe, to answer your question.