I'm not sure what your point is - can you expand?
When you consider the amount of computation which went into this discovery it is less impressive. Like if you spend a lot of fuel you can travel really fast, much faster then a bicyclist. Similarly Go-engines can beat the best humans at go, but they spend several orders of magnitude more energy to do so.
Mathematicians prove or disprove conjectures all the time and use orders of less energy to do so. Using LLMs is kind of just throwing money at the problem and hoping it works. In this case it did. But this is not the most efficient way to do this, and it won‘t scale.
From what I can find AlphaGo Zero runs at ~400 watts, while a human brain uses ~20. So really only about 1 order of magnitude difference.
Of course, training costs are a different question entirely.
That a raw LLM hallucinates?
That we never see all the mistakes and dead ends a complex system using AI hits?
Does it even matter if its accuracy rate across all its experiments is < 100% if it can run trillions of experiments in the same time a human could run 1?
We don't see many of the failed attempts of Human Researchers. Why? Because it doesn't matter.
What amazing here is that it shows our society can make discoveries faster in the post LLM world. Thats incredible.
Your "critique" of how it happened. Not so much.
I'm sorry to nitpick, but isn't an unconscious idea an oxymoron?
Unless you’re defining an idea as something that only exists in your conscious awareness?
I bet your stupid ideas also taught you a valuable lesson and you learned at least something from the experience, maybe your next idea won’t be so dumb, and those 100 watt hours weren’t actually wasted (though it may feel like they were). Compered to a failed LLM experiment, where all those billions of billions of computations are completely wasted. the model knows exactly as much after a failed experiment as it did going into it. Those Megawatt hours were simply wasted, turned into heat energy, paid for by raising the power bills of the of the datacenter’s neighbors.
Not my post, but I think point 1 is stronger than 2.
That's not necessarily true. If our only counterfactual to investing resources in project A were to invest them in some other project B, then, yes, the conclusion above follows. But often people just consume the resources.
(In the end, the goal of all economic activity is consumption. We invest resources so that we can consume more later. If there's no good enough project around, might as well consume more now.)