People keep saying this. Why?
Surely the AI can complete the prompt “Generate new research questions based on these observations”?
When I read the reasoning traces of coding models they are constantly asking themselves questions and attempting to answer them.
They can't exit the hull until the "intuition" starts spawning points outside the convex hull.
The extent to which they are able to do this is the more interesting question!
By the way, convex hull permits extrapolating past the training data. LLM won't invent a new word that could not be defined by a sequence of known words. Just if it's meaningless and fully random/hallucinated, the new knowledge won't work with other known information blocks (breaks convexity).
It's a convex hull of information that is reflective and spans outside of itself and combines in a new way, when you shine two known rays of light together from the inside.
Now it gets better. AI can be orders of magnitude more creative than any human could ever hope for, because his convex hull of information is orders of magnitude larger, and the possibilities for new combinations are equally larger.
Not completely. Novelty used to be a major thing, when Humans did it. Another important criteria used to be if that new thing makes sense at all. Here the language model has a problem, as it doesn't have the means to evaluate this criteria.
Maybe there's some sense of "remix" that covers all of that, but then that meaning is not the standard one, or maybe you would concede that this happened in the past, but isn't happening now, but then where's the cutoff, or maybe something else...?
In your analogy, I would love to see some elaboration on the "reflective and spans outside of itself" part -- geometry doesn't work that way, do you have a more intuitive metaphor, or ideally a mechanism, or even better, some examples?
Humans can “intuit” based on a much larger, if not unlimited, context. Also I just want to say that human cognition is something so insanely complex and deep that we will not understand it at all in my lifetime. To attribute all, or really any, aspects of human cognition to a machine at this point is silly to me.
Most humans are dumber than a box of rocks. Here in Seattle we had one of many light rail-related fuckups where they had to replace part of the line with buses. People piled into the front of one when it was full. When people got out they never moved back. As the driver struggled to close the door and people struggled to get in the wad of people never moved back to fill the ample space.
Chatgpt was smarter than the average person a while ago
There are processes at work there that we don’t even have the language to describe.
(86 billion is the number ChatGPT, ironically enough, has given me a couple of times. I remember hearing for a long time that it was estimated to be somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion. This is not my field of study.)
For now, caring about a topic (or having somebody you trust care for you) still gets you better information than asking an LLM.
This does not demonstrate a lack of intelligence. It demonstrates laziness and a lack of interest in spreading apart. Or just lack of consideration (or even malice) on the part of those at the back of the wad.
> Chatgpt was smarter than the average person a while ago
This is an absurd claim that fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be "smart". Reasoning that would get you to this conclusion would equally well apply to Google's search engine over a decade ago.
You can't find things on a map that aren't there, but maybe you can draw a route nobody used before.
Since we're quoting Douglas Adams in this thread, I'll mention something I posted a while back, with his writings as example. After Douglas Adams passed away, somebody was tasked to "finish" The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy :
> And Another Thing... is the sixth and final novel in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Written by Eoin Colfer with the blessing of Douglas Adams' widow Jane Belson
Being a rather big fan, I immediately bought and read this novel and I have to say that Eoin Colfer did a really really great job, nailing the tone, humour and writing style of Douglas Adams.
IMVHO, he did about as good as anyone could reasonably expect someone to do, when given this task. It was big shoes to fill, and I was impressed.
But it just also wasn't good enough, in a weird way that I found hard to put my finger on at first.
The thing is that Colfer was doing the tone of voice, even came up with somewhat new jokes perfectly in the style of, etc etc. And for the sake of argument let's say he was able to get "arbitrarily close".
But there was always one thing he couldn't do: Actually make something new happen, make a new kind of joke, do a real plot twist, a big reveal, stuff like that. Because then it would deviate from Douglas Adams' work too much.
However, if Douglas Adams was still alive, this limitation would not apply to him: he could make a new kind of joke, do a plot twist, big reveal, and it would become canon.
This the best "good faith" argument I can present for how LLMs lack "intuition", in some sense. Now "intuition" is not a very exactly defined term, but I'm arguing that the thing I'm describing here, is at least a part of intuition, that an LLM fundamentally can't reach (until they start getting their own volition, which I would prefer they didn't).
To address your question:
> Surely the AI can complete the prompt “Generate new research questions based on these observations”?
Yes I imagine it could do that very well. But it would still need a human to decide if the research questions are "relevant" or "within scope" of what the human wants (a.k.a. their volition). Without that filter, the research would just bloom out exponentially, with more and more questions nobody was asking.
And yes, up to some point that "blooming" behaviour is a useful aspect of research, the exploratory aspect/phase, but at some point you need to get back to the "synthesis" aspect/phase, to distill all the explorations back to "stuff that matters". And just like Douglas Adams vs Eoin Colfer, only the human who wants to know something, can decide to widen or change the domain of that synthesis, but if the LLM were to decide this (outside of exploratory phase), it would actually be considered the wrong answer.
And this is not at all to say you can't do research with LLMs, obviously you can. But this is just a thing they can't do, on a real philosophical level. I'm also not saying you can't work around this limitation, you probably can, I'm just saying it exists.
For the same reason that you can't draw a 15 of Diamonds from a regular card deck.