Thanks, looking forward to reading his rationale.
Edit: OK, I found his rationale in the comment section, and I don't find it particularly convincing:
> (1) Einstein and Gödel and Gauss and Shakespeare “merely filled out some points in the convex hulls” of everything that came before them, if you take an expansive enough view of what those convex hulls actually were. What a pathetic piece of cope.
> (2) Dana tells me she now mostly understands the proof of the UGC, and is amazed by the new ideas in it, and wants to give talks about it soon. So, maybe people can listen to that and then lecture her on how it’s “just a point in the convex hull” of the ideas that she’s worked with for 20 years!
First, to just use Einstein as an example, I remember reading many years ago (like at least a decade plus) that many scientists felt like if Einstein had never lived, the theory of special relativity (i.e e=mc^2) likely would have been found pretty quickly in any case - the work had already been done putting the nail in the "luminiferous ether" coffin, and people were starting to connect the dots. I think most people would agree that special relativity was within the "convex hull" that existed at that time. However, I've also heard that general relativity was so far outside the bounds of scientific thought of the time that if Einstein hadn't discovered it that in may have been 50-100 years or more before we figured it out - it was far outside the bounds of the convex hull of that time.
All that said, I'm not a mathematician qualified to determine whether what has been discovered by OpenAI is inside or outside the convex hull, and I do think that the vast majority of human intelligence operates within the convex hull in any case, and what AI can do is hugely, immensely powerful. Still, I'm more inclined to agree with this other commenter on Scott's blog:
> I am a little more in the “convex hull” camp when it comes to AI creativity. In my own interactions on research problems, I find the AI to be singularly uncreative. But these are not math problems.
> From my own introspection, my creative ideas come from a kind of visualization: situating myself in a quasi-physical abstract place that is very difficult to explain. But from there I can simply “see” things by “looking around”.
> This seems to me to be a byproduct of being an embedded agent, not just a prompt-responder. Embedded agents reflect and cogitate using their model of the world. Yann LeCun in particular pushes this as a necessary requirement for true intelligence.
> That said, I don’t agree with LeCun’s claim of necessity. Just as reasoning turned out to be something mysteriously emergent from language in the LLMs, so too could this kind of creative behavior. But I have no idea how.