Can LLMs realise we're looking at a problem the wrong way?

Reddit r/singularity News
llms scientific-breakthroughs ai-research assumptions paradigm-shift

Summary

The article questions whether large language models can independently recognize and challenge foundational assumptions in science to achieve paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, drawing parallels to human innovations like Einstein's theory of gravity.

I've been wondering recently whether LLMs will ever be able to come up with a different sort of scientific breakthrough; where they look at existing maths and science and realise that everyone has been looking at a problem the wrong way, without explicitly being prompted to do so by a human. It seems somewhat at odds with how they're trained, since they're fundamentally learning patterns from existing human knowledge, whereas this kind of breakthrough often requires rejecting the assumptions that knowledge is built on. There are many examples of humans doing this. Einstein completely changed how we understood gravity. Plate tectonics came from accepting that the continents themselves could move. Non-Euclidean geometry basically came from asking what happens if one of the assumptions everyone had been working from wasn't actually necessary. These all feel quite different to being really good at finding solutions within an established set of rules. AI already seems very good at that. What I'm less sure about is whether it can independently get to the point of saying "maybe the thing everyone is assuming is actually the wrong problem". Obviously humans don't come up with these ideas from nowhere either. Usually there are years of weird results and things that don't quite fit the existing theory first. Are there any examples where AI has actually done something like this already?
Original Article

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