Ideas on how to avoid discouraging people doing valid work without providing a way-too-tempting escape hatch are extremely welcome, from you or anyone!
Perhaps this is elitist or counter-productive to say but… do these people actually exist?
By which I mean, are there people who are using LLMs to do meaningful novel research, while also lacking the faculties/self-awareness to realize that LLMs can’t produce or verify novel ideas?
My impression has been that LLMs can only be used productively in situations where one of the following holds:
- The task is incredibly easy - Precision is not a requirement - You have enough skill that you could have done the thing on your own anyway.
In the last case in particular, LLMs are only an effort-saver, and you’d still need to verify and check every step it took. Novel research in particular requires enormous skill—I’m not sure that someone who had that skill would get to the point where they developed a whole theory without noticing it was made up.
[Also, as a meta-point, this is a great piece but I was wondering if it’s going to be posted somewhere else besides LessWrong? If the target demographic is only LW, I worry that it’s trying to have too many audience. Someone coming to this for advice would see the comments from people like me who were critiquing the piece itself, and that would certainly make it less effective. In the right place (not sure what that it) I think this could essay could be much more effective.]
I think your view here is too strong. For example, there have been papers showing that LLMs come up with ideas that human judges rate as human-level or above in blind testing. I’ve led a team doing empirical research (described here, results forthcoming) showing that current LLMs can propose and experimentally test hypotheses in novel toy scientific domains.
So while the typical claimed breakthrough isn’t real, I don’t think we can rule out real ones a priori.
If the target demographic is only LW, I worry that it’s trying to have too many audience.
I’m not sure what that means, can you clarify?
Someone coming to this for advice would see the comments from people like me who were critiquing the piece itself, and that would certainly make it less effective.
Maybe? I would guess that people who feel they have a breakthrough are usually already aware that they’re going to encounter a lot of skepticism. That’s just my intuition, though; I could be wrong.
I’m certainly open to posting it elsewhere. I posted a link to it to Reddit (in r/agi), but people who see it there have to come back here to read it. Suggestions are welcome, and I’m fine with you or anyone else posting it elsewhere with attribution (I’d appreciate getting a link to versions posted elsewhere).
Ideas on how to avoid discouraging people doing valid work without providing a way-too-tempting escape hatch are extremely welcome, from you or anyone!
Perhaps this is elitist or counter-productive to say but… do these people actually exist?
By which I mean, are there people who are using LLMs to do meaningful novel research, while also lacking the faculties/self-awareness to realize that LLMs can’t produce or verify novel ideas?
My impression has been that LLMs can only be used productively in situations where one of the following holds:
- The task is incredibly easy
- Precision is not a requirement
- You have enough skill that you could have done the thing on your own anyway.
In the last case in particular, LLMs are only an effort-saver, and you’d still need to verify and check every step it took. Novel research in particular requires enormous skill—I’m not sure that someone who had that skill would get to the point where they developed a whole theory without noticing it was made up.
[Also, as a meta-point, this is a great piece but I was wondering if it’s going to be posted somewhere else besides LessWrong? If the target demographic is only LW, I worry that it’s trying to have too many audience. Someone coming to this for advice would see the comments from people like me who were critiquing the piece itself, and that would certainly make it less effective. In the right place (not sure what that it) I think this could essay could be much more effective.]
Thanks for the reply!
I think your view here is too strong. For example, there have been papers showing that LLMs come up with ideas that human judges rate as human-level or above in blind testing. I’ve led a team doing empirical research (described here, results forthcoming) showing that current LLMs can propose and experimentally test hypotheses in novel toy scientific domains.
So while the typical claimed breakthrough isn’t real, I don’t think we can rule out real ones a priori.
I’m not sure what that means, can you clarify?
Maybe? I would guess that people who feel they have a breakthrough are usually already aware that they’re going to encounter a lot of skepticism. That’s just my intuition, though; I could be wrong.
I’m certainly open to posting it elsewhere. I posted a link to it to Reddit (in r/agi), but people who see it there have to come back here to read it. Suggestions are welcome, and I’m fine with you or anyone else posting it elsewhere with attribution (I’d appreciate getting a link to versions posted elsewhere).