r/singularity • u/Spare-Dingo-531 • 20h ago
LLM News Problems in 22 scientific fields had solutions hiding in plain sight. AI has found them.
https://www.science.org/content/article/problems-22-scientific-fields-had-solutions-hiding-plain-sight-ai-has-found-them18
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 20h ago
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u/JLongTom 18h ago
So cool. I love it. Bootloops is incredible.
Hiding in plain sight is the key phrase, and this is going to be the main source of fruit in the near future.
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u/Super_Sierra 15h ago
LLMs can leverage its massive breadth of knowledge of almost all of math to find things no one has tried, sometimes haven't even heard of. That is how it tackled the Erdos problem by using infinity clas field towers, ideas from ring theory and apply it to geometry.
LLMs are great at this sort of thing because it can firehose lots of ideas at a problem with its wide knowledge base that a human being would never make a connection on because the other field is so distant to the problems that they work on.
A lot of layman don't realize just how wide some subfields at, and how impossible it would be for a humam being to even accurately hold all the different ways you could apply that information.
The people that say 'LLMs are just bruteforcing' are idiots who have no idea that you have to be genuinely clever and intelligent to get these results, some of these problems nearly 130 years old and our greatest minds failed as proving or solving.
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u/JLongTom 14h ago
I don't know what 'genuinely clever and intelligent' means, but the proof is in the pudding.
I think of them as having comically high crystallised intelligence and merely OK fluid intelligence. Turns out that would probably be enough if it ever occurred in a human; it just never has or could.
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u/Super_Sierra 5h ago
Well, Claude Shannon, the pretty much solidifier of information theory and creator of the modern world, made the connection that intelligence and compression is intertwined. ( His algorithms and ideas are in everything we use to transfer information )
We don't think of every tree we ever interacted with to think of 'tree' we compress all our experiences and interactions into an abstract 'tree' in our heads. We have found that LLMs might hold actual higher order concepts the same way, and have found to have global workspaces inside of them, which is fascinating because Global Workspace Theory made a prediction that if we were on the right road to figuring out the Hard Problem of consciousness, we found find them.
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u/CoolStructure6012 9h ago
This is taking advantage of parallelism to attack the weak point on problems which are slow to solve but quick to verify. Brute forcing carries negative connotations but mainly because humans can't create infinite copies of themselves.
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u/Open_Relative4605 19h ago
u/askgrok explain?
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u/the_quark 7h ago
I'm not Grok, but the issue is that it's very difficult for experts to work cross-domain. You've got to spend a significant chunk of your life to become an expert in a single narrow field. Very few people have the inclination and time to become experts in two fields at once.
There may be techniques and information that are obvious to an expert in a single field that would also be helpful to experts in other fields -- but there really aren't any people who could recognize that.
One of the interesting things about AI in a research context is that as it gets to be PhD level in all domains at once AI can make these connections that we have no humans available who could.
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20h ago
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u/JuniorOven8520 20h ago
It's just not feasible for people to learn about a billion different topics (limited human capacity/time), and AI is better than us at this, which is good and helps us do things!
Idk how that translates to hating on mathematicians lol
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u/Spare-Dingo-531 20h ago
Don't lump mathematicians into a group!
I've had enough of this tribalism bullcrap. There are many, many mathematicians and scientists who embrace AI, don't discredit them.
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u/hackerbots 20h ago
You really think this is about ego and an entire field of science is just making shit up? really??
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u/sckchui 16h ago
The article talks about applying knowledge from one discipline to solve problems in another discipline, something that human experts can't do because individual human experts are extremely narrowly focused inside their own field of expertise.
In that sense, this is a demonstration of how AI is a more general intelligence than individual human experts. Humans are only more general if you count the whole species, not individuals. There are some things humans can do that AI can't, but there are a lot more things AI can do that humans can't.