An LLM is like a well read college student with a nearly photographic memory that sometimes mixes things up.
It's great for bouncing ideas off of and getting feedback on them. And yeah, it might product "novel ideas" by mixing and matching existing ideas, but LLMs will never create truly novel ideas. Not in their current form.
The paper didn't really answer the question sadly: their conclusion was just that humans rate LLM answers as more novel than human ones, but less feasible.
Let's be real though. 99% of people 99% of the time are also not coming up with novel ideas.
LLMs seem to mostly be limited right now by the fact that they're always losing context on new conversations and their interactions don't rewire their neural nets. Hard to come up with a new idea when your brain gets reset with every conversation.
> Hard to come up with a new idea when your brain gets reset with every conversation.
Haha I love this picture!
I agree but I have tried many times to intersect two ideas with a LLM that would be novel and the LLM can not do this at all.
We shouldn't expect the stochastic parrot to be able to do this though and it is unfair to the stochastic parrot.
It is like expecting a real parrot to say words it has never heard before.
No one asks that of a real parrot because we don't anthropomorphize a real parrot like we do the LLM.
You are trivially incorrect.
LLMs (unless used in deterministic mode, which you shouldn't anyway) will eventually generate all ideas for the same reason as 1_000_000 monkeys on typewriters will eventually generate War and Peace. The question is only how soon in practice this will happen.
Well, I am nearly certain, that 1_000_000 LLMs (or rather 1_000_000 streams of generation using a few LLMs) will do better than 1_000_000 monkeys on typewriters.
The same 1_000_000 LLMs could do better than 1_000_000 average humans, but we don't know yet.
> And yeah, it might product "novel ideas" by mixing and matching existing ideas, but LLMs will never create truly novel ideas. Not in their current form.
Can you give a historic example of a human creating "truly novel ideas" that is not the product of mixing and matching existing ideas?
I mean, it depends on how pedantic you want to be. I'd say e=mc2 was pretty novel, but yes, it was based on existing math concepts.
But I don't think an LLM could ever come up with something like that.
Why? Just a gut feeling?
Perhaps it's specific to present-day LLMs and things will improve in the future - but when I ask my favourite LLM to suggest creative, novel marketing options for a coffee shop it suggests a tenth-drink-free punch card. Which is pretty much the least novel answer imaginable.
It's such a banal suggestion it makes me think there could be a tension between the requirement to be creative, and the requirement that the next token be among the most probable.
I mean if that's how you're prompting it that's your problem. What are marketing options? Do you mean campaign? Campaign to do what? Increase repeat business? Get new customers? Expand into a new market?
"Hey make me a cool like marketing thing or whatever" isn't going to work.
Relevant to this discussion is the fact that if an LLM can’t come up with that, it wouldn’t be due to the inability to mix and match to form novel ideas, but something else, and that something else hasn’t been clearly articulated yet.
What does `e=mc2` mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc...
> Mass–energy equivalence states that all objects having mass, or massive objects, have a corresponding intrinsic energy, even when they are stationary. In the rest frame of an object, where by definition it is motionless and so has no momentum, the mass and energy are equal or they differ only by a constant factor, the speed of light squared (c²).
Thanks.
Now go check the "History" section of that article; which, by the way, takes up about half of it.
Alright.
I'm trying to come up with other examples, but as the parent said, it then depends how pedantic we want to be e.g. take Poincaré's spacetime, but he'd still be working from two pre-existing ideas, "space" and "time"; the idea of combining the two is (feels?) quite novel and unexpected.
Going back some more, the notion of "space" (or that of "time") feels more primitive, less explainable in terms of other notions.
Yes, but the whole "combine things and see if they make other thing make sense" seems to me like a procedure that may be reproduced by pattern matching at a very large scale.
I think every major idea was truly novel at some point. Even an idea like "I will write down the things that happened, so when I am dead, other will know what has happened from my writings" was novel at some point.
Which means that an LLM can probably technically come up with novel ideas, since novel ideas aren't some special category of things, it's just that LLMs are not very good at it.
> I'd say e=mc2 was pretty novel
Well, the rest mass notion in special relativity is just a natural derivation. It appears once you have the "real" ideas in place. And those aren't really "existing math" at all. It was a pure physics idea at root: "the universe's laws don't change if you are in motion" (or alternate framings like "you can't tell if you're moving from inside a moving box").
Well, it turns out that if you try to construct such a theory, you end up needing some different (pre-existing) math to help describe it. But the idea isn't math at all.
Then the question is "Can LLMs propose new well-framed, evocative theories like relativity", and the answer is sort of open. In point of fact human beings, to first approximation, can't do this either!
Considering the fact that we know the names of the individuals who came up with new ideas in physics, it's extremely rare. If every other college kid was in that category, then we could call it "human ability".
This argument can be applied recursively. For example: the information in the human genome is just information from the environment transferred into the genome by evolutionary learning. Ultimately you get back to some kind of first cause argument where everything goes back to God or whatever natural process created information in the universe. Either nothing new is actually new or everything new is new.
In the end it becomes moot. A novel rearrangement of existing ideas that does something new or different is creativity.
Can LLMs do that? I think they can to a limited extent, but not as well as humans. Is it something we get with scale or does it require a fundamental architectural innovation? Don't know.
> Can you give a historic example of a human creating "truly novel ideas" that is not the product of mixing and matching existing ideas?
The invention of PCR comes to mind:
> During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
https://www.iflscience.com/lsd-dna-pcr-the-strange-origins-o... would argue that it was exactly mixing and matching at play here, but that the component parts wouldn't necessarily have been called to mind without the hallucination.
You don't even need drugs...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#Kekul%C3%A9...
How about the Transformer models that power LLMs? That was pretty novel.
Creativity is one of the most problematic concepts in psychology. I am right now reading
https://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Bell-Jar-Psychotic-Authors/dp/...
where the authors (a psychologist and two literature critics) carefully tease apart the connection between creativity and psychosis which is of course problematic because insanity mostly gets in the way of being creative which leads to much more serious definition of what "being creative" really means than one usually finds. (One thing they point out is that a third-rate artist (Andy Warhol?) can become quite prominent if they are good at marketing their work.)
People who are religious will make a theological argument to the effect that "God gave you the power to create when he created you" or "You can be creative because God is inside you".
Atheists may dismiss these arguments out of hand but it's a mistake to do so because of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument
in the sense that "God" can be defined as "the reason why there is something instead of nothing" which could have no relation to the image of some old patriarch on a throne. If we are made "in his image" we should consider the image revealed in a microscope that reveals that we are based on cybernetic principles that apply to the individual cell as well the whole organism and how those principles apply to the evolution of language and culture as they do to our genetic endowment.
(Insofar as God can delegate his creative ability to you, can't you further delegate it?)
A vulgar version of this is Rodger Penrose's "I can solve math problems because I am a thetan" where he claims to be exempt from the problems that Godel and Tarski and Turing warned you about but since there is nothing complete or consistent about Rodger Penrose these don’t apply (he can't solve Collatz and neither can a OT VIII!)
Muddy thinkers may reject the existence or relevance of God or not explicitly believe they are "a spirit in the material world" but often think there is something uniquely human about creativity (can other animals be creative?) but I sense that the ghost of the arguments above is behind that thinking.
In this transcript I get Python to create something that was never seen before and will never be seen again
which is by no means interesting; real creativity involves creating something that is useful and/or expressive using certain resources and subject to some system of constraints. Insofar as some task is repeatable, creativity is involved in the creation of some process or and/or system that makes the task repeatable.
As Edison put it “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” so it is not so interesting that the LLM can generate novel (yuck I hate that word, "novel" is the first word I delete when I have to squash a long paper title to fit into 80 characters) research ideas, I'll be impressed when it can fill out a grant application that gets funded.