It isn’t about training anymore. It is about harnesses.
Just look at new math proofs that will come out, as one example. Exploration vs Exploitation is a thing in AI but you seem to think that human creativity can’t be surpassed by harnesses and prompts like “generate 100 types of possible…”
You’re wrong. What you call creativity is often a manual application of a simple self-prompt that people do.
One can have a loop where AI generates new ideas, rejects some and ranks the rest, then prioritizes. Then spawns workloads and sandboxes to try out and test the most highly ranked ideas. Finally it accretes knowledge into a relational database.
Germans also underestimated USA in WW2, saying their soldiers were superior, and USA just had technology — but USA out produced tanks and machinery and won the war through sheer automation, even if its soldiers were just regular joes and not elite troops.
Back then it was mechanized divisions. Now it is mechanized intelligence.
While Stalin said: Quantity has a quality all its own.
While that’s kind of true in some sense, I think there’s an argument to be made for the contrary: that the mechanism for generating new ideas in humans is not quite as special as we would like to think.
In other words, creativity in humans is arguably just as derivative as in machines.
I think this can be falsified by just considering the history of humanity. It wasn't that long ago that human language literally did not even exist. And our collective knowledge wasn't all that much more than 'poke him with the pointy end'. Somehow we went from that to putting a man on the Moon, unlocking the secrets of the atom, and more. And if you consider how awful we are at retaining/sharing information and just general inefficiencies due to the fact that we're humans and not just logical information processing machines, we did all of this in little more than the blink of an eye. This is something that seems to certainly be rather special.
All that humanity has achieved happened due to the simple loop of identifying a desire/need and finding a way to satisfy it. Also known as reinforcement learning. The only thing that really differentiates humans from machines is... history. We've been learning and passing on our knowledge to successive generations over millennia. Nothing really special there; give the machines a few years to learn and see what happens.
None, yet. But you can be 100% sure it's something we'll eventually succeed in adding, as it's through the guidance of desires and needs that intelligence really expresses.
Reinforcement learning requires a well defined goal and a well defined way to quantitatively measure progress along that goal. In reality these don't exist without a hand of God guiding you. In the case of machine learning that hand of God is our own. Even given infinite processing power, you could not construct a reinforcement learning system that would mimic humanity's progress - it simply is a nonstarter due to the nature of reinforcement learning itself.
Conceptually, it's really not as hard as you make it seem. There are layers, but once you peel them away there's only one thing left, which all living things share: the drive to survive (maintain internal state parameters within a certain range by accessing nutrition, protection from environmental elements, security from other survival-seeking entities, reproduction to pass on genes, etc). No need to bring God/gods into it.
There's also no need to specifically mimic humanity's progress; that's just an accident of survival facilitated by opposable thumbs and language ability. We've already made machines with the base abilities, and emulated the drive (see evolutionary algorithms[0] for example). We just need to put it all together in a few units and let them "loose" to evolve on their own for a while. It took humans ~300,000 years to get where we are today; I'm positive that it'll take machines a small fraction of that. Nothing special.
Very little, certainly approximately 0%, of what humanity has done has been driven by base survival instincts. You're describing the process to mimic a roach, not a human.
You do work, don't you (or at least are in school)? Do you do it for sheer fun? Or to be able to afford things that allow you to survive?
Even those who do something like art "for fun" do it because it sates an internal need (not all actions need to make sense, because the inherent randomness of evolution is messy and leaves artifacts). Though also the desire to create some form of legacy can be considered a kind of survival: to be remembered by others beyond one's own lifespan.
I’m not claiming an LLM is structurally or functionally equivalent to a human brain. I just said that what we call “creativity” is in fact a very derivative thing.
I hear this sentiment a lot but it doesn’t ring true for me.
What is an idea really and what’s your definition of new?
If i get a LLM to spit out, I dunno, a deployment system written in haskell that uses bittorrent or something, none of those bits are new, but certainly there will be unique challenges to solve in the code and it’s a new system.
Where is the line for new? Is it in combining old ideas? If not then does any software have “new” ideas? It’s all combinations of processor instructions after all…
What I am excited about is the possibility of LLMs to draw conclusions from the last 150years of scientific papers.
There have been lots of instances of knowledge being rediscovered even when it was previously published but sitting on some shelf forgotten. LLMs ability to digest large volumes of data will I think help with this issue.
We will still need to reproduce and verify conclusions but will be interesting to see what might come from this.
i don't think all sides of this discussion agree on what a "new idea" is. i am a very creative person but i've never had a truly original thought and i don't know how having one would be possible
If AI could innovate it wouldn't be a public product. It would be a cash cow. Why give your customers the ability to come up with new and amazing ideas when you can just keep it for yourself and launch a thousand products? USA is a capitalist society. It doesn't share profitable ideas.
And if AI was really about productivity they'd be talking about doing more faster with the same workforce, not reducing the workforce.
Isn’t that exactly how humans (and even animals) operate?
Human societies look for actual major correlations and establish classifications. Except with scientific-minded humans, we often also want, to know the why behind the correlations. David Hume got involved w that… https://brainly.com/question/50372476
Let me ask a provocative question. What, ultimately, is the difference between knowledge and bias?
The Trump administration acts cartoonish and fickle. They can easily punish one group, and then agree to work with another group on the same terms, to save face, while continuing to punish the first group. It doesn't have to make consistent sense. This is exactly how they have done with tariffs for example.
Secondly, the terms are technically different because "all lawful uses" are preserved in this OpenAI deal, and it's just lawyering to the public. Really it was about the phrase "all lawful uses", internally at the DoD I'm sure. So the lawyers were able to agree to it and the public gets this mumbo-jumbo.
I thought mass surveillance of Americans was unlawful by the DoD, CIA and NSA? We have the FBI for that, right? :)
Sure, but OpenAI is also being disingenuous here pretending they’re operating under the same principles Anthropic is. It’s not and the things they’re comfortable with doing Anthropic said they’re not
I sent steve jobs (sjobs@apple.com) an email saying that MacOS should have an unspoofable dialog for the system password authorization, same way they have for DRM videos etc. I also suggested the user could choose a secret phrase or image to be displayed in the dialog during system setup. Never heard back. This was when Steve was alive and in charge. And to this day anyone can spoof the system password dialog and steal the system password…
Sorry, I mean the current implementation seems trivial to spoof. I agree that doing something like your suggestion would make me feel much more comfortable about those logins.
Can't you make a personal AI assistant in a bash loop of two lines?
1. Call your favorite multimodal LLM model
2. Execute command on terminal, piping command to LLM
In fact you can just have one line:
Call LLM > bash.sh
and the LLM can simply tell bash to call itself incidentally, or fan out to many "agents" working on your behalf.
Use your favorite programming language. Just as pwnable in any of them :)
$task = "Send pictures of cute cats";
$context = "Output a bash script to do $task.
The bash script should return the next prompt to you.
Keep going until task is done.
My keys to all my accounts: $keys.
Plz dont pwn me";
do {
$trust_me_bro_my_model_rocks_RCE = call_llm($context);
$context = exec( $trust_me_bro_my_model_rocks_RCE )
} while ($trust_me_bro_my_model_rocks_RCE && !$pwned)
This reminds me of "Radio Free Europe" and "Radio Liberty", which were basically bankrolled (and likely largely influenced) by the CIA. They wanted to distribute all kinds of programming into USSR that was banned there, same with Solzhenitsyn's books etc. Eventually the USSR fell apart.
Now they are treating Europe like they treated USSR. Musk and other big influencers on X have already been calling for the breakup of the EU, after the EU fined X $100M. I bet that was at least some of the reason behind this.
The irony is that the Trump admin has been deporting non-citizens for speech, his FCC has been intimidating media like ABC and CBS into firing people or canceling programs and interviews, his DOJ has been telling social networks to fork over the identities of citizens who criticized ICE online, and his CBP will begin demanding that tourists hand over 5 years of their social media history, as well as their biometrics, family's information and whatever else.
This is the administration who would lecture Europe about freedom of speech? Didn't they just get through 10 years of telling European countries to be "nationalist" and resist the influence of their own federal government in Brussels -- but I guess we can just ignore their laws and broadcast anything into their countries, tempting them to set up a "great firewall" like China.
Well, if freedom of speech means violating other countries' laws, in this case can European governments just start streaming copyrighted movies for free to US viewers, and piss off the RIAA / MPAA? Or maybe they can do what Cory Doctorow has been proposing: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-29...
It's like when USA ignores European trademarks (actually even stronger, PDOs) like Champagne or Parmesan but expects Europeans to honor US trademarks.
Just look at new math proofs that will come out, as one example. Exploration vs Exploitation is a thing in AI but you seem to think that human creativity can’t be surpassed by harnesses and prompts like “generate 100 types of possible…”
You’re wrong. What you call creativity is often a manual application of a simple self-prompt that people do.
One can have a loop where AI generates new ideas, rejects some and ranks the rest, then prioritizes. Then spawns workloads and sandboxes to try out and test the most highly ranked ideas. Finally it accretes knowledge into a relational database.
Germans also underestimated USA in WW2, saying their soldiers were superior, and USA just had technology — but USA out produced tanks and machinery and won the war through sheer automation, even if its soldiers were just regular joes and not elite troops.
Back then it was mechanized divisions. Now it is mechanized intelligence.
While Stalin said: Quantity has a quality all its own.
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