In a recent post, Cole Wyeth makes a bold claim:

. . . there is one crucial test (yes this is a crux) that LLMs have not passed. They have never done anything important.

They haven't proven any theorems that anyone cares about. They haven't written anything that anyone will want to read in ten years (or even one year). Despite apparently memorizing more information than any human could ever dream of, they have made precisely zero novel connections or insights in any area of science[3].

I commented:

An anecdote I heard through the grapevine: some chemist was trying to synthesize some chemical. He couldn't get some step to work, and tried for a while to find solutions on the internet. He eventually asked an LLM. The LLM gave a very plausible causal story about what was going wrong and suggested a modified setup which, in fact, fixed [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
February 23rd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GADJFwHzNZKg2Ndti/have-llms-generated-novel-insights

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.