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I don’t think we have spent enough time on the creativity axis.

When we solve problems we usually follow a heuristically guided energy efficient path. We just prune a lot of possibilities based on our existing knowledge and experience.

Creativity happens when we consciously (or not) go off the beaten path and explore. Most of those explorations are dead ends. But some will yield unexpected connections, patterns etc that we call “creativity” .

An AI system could also go on those kinds of explorations. Today they aren’t it because we are not asking them to.

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Machine learning systems do have a component of exploring suboptimal path, otherwise they would never get off a singular track. The creativity issue in regards to AI is not about taking unexplored paths, but doing so in a computationally efficient manner when there are infinite combinations of ideas between domains.
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> LLMs are permanently trapped in the vector space they are trained on.

A lot of the time people state the kind of fundamental limitations of LLMs very confidently when it feels like it is too early for people to really know. Like we are already well past the point where where LLMs are just pre trains on the internet with some RLHF for chatbot… Most of the effort is spent on elaborate reinforcement learning.

Is it unconceivable that future generations of LLMs could be RL’d to use einsteins visual method for theories [1] with the right tooling and geometry representations? Or just something random like that.

[1]. https://www.visualscribing.com/blog/2019-11-11-einstein-on-v...

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That paper argues that an LLM “lacks the mechanism for Abduction,” which is not the same thing as a claim that “creativity cannot be automated.” They propose a different kind of AI:

> The emergence of physically consistent World Models offers a pathway to a synthetic laboratory. By enabling agents to run counterfactual simulations—to experience the physical consequences of a thought experiment—we may finally mechanize the feedback loop between intuition and logic.

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Creativity can be automated. Humans are automated creativity invented by evolution
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