I expected someone would say this.

That’s how it feels like. ;)

More seriously, the only time where you’re jolted out of your prediction flow state is when you’re surprised, which means something happened counter to what your brain was predicting.

For a cost-prohibitive example, you could put a humanoid robot whose pretraining contained no chemistry, in a chem lab, and put it in a hypothesis loop, where it generates a random action, guesses the result, and then does it. Every time the lab burns down, you just build it again. Reward the model for producing novel actions and reward the model for correct hypotheses.

In other words, you generate more training data by actually experimenting, just like humans do.

This is kind of an aside to the topic, but your comment made me think that one of the advantages of humans is just that there are currently 8 billion different neural nets trained on different experiences with different model configurations running different architectures on different hardware.

if patterns can be put into words, why wouldn't the same process happen at the word level? do you think it's impossible for a LLM to write even a simple python program that will generate millions of plausible random sentences in the general problem space we aim to generate new concepts for, then filter and rank them semantically?

More generally, do you really think humans randomly come up with new ideas, in any act of creation, such as art, science, etc.? Why do you think art studies and stuff like Oblique Strategies exist? How long should one wait for a specific random human without any formal education in physics to have 50% chance of coming up with a new workable theory of cosmology?

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