HACKER Q&A
📣 cobbzilla

Has an LLM Discovered Calculus?


It seems like an easy test: Train an LLM but restrict the data set to publications from <= year 1600, tell it that it's an expert geometrist, and ask for a formula yielding the area under a curve.

You could do the same for any number of more recent inventions, and see if the LLM is able to "innovate" the solution solely from what had been published prior to the actual human invention.

Has anyone done anything like this? It seems like an easy way to measure AI "innovative-ness". That or to dispel the idea that it exists, if it doesn't.

  👤 BeetleB Accepted Answer ✓
> It seems like an easy test: Train an LLM but restrict the data set to publications from <= year 1600

So, train it on less than 0.01% of the material other LLMs are trained on? It won't prove much if it fails.

👤 yakubov_org
Betteridge's law of headlines states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

For example: "Has Science Found the Fountain of Youth?" -> No

So, answering your question, it's a resounding no

👤 michaelgiba
Interesting idea. Although I wouldn't consider `but restrict the data set to publications from <= year 1600` "easy".

If you did have access to a high-quality pretraining dataset and you could explore training up to 1600, then up to 1610, 1620, ... 1700 and look at how the presence of calculus was learned over that period. Running some tests with the intermediate models to capture the effect