Comment by visarga
> Scale enough compute for 1 million AGI and we can solve quantum gravity in a year.
That is wrong, it misses the point. We learn from the environment, we don't secrete quantum gravity from our pure brains. It's a RL setting of exploration and exploitation, a search process in the space of ideas based on validation in reality. A LLM alone is like a human locked away in a cell, with no access to test ideas.
If you take child Einstein and put him on a remote island, and come back 30 years later, do you think he would impress you with is deep insights? It's not the brain alone that made Einstein so smart. It's also his environment that had a major contribution.
if you told child Einstein that light travels at a constant speed in all inertial frames and taught him algebra, then yes, he would come up with special relativity.
in general, an AGI might want to perform experiments to guide its exploration, but it's possible that the hypotheses that it would want to check have already been probed/constrained sufficiently. which is to say, a theoretical physicist might still stumble upon the right theory without further experiments.