Comment by andsoitis
> simply referencing established knowledge would ever get the correct answer to novel problems, absent any understanding of that knowledge.
What is a concrete example of this?
> simply referencing established knowledge would ever get the correct answer to novel problems, absent any understanding of that knowledge.
What is a concrete example of this?
Unless everybody is writing the same code to solve the same exact problems over and over again, by definition LLMs are solving novel problems every time somebody prompts them for code. Sure, the fundamental algorithms and data structures and dependencies would be the same, but they would be composed in novel ways to address unique use-cases, which describes approximately all of software engineering.
If you want to define "novel problems" as those requiring novel algorithms and data structures etc, well, how often do humans solve those in their day-to-day coding?
This goes back to how we define "novel problems." Is a dev building a typical CRUD webapp for some bespoke business purpose a "novel problem" or not? Reimplementing a well-known standard in a different language and infrastructure environment (e.g. https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/)?
I'm probably just rephrasing what you mean, but LLMs are very good at applying standard techniques ("common solutions"?) to new use-cases. My take is, in many cases, these new use-cases are unique enough to be a "novel problem."
Otherwise, this pushes the definition of "novel problems" to something requiring entirely new techniques altogether. If so, I doubt if LLMs can solve these, but I am also pretty sure that 99.99999% of engineers cannot either.
What problems have LLMs (so models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc, not specific purpose algorithms like MCTS tuned by humans for certain tasks like AlphaGo or AlphaFold) solved that thousands of humans worked decades on and didn't solve (so as OP said, novel)? Can you name 1-3 of them?
Wait, you're redefining novel to mean something else.
If I prove a new math theorem, it's novel - even though it's unlikely that thousands of humans have worked on that specific theorem for decades.
LLMs have proven novel math theorems and solved novel math problems. There are more than three examples already.
Coding seems like the most prominent example.