Comment by metalliqaz
Comment by metalliqaz a day ago
Yann LeCun spoke explicitly on this idea recently and he asserts definitively that the LLM would not be able to add anything useful in that scenario. My understanding is that other AI researchers generally agree with him, and that it's mostly the hype beasts like Altman that think there is some "magic" in the weights that is actually intelligent. Their payday depends on it, so it is understandable. My opinion is that LeCun is probably correct.
There is some ability for it to make novel connections but it's pretty small. You can see this yourself having it build novel systems.
It largely cannot imaginr anything beyond the usual but there is a small part that it can. This is similar to in context learning, it's weak but it is there.
It would be incredible if meta learning/continual learning found a way to train exactly for novel learning path. But that's literally AGI so maybe 20yrs from now? Or never..
You can see this on CL benchmarks. There is SOME signal but it's crazy low. When I was traing CL models i found that signal was in the single % points. Some could easily argue it was zero but I really do believe there is a very small amount in there.
This is also why any novel work or findings is done via MASSIVE compute budgets. They find RL enviroments that can extract that small amount out. Is it random chance? Maybe, hard to say.