FULL INTERVIEW: Yong Zheng-Xin says a paper argued LLMs can't make Einstein-style leaps, so they'll never reach general relativity. His answer: Feynman showed you can derive it without Einstein, from theories that already existed.
@yong_zhengxin works at
@OpenAI on RSI preparedness and safety. 2 weeks after publishing "Hot Take: LLMs Can Jump," he joined
@theojaffee and
@schisofrenia to discuss whether models can create genuinely new knowledge:
01:18 the 3 kinds of reasoning, and which one the paper says LLMs lack
03:07 why cyber is accelerating and algorithmic progress isn't
05:48 the elevator thought experiment, and what Feynman said about it
07:59 why a model that isn't a specialist finds connections specialists miss
08:45 Yudkowsky's Bayesian superintelligence and three frames of a falling apple
10:59 why interconnected knowledge makes continual learning easier
14:08 the wet lab is the bottleneck, not the reasoning
15:31 whether you need embodiment to know when something feels wrong
17:24 the real constraint on abduction is diversity of hypotheses
19:22 we never ask one scientist to make every breakthrough
22:09 whether GPT-4 could do today's cyber work with infinite compute
23:34 what safety even means once a model is improving itself