5 Comments
User's avatar
10Billion's avatar

Toner-Rodgers' paper provides empirical evidence relevant to your argument, demonstrating that AI enhances research productivity by automating idea-generation tasks but remains reliant on human expertise, specifically, the top scientists' "taste" and judgment, to identify truly promising innovations. The findings reinforce your point that creative discernment may be humanity's enduring advantage over AI in innovation. Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17866 Also, hi!

Expand full comment
Luke Drago's avatar

Will read this and reach out to the author. Fascinating paper.

Expand full comment
Freeman Noryve's avatar

Incredible essay, as always

Expand full comment
Séb Krier's avatar

Great piece!

Expand full comment
Sharmake Farah's avatar

The 10s of trillions of dollars at minimum question on whether taste is relevant in the future as a competitive advantage for humans is IMO whether AI meta-learning/in-context learning either becomes a substitute for weights learning at runtime, or whether the ability to learn at run-time in the weights after training becomes unlocked for AIs.

If this does happen, especially within 5-20 years, then humans have basically no comparative advantage left. If it doesn't, I'd be much more sympathetic to claims of scaling hitting a wall.

More from Gwern here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/deesrjitvXM4xYGZd/?commentId=hSkQG2N8rkKXosLEF

Expand full comment