The pattern finding is in the prompt, the one- or fewshotting.
You can give it a novel problem and it will find something. It might not be good, it might not be what you want to see, but you can't maintain it hasn't found something.
You vastly, vastly overestimate human intelligence. We took thousands, upon tens of thousands of years to get to Newton and even that is not garantueed. He was a fluke of astronomical proportions. We need mountains upon mountains of (intellectual) infrastructure to get anywhere. Newton didn't just wake up with a good idea. He took what was already there and creatively combined it into a seemingly new thing, but none of it was truly novel. How could it be? Divine inspiration?
> it's finding one specific kind of pattern which we can characterise quite easily
Einstein built his towering thoughts on top of scaffolding laid by Lorenz, Riemann, and other contemporary thinkers. They in turn built their theories on top of foundations laid down by Newton, Gauss, Euler, Cauchy, and Spinoza.
Nobody just "thinks up" entire physical theories in a vacuum, it's always incremental progress.
I regularly see people moving the goalposts by asking ChatGPT to solve "world problems", as if asking a god. People can't do this, so why would you expect an AI trained on the output of people to just snap its digital fingers and do it?
> I regularly see people moving the goalposts by asking ChatGPT to solve "world problems", as if asking a god. People can't do this, so why would you expect an AI trained on the output of people to just snap its digital fingers and do it?
Because (some) people are desperately looking for a _god_ that will precisely snap its digital fingers and... do it.
Seen under this prism, some of the reactions here start to make sense: "I gave it this particular problem that I thought up, and it made a mistake / couldn't answer it, hence I cannot trust it / it's just a parrot / not creative / not _really_ intelligent."
It does not matter how many things it _can_ do, all it matters is that there is this one thing that it can _not_ do. It may be more learnt or creative than any single human, but it is not yet _omniscient_.
You can give it a novel problem and it will find something. It might not be good, it might not be what you want to see, but you can't maintain it hasn't found something.
You vastly, vastly overestimate human intelligence. We took thousands, upon tens of thousands of years to get to Newton and even that is not garantueed. He was a fluke of astronomical proportions. We need mountains upon mountains of (intellectual) infrastructure to get anywhere. Newton didn't just wake up with a good idea. He took what was already there and creatively combined it into a seemingly new thing, but none of it was truly novel. How could it be? Divine inspiration?
> it's finding one specific kind of pattern which we can characterise quite easily
I'm curious, how would you characterise it?