An anonymous reader shares a report: AI excels at following instructions -- but it's not pushing the boundaries of knowledge, says Thomas Wolf. The chief science officer and cofounder of Hugging Face, an open-source AI company backed by Amazon and Nvidia, analyzed the limits of large language models. He wrote that the field produces "overly compliant helpers" rather than revolutionaries. Right now, AI isn't creating new knowledge, Wolf wrote. Instead, it's just filling in the blanks between existing facts -- what he called "manifold filling."

Wolf argues that for AI to drive real scientific breakthroughs, it needs to do more than retrieve and synthesize information. AI should question its own training data, take counterintuitive approaches, generate new ideas from minimal input, and ask unexpected questions that open new research paths. Wolf also weighed in on the idea of a "compressed 21st century" -- a concept from an October essay by Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, "Machine of Loving Grace." Amodei wrote that AI could accelerate scientific progress so much that discoveries expected over the next 100 years could happen in just five to 10.

"I read this essay twice. The first time I was totally amazed: AI will change everything in science in five years, I thought!" Wolf wrote on X. "Re-reading it, I realized that much of it seemed like wishful thinking at best." Unless AI research shifts gears, Wolf warned, we won't get a new Albert Einstein in a data center -- just a future filled with "yes-men on servers."

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