March 27, 2025
AI and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions – O’Reilly
Thomas Wolf’s blog post “The Einstein AI Model” is a must-read. He contrasts his thinking about what we need from AI with another must-read, Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace.”1 Wolf’s argument is that our most advanced language models aren’t creating anything new; they’re just combining old ideas, old phrases, old words according to probabilistic models. That process isn’t capable of making significant new discoveries; Wolf lists Copernicus’s heliocentric solar system, Einstein’s relativity, and Doudna’s CRISPR as examples of discoveries that go far beyond recombination. No doubt many other discoveries could be included: Kepler’s, Newton’s, and everything that led to