> I don’t see how AI can do some sort tech breakout/runaway.

I'm expecting (in the mode, but with a wide and shallow distribution) a roughly 10x increase in GDP growth, from increased automation etc., not a singularity/foom.

I think the main danger is bugs and misuse (both malicious and short-sighted).

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> How does an AI language model devise an experiment and observe the results?

Same way as Helen Keller.

Same way scientists with normal senses do for data outside human sense organs, be that the LHC or nm/s^2 acceleration of binary stars or gravity waves (or the confusingly similarly named but very different gravitational waves).

> The language model is only trained on what’s already known, I’m extremely incredulous that this language model technique can actually reason a genuinely novel hypothesis.

Were you, or any other human, trained on things unknown?

If so, how?

> A LLM is a series of weights sitting in the ram of GPU cluster, it’s really just a fancy prediction function. It doesn’t have the sort of biological imperatives (a result of being complete independent beings) or entropy that drive living systems.

Why do you believe that biological imperatives are in any way important?

I can't see how any of a desire to eat, shag, fight, run away, or freeze up… help with either the scientific method nor pure maths.

Even the "special sauce" that humans have over other animals didn't lead to any us doing the scientific method until very recently, and most of us still don't.

> Do we even have a model or even an idea about what “thinking” is?

AFAIK, only in terms of output, not qualia or anything like that.

Does it matter if the thing a submarine does is swimming, if it gets to the destination? LLMs, for all their mistakes and their… utterly inhuman minds and transhuman training experience… can do many things which would've been considered "implausible" even in a sci-fi setting a decade ago.

> So unless we make some radical breakthroughs in general purpose robotics

I don't think it needs to be general, as labs are increasingly automated even without general robotics.

At the least, it is a computable function (as we don’t have any physical system that would be more general than that, though some religions might disagree). Which already puts human brains ahead of LLM systems, as we are Turing-complete, while LLMs are not, at least in their naive application (their output can be feeded to subsequent invocations and that way it can be).