Elon Musk reposted
Yun-Ta Tsai
@yunta_tsai
I would like to offer a counterargument that LLMs (or maybe AIs) cannot jump.
Before AlphaGo, the AI field had the same argument for Go: there are 2.08 × 10^170 possibilities, nothing fits in the computer, and there is no way AI could possibly predict the outcome of the next 50-60 moves.
It turned out most moves do not lead to a win. Combined with clever use of Monte Carlo Tree Search, the sampling becomes quite manageable. The same can be said for physics, where equations are just another form of compression.
Einstein did not start with relativity. That was not his first paper. He spent years understanding the properties of light before concluding that the speed of light is constant across the universe, which unlocked his discovery of relativity. During his thought process, he also interacted with other physicists (e.g., sub-agents) to enrich his thinking.
Currently we have not run an agent for years of compute. The sessions are often fragmented and disoriented, so every new session is almost a fragmented memory of the past, but it may not be for long.
Han Xiao ✈️ ICML 2026@hxiao· Jul 9, 2026interesting position paper throwing cold water on autoresearch/ai scientist: LLMs can't jump.
The thought experiment is this: Take an LLM with a 1905 knowledge cutoff. Feed it every paper, every dataset, every equation of that era. Could it invent general relativity?
No.
03:10 PM · July 12, 2026 · 563.4K views
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