Can A.I. Generate New Ideas?

Systems like OpenAI’s GPT-5 are accelerating research in math, biology and chemistry. But there is a debate over whether it can do that work on its own.

Excerpt: "For many computer scientists and mathematicians, solving an Erdos problem showed that artificial intelligence had reached a point where it was capable of doing legitimate academic research. But some experts were quick to point out that the solution generated by A.I. was not very different from earlier work done by human mathematicians.

“It feels to me like a really clever student who has memorized everything for the test but doesn’t have a deep understanding of the concept,” said Terence Tao, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is regarded by many as the finest mathematician of his generation. “It has so much background knowledge that it can fake actual understanding.

...The result is that these systems can now “reason” through problems in fields like math, science and computer programming. A system like GPT-5 does not exactly reason like a human, but it can spend additional time working on a problem. Sometimes, this work extends for hours.

...When Dr. Unutmaz uses A.I. for his research into chronic diseases, he said, he often feels like he is talking with an experienced colleague. But he acknowledges the machine cannot do its work without a human collaborator. An experienced researcher is still needed to repeatedly prompt the system, explain what it should be looking for and ultimately separate the interesting information from everything else the system produces.

“I am still relevant, maybe even more relevant,” he said. “You have to have a very deep expertise to appreciate what it is doing.'”