Current language models struggle with discovery tasks not because they lack capability or data, but because the pre-training process did not incentivize connection-making between disparate concepts; training the models specifically to perform discovery tasks (e.g., through RL on benchmark sets of novel connections) could plausibly overcome this limitation.

causalpending

Speaker

Scott Alexander

Evidence Quote

In general I think it's a helpful heuristic that I use to ask the question of: remind oneself, what was the AI trained to do? What was its training environment like?

Source

AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel KokotajloDwarkesh Patel
Created: 8/11/2026, 7:03:29 AM

My Notes

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