About whether LLMs can recognize or produce genuinely novel ideas.
Has this happened?
Yes 17 (15%)Not sure 39 (35%)No 57 (50%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether LLMs can recognize or produce genuinely novel ideas.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
It's a good question. A related question is: "what's an example of something undeniably novel?". Like if you ask an agent out of the blue to prove the Collatz conjecture, and it writes out a proof or counterexample. If that happens with LLMs then I'll be a lot more optimistic about the importance to AGI. Unfortunately, I suspect it will be a lot murkier than that - many of these big open questions will get chipped away at by a combination of computational and human efforts, and it will be impossible to pinpoint where the "novelty" lies.