About whether LLMs can produce wholly novel research without external sources.
Has this happened?
Yes 14 (12%)Not sure 48 (40%)No 57 (48%)
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 produce wholly novel research without external sources.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
If LLMs can indeed produce wholly novel research independently without any external sources, then prove it.
I was actually thinking about it, and there could be a simple test - Remove all knowledge of X from knowledge corpus and train LLM on such corpus. Under X one can imagine anything - differential calculus, logarithms, Reimann Hypothesis, Special Theory of relativity, Fermat's theorems, ... And now ask AI questions which actually has lead to discovery of X.
If AI is able to rediscover X while not knowing about X, we can say it is proof of intelligence.