About whether an LLM trained only on pre-1900 texts could rediscover physics like relativity.
Has this happened?
Yes 5 (4%)Not sure 47 (38%)No 72 (58%)
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 an LLM trained only on pre-1900 texts could rediscover physics like relativity.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
What's the bar here? Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?"
I by no means believe LLMs are general intelligence, and I've seen them produce a lot of garbage, but if they could produce these revolutionary theories from only <= year 1900 information and a prompt that is not ridiculously leading, that would be a really compelling demonstration of their power.