Tom Griffiths

And again, that's a kind of 20th century innovation.

I mean, I think for many of these kinds of inductive inferences, probability theory gives us a good description of how it is that you should make those inferences.

But for something like abduction, a lot of the work is actually done at the level of how people really do make those inferences.

One of the challenges is you're probably coming up with a kind of thing that no one's thought about before.

you have to come up with a hypothesis in order to be able to entertain that hypothesis.

And that's something which is an algorithmic level phenomenon.

It's something which is about something our brains are doing rather than something we're told how to do using the math.

It's certainly something which I think is an open question about the capacities of these models in terms of the extent to which they're able to make those sorts of extrapolative inferences.

we would expect that they could do so to the extent that, again, what they've been trained to do provides some kind of infrastructure for being able to do that.

So we find that there are certain kinds of creative thinking that these models can actually do reasonably well.

there may be better than people coming up with simple kinds of analogies, right?

And you can think about that as being a consequence of having this very fine understanding of language, right?

That's important for doing that.

But analogy is an important part of discovery too.

Sometimes you make a discovery by recognizing that an idea from one domain applies in another domain.

And so I think it's not going to be as simple as,

They're not able to do this thing that we think of as abductive inference.

I think it's going to be something where there's going to be a set of things that they're going to be able to do well because they align with the kinds of tasks they're trying to do, and then a set of things that maybe are harder for them because they push against that training.

Yeah.

So we talked about one thread, right, which is the thread of logic through Leibniz and Boole.