A chatbot is exactly and only a short term recombination of existing ideas is exactly my point.
Even if an LLM came up with a theory of quantum gravity in some random chain of thought via chance, once the context is wiped everything is gone.
Expanding the frontier of knowledge (true extrapolation) requires iteration and layering of sinpler ideas. If you loose the layers and have to start from scratch every time then you fundamently will never move further out then what you already know (the interpolation).
>A chatbot is exactly and only a short term recombination of existing ideas is exactly my point.
You missed my point. I'm saying humans have finite context windows as well.
Look at how claude keeps passing it's context window down the chain. It creates a summary. It can spend thousands of tokens to coalesce on a conclusion, and only that conclusion needs to be passed on to the next context window. The research can be tossed. That's how human discovery works. We don't need the whole context window, we produce major discoveries because we pass the conclusion down the chain.
Even if an LLM came up with a theory of quantum gravity in some random chain of thought via chance, once the context is wiped everything is gone.
Expanding the frontier of knowledge (true extrapolation) requires iteration and layering of sinpler ideas. If you loose the layers and have to start from scratch every time then you fundamently will never move further out then what you already know (the interpolation).