Mr Branding: The Real Reason AI Can’t Solve Nobel-Worthy Problems: It’s Not Creative Enough!

Friday, March 7, 2025

The Real Reason AI Can’t Solve Nobel-Worthy Problems: It’s Not Creative Enough!

Many of the founders of AI companions make many bold claims, which sometimes don't even make sense, but this new take by Hugging Face’s co-founder, Thomas Wolf, makes some sense. In his post recently published to X, he said that AI is just becoming a yes-man, which doesn't have any capabilities to think outside the box and be creative. It cannot do any creative problem solving, the type which wins Nobel Prizes. He added that he fears not much AI development can make it capable of creative problem solving.

He said that many people think that Einstein or Newton were geniuses because they were good students. But that was not the case because thinking outside the box was what made them a genius. If we want our AIs to behave like Einstein or Newton, it is important that we make them capable of thinking and asking questions no one has dared to raise. This claim by Thomas Wolf is quite opposite from Sam Altman and Dario Amode, who have said that super-intelligent AI can help in scientific discovery and help cure cancer.

Wolf added that AI is just filling the gaps about what humans already know and it is not generating any knowledge by connecting unrelated facts. François Chollet, ex-Google engineer, also said that AI can only memorize reasoning patterns but cannot form reasoning on its own. He said that AI labs are just creating very obedient students and not any scientific revolutionaries. AI cannot pose any questions which go beyond the data that has already been fed to it.

He added that AI needs new patterns so it can ask non-obvious questions and make bold approaches. Evaluation crisis in AI is one of the biggest reasons why it cannot achieve out-of-the-box reasoning. AI needs to be developed in a way that doesn't only strive for general knowledge, but ask questions no one has thought about before.