The Alien Intelligence of AI
It is a comfortable belief: AI is just a mirror. Critics often dismiss large AI systems, especially large language models, as statistical parrots that reflect our words, images, and ideas without any deeper agency. They argue that such systems can't come up with new ideas. I think that is wrong. The question is not whether AI has consciousness or human-style understanding. The question is whether it can see associations and links that humans often miss. Human civilisation also advances through copying and recombination. We build on what came before. AI does something related, though in a different manner. It notices connections across vast bodies of data and turns those relationships into outputs that can feel surprising to us. In this essay I will look at several examples — a Go match, a mathematical proof, a rocket engine, a strange portrait, and a drug candidate — where I think AI has done something novel and interesting. Move 37: a strategy that broke human intuition In ...