The ways that LLMs find great ideas is different than humans.

A human with a high IQ (a Newton) could think deeply about a problem for extended periods of time.

A Newton, given infinite time, could probably figure out nuclear fission.

A 100-IQ person, even given infinite time, probably couldn't.

But LLMs find great ideas the same way that swarms of individually unexceptional humans do.

You swarm all of the possible solutions.

The vast majority are crap and kind of fall away, unused.

The small subset that are great are all that remain.

Humans have a trick the LLMs don't: the world can cache intermediate useful results.

When someone finds something useful, it becomes a durable part of the environment, as they and others invest in keeping it around.

Each individual human trying out something new can use the pieces other humans figured out before them, "standing on the shoulders of giants".

The swarm of humans doing things in the world can reach ever further because of this.

LLMs don't get that ability because they can't change the world directly.

The swarm of search heads executing different LLM paths can only find as much as the LLM as it was trained could.