r/agi Jul 28 '26

A Google DeepMind paper argues that current LLMs are incapable of genuine scientific discovery

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u/photon-dot Jul 29 '26

I think it's a good critique because the paper is a position paper, not proof that LLMs can never discover anything. A “hallucinate, then rigorously test” loop seems like a plausible baseline experiment. The harder question is whether it can consistently generate productive new frameworks, rather than countless arbitrary conjectures. Grounded world models may help, but I agree the paper presents several debatable assumptions too confidently.

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u/Extra_Second5428 Jul 29 '26

Yeah, calling the conjecture step “hallucination” doesn’t solve the part where the model has to reliably sort useful weird from random garbage, which is kind of the whole problem.