Sparks vs. Embers

As part of the Simons Institute’s recent workshop on Unknown Futures of Generalization, we hosted a debate probing the unknown generalization limits of current LLMs. The debate was between Sébastien Bubeck (OpenAI), a coauthor of “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence,” and Tom McCoy (Yale), a coauthor of “Embers of Autoregression,” and it addressed the motion “Current LLM scaling methodology is sufficient to generate new proof techniques needed to resolve major open mathematical conjectures such as P ≠ NP.” The debate was followed by an interactive discussion with Pavel Izmailov (Anthropic), Ankur Moitra (MIT), and the audience, moderated by Science Communicator in Residence Anil Ananthaswamy.