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Matthieu Wyart: belief

10 Aug 2026 Machine Learning Street Talk AI Is Learning at the Wrong Level of Abstraction — Matthieu Wyart

“I think maybe we need to do more introspection of how we function as scientists to come up with a good data set and the good procedures to teach machines to be good scientists.”

— Matthieu Wyart

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Matthieu Wyart
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
10 Aug 2026
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

Transcript context

…putting pieces together that satisfy constraint. Although when you have a new idea, often it's putting existing ideas together into a new hole. But I think creativity can be much more than that. I mean, if we think about what we discussed about what it means to be a physicist and how science proceeds, I mean, it's an example of creativity. You know, if you think about creativity like Newton, understanding the motion of planets and things like that. I mean, we talked about dialogue between experiment and theory. We talked about building models at a good level of description. We talked about analogies. And I don't think I agree with you that I, for example, all that, I don't think it's in the machine. I think there is no reason why we would not be able 1 day to build machines that can do that. I'm not sure if just scanning up things will lead to that. I think maybe we need to do more introspection of how we function as scientists to come up with a good data set and the good procedures to teach machines to be good scientists. So just an example, like creativity in science requires a lot of abilities to create something really new and how to interact with the world around us that I don't think machines have and yet. I mean, so I think I agree with you that just getting up, I don't think will lead to total success. We need to have developed other abilities in those machines. Yeah. I think I'm just trying to understand what the gap is because it would be consistent with your argument. If you're saying that we can learn the abstract structure of the world and be generatively competent in 1 domain, why would we not Because for me creativity is not just about coherence and respecting the constraints. I mean transformative creativity in my mind is about discovering interesting new subspaces. So we can traverse these constraints collectively and serendipitously sometimes we happen upon these fascinating new subspaces and we go on to explore them. And when we look back after discovering them, think, that was a very transformative creative stepping stone.…

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