If we drop the word “engineering”, we can focus on the point - geometry is another case where rote learning of repetition can do a pretty good job. Clever engineers can teach computers to do all kinds of things that look like novel engineering, but aren’t.
LLMs can make computers look like they’re good at something they’re bad at.
And they offer hope that computers might someday not suck at what they suck at.
But history teaches us probably not. And current evidence in favor of a breakthrough in general artificial intelligence isn’t actually compelling, at all.
Sometimes even researchers reach new results by having a machine verify many cases
Yes. Computers are good at that.
So far, they’re no good at understanding the four color theorum, or at proposing novel approaches to solving it.
They might never be any good at that.
Stated more formally, P may equal NP, but probably not.
Edit: To be clear, I actually share a good bit of the same optimism. But I believe it’ll be hard won work done by human engineers that gets us anywhere near there.
Ostensibly God created the universe in Lisp. But actually he knocked most of it together with hard-coded Perl hacks.
There’s lots of exciting breakthroughs coming in computer science. But no one knows how long and what their impact will be. History teaches us it’ll be less exciting than Popular Science promised us.
Edit 2: Sorry for the rambling response. Hopefully you find some of it useful.
I don’t at all disagree that there’s exciting stuff afoot. I also thing it is being massively oversold.