LLMs Can't Jump and They Shouldn't Have To
A position paper by Google DeepMind researcher Tom Zahavy, LLMs can't jump, makes a specific claim about the limits of current AI: models are good at induction (finding patterns in data), increasingly good at deduction (formal logic and proof), and bad at abduction — proposing a genuinely new explanation for a phenomenon, often before there's much data to explain it (OpenReview).
Abduction is the part that matters for scientific breakthroughs. It's the move where someone posits an unobserved cause: germs, continental drift, curved spacetime. The paper's argument is that LLMs can't do this because they have no embodied experience of the physical world. A model that has never fallen, never held a weight, never watched an object accelerate has no grounded intuition to draw on. It manipulates symbols about the world without ever having been in it.
I think the paper is probably right about the limitation. I...
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