Someone fed a bunch of Paul’s essays into GPT and then asked the question:
Where do good ideas come from?
Here is the GPT response:
The GPT response that new ideas are a combination of existing ideas and information is interesting because that is what AI does – combine existing information – at least GPT is honest …
Here is Paul’s response:
http://paulgraham.com/getideas.html
Paul’s response (read the entire thing, it’s short) is the way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies. Perhaps AI can be trained to do this too. But I still wonder about human creativity and question if it can ever be fully replaced by a machine. Perhaps the bigger question is efficiency – if it takes a data center full of GPUs to even approach the creativity of a human, who can run on 3 good meals/day, perhaps it’s just not practical.