Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi
— saved image
Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi · 1h Registering my prediction on this, too: If AI starts replicating Einstein's mental leaps, there will be, by the same people, new and different cope. [Quoted tweet] gfodor.id @gfodor · 6h The last and final cope of humanity was always going to be about AI failing to replicate Einstein's mental leaps, which are generally seen as the greatest 'magical' achievement of the human mind in history. The fact we're already up again... [Embedded image of a paper/abstract page:] Google DeepMind Jan 27th, 2026 LLMs can't jump Tom Zahavy, Google DeepMind How do we fundamentally discover new things? In a letter to Maurice Solovine, Albert Einstein conceptualized discovery as a cyclical process involving an intuitive 'jump' from sensory experience to axioms, followed by logical deduction. While Generative AI has mastered Induction (statistical pattern matching) and is rapidly conquering Deduction (formal proof), we argue it lacks the mechanism for Abduction—the generation of novel explanatory hypotheses. Using Einstein's formulation of General Relativity as a computational case study, we demonstrate that the prevailing theory of "creativity as data compression" (induction) fails to account for discoveries where observational data is scarce. This position paper argues that while a modern Large Language Model could plausibly execute the deductive phase of proving theorems from established premises, it is structurally incapable of the abductive 'Jump' required to formulate those premises. We identify the translation of simulation into formal axioms as the critical bottleneck in artificial scientific invention, and propose that physically consistent, multimodal world models offer the necessary sensory grounding to bridge this divide.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Zvi Mowshowitz quote-tweets gfodor's post about a Google DeepMind position paper ('LLMs can't jump' by Tom Zahavy, dated Jan 27th 2026) arguing LLMs lack the abductive capacity for Einstein-style conceptual leaps despite mastering induction and deduction. Zvi predicts new forms of 'cope' if AI eventually replicates such leaps.