Jan 3, 2025 4 min read Weekly Retro

[Weekly Retro] Can AI create truly original ideas? This study brings answers

#202 - Jan.2025

Happy Friday and hope you have a great start in 2025!

💡 Here is a quick idea before you head off to the weekend:

Can AI accelerate the pace of innovation through truly novel ideas?

Aidan Toner-Rodgers' paper brings some light to this tricky question.

This is the first type of research of this type that I've found (if you know others, please let me know).

There is a tendency to expect AI to generate only incremental ideas given that it is trained through existing data.

But a this study (in a scientific context) demonstrated that AI can play a critical role in discoverability and generation of novel ideas for R&D. There are other very interesting insights from this study:

Expertise makes all the difference when leveraging AI. The study demonstrated that scientists with higher expertise were able to evaluate faster the feasibility of new ideas generated by AI. In contrast, others wasted a lot of time evaluating false positives.
AI enabled a shift toward more radical innovation. By removing the biases from humans, the ideas resulting from AI were more disruptive.
Workload shifted from generating ideas to evaluating the feasibility of each one. This was interesting. The overall labor was unchanged, but what changed was rather the distribution of the work.
Job satisfaction decreased (what?!). The study discovered that AI automated precisely the task that scientists find more valuable (idea generation), while increasing the volume of repetitive tasks (evaluations).

AI can make a lot of difference in the discovery phase of innovation processes. Yet, expertise will continue to play a big role when evaluating ideas.

Your experience and taste will be hard to replace : )

Here's the link to the paper if you want to dive deep: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17866

✉️ Post from this week

This week I wrote an article on the risk of outsourcing too much of our thinking to AI. The leaders from the future will combine their human intuition and critical thinking with leverage of AI. They will not let AI take all the decisions for them:

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