AI has indeed come a long way in the last couple of years. But if we boil it down, it’s all basically just very sophisticated pattern matching. Let’s say you ask AI to write a piece of code, there’s a good chance that the data it was trained on had the exact same problem solved in many different ways. i.e. the algorithm for merge sort.

But let’s say you ask it something fairly unique i.e. a specific domain modeling of your new business. It’s quite possible that it hasn’t seen those exact requirements before but it is able to deduce your intentions from fairly close examples it’s seen before and still able to give you a well rounded answer. I’m sure that in the latter case the output will vary quite a bit between the runs but still, mostly, it can give you what you’re looking for or point you in the right direction for the very least.

Now, let’s assume that there’s something that it truly doesn’t know anything about. I can’t think of an example right now but let’s say we go back two centuries when airplanes weren’t a thing. All it’s given is the raw data like 1) Birds can fly 2) Trains have engines that produce mechanical power from chemical/thermal energy 3) Bernoulli’s principle and fluid dynamics are fairly well-known at that point. Would you say that today’s AI would have been able to truly “reason” that building machines that fly are possible? Could they be capable of going from “zero to one”?

Another interesting thought experiment: Could AI come up with the theories of relativity or other similar discoveries/inventions that didn’t just conform to the available knowledge but required genuine human imagination?