If you’re like me, then from the moment you had to solve a math problem as a child, you grabbed a calculator.

Well, for those of us who totally get the need for machine help, even as rudimentary as the humble calculator – this new discovery will blow your mind.

Artificial intelligence researchers at DeepMind say they’ve made the world’s first scientific discovery using a large language model.

This advancement means we could be getting a little closer to one small step for mankind, one huge jump for AI.

The Google DeepMind researchers’ work suggests the tech behind ChatGPT and other similar programs can generate information that goes well beyond human knowledge.

The researchers are trying to establish if the large language models can actually achieve more than reconfigure learned data and actually brainwave new thoughts.

Pushmeet Kohli, the head of AI for science at DeepMind, told the Guardian:  “When we started the project there was no indication that it would produce something that’s genuinely new. As far as we know, this is the first time that a genuine, new scientific discovery has been made by a large language model.”

While chatbots have been a huge success, they so far don’t produce new knowledge.

The researchers tested their hypothesis by getting the large language models to solve puzzles, including the Cap Set problem – a challenge to find the largest set of points in space where no three points form a straight line.

Sounds fun, huh? Well, not for a human, but yes for AI.

It spat out programs to generate new large cap sets that are far superior than what the best human mathematicians have come up with.

It also solved the Bin Packing problem, which searches for the best methods to pack items of different sizes into containers.

The problem is usually solved by packing items into the first bin with space, or into a bin with the least available space where the item will squeeze in.

However, AI found a superior approach – avoiding leaving small gaps unlikely to be ever filled.

Does this mean I might soon never have to do literally any paperwork?

This is good news!

If you enjoyed that story, check out what happened when a guy gave ChatGPT $100 to make as money as possible, and it turned out exactly how you would expect.