AI as Analogy Engine: Synthesis, Invention, and the Combinatorial Frontier
A common dismissal of modern AI goes like this: “It is just a fancy autocomplete. It memorises text and stitches it back together. There is no real understanding, only retrieval.” It is a comforting story, and it has the shape of a critique that ought to be true. But spend enough time with frontier systems and a different picture starts to form. The thing that large models actually seem to be good at is not memorisation. It is something stranger and arguably more important: the formation of analogies, the combination of distant concepts, and the generation of conceptual relationships that were not explicitly present in any one place in the training data. ...