Machine Learning Street Talk · Friday, September 11, 2026
The conversation explored the concept of creativity in AI, suggesting it is closely linked to respecting constraints, which are viewed as an abstract form of knowledge. This knowledge can exist at different levels, including cognitive, cultural, and physical. The speaker used the analogy of a maze to describe the process of discovering problem constraints.
“I think that creativity has a lot to do with respecting constraints. And I use the word constraints because that feels like the most abstract form of knowledge. Because we have a privileged form of cognitive knowledge, and there's cultural knowledge, and I even think that constraints in the physical world can be thought of some form of knowledge.”
“So the most abstract possible way to describe creativity is respecting constraints. And what we want to do, um, at different levels is is accumulate knowledge, which means we need to find or discover these constraints.”