🧵[1/N] Are large language models more creative than humans at combining ideas? 🤔 Combinatorial creativity involves combining familiar ideas in unfamiliar ways, and is central to scientific discovery and technological innovation. In fact, breakthrough scientific work is often associated with more distant combinations of methods, techniques, and concepts. Here, we introduce Kombine, a new benchmark of combinatorial creativity for LLMs. TLDR: - LLMs are more combinatorially creative than the average human. - However, conceptual blending is the hardest task for LLMs, and even frontier models struggle. - LLMs also tend to homogenize, inventing concepts with the same properties across separate models. - Moreover, humans and LLMs combine in distinct regions of semantic space. - As a result, we anticipate greater conceptual diversity can be unlocked through human-AI collaboration. 🗣️ Thread below🧵⬇️