Pretty close to the idea of human brainstorming and has worked. Could it do orbital math? Maybe not today but the approach seems as feasible as the work Mattingly did for Apollo 13.
I recommend reading his interview with Matteo Wong, where he proposes the opposite: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/teren...
> With o1, you can kind of do this. I gave it a problem I knew how to solve, and I tried to guide the model. First I gave it a hint, and it ignored the hint and did something else, which didn’t work. When I explained this, it apologized and said, “Okay, I’ll do it your way.” And then it carried out my instructions reasonably well, and then it got stuck again, and I had to correct it again. The model never figured out the most clever steps. It could do all the routine things, but it was very unimaginative.
I agree with his overall vision, but transformer-based chatbots will not be the AI algorithm that supports it. Highly-automated proof assistants like Isabelle's Sledgehammer are closer (and even those are really, really crude, compared to what we could have).