If an outsider’s objective is to be taken seriously, they should write papers and submit them to peer review (e.g. conferences and journals).
Yann LeCun has gone so far to say that independent work only counts as “science” if submitted to peer review:
“Without peer review and reproducibility, chances are your methodology was flawed and you fooled yourself into thinking you did something great.”—https://x.com/ylecun/status/1795589846771147018?s=19.
From my experience, professors are very open to discuss ideas and their work with anyone who seems serious, interested, and knowledgeable. Even someone inside academia will face skepticism if their work uses completely different methods. They will have to very convincingly prove the methods are valid.
In entrepreneurship, there is the phrase “ideas are worthless”. This is because everyone already has lots of ideas they believe are promising. Hence, a pre-business idea is unlikely to be stolen.
Similarly, every LLM researcher already has a backlog of intriguing hypotheses paired with evidence. So an outside idea would have to seem more promising than the backlog. Likely this will require the proposer to prove something beyond evidence.
For example, Krizhevsky/Sutskever/Hinton had the idea of applying then-antiquated neural nets to recognize images. Only when they validated this in the ImageNet competition did their idea attract more researchers.
This is why ideas/hypotheses—even with a bit of evidence—are not considered very useful. What would be useful is to conclusively prove an idea true. This would attract lots of researchers … but it turns out to be incredibly difficult to do, and in some cases requires sophisticated techniques. (The same applies to entrepreneurship. Few people will join/invest until you validate the idea and lower the risk.)
Sidenote: There are countless stories of academics putting forth original, non-mainstream ideas, only to be initially rejected by their peers (e.g. Cantor’s infinity). I believe this not to be an issue just with outsiders, but merely that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. ML is an interesting example, because lots of so-called outsiders without a PhD now present at conferences!