Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terence Tao on O1

mathstodon.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 527 posts

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#221

Post by ahnick »

dpig_ wrote: post #216
ahnick wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are the key points outlining why thewanderer1983's response misinterprets noch's comment and contains inaccuracies: Misinterpretation of the Original Point: Intelligence vs. Moral Superiority: Noch discusses the intelligence level of a mediocre graduate science student compared to the general population. Thewanderer1983 misreads this as a claim of moral or inherent superiority over "the rest of humanity," which…

If you couldn't be bothered to write this comment, I can't be bothered to read it.

but you did bother to comment on it. :)

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#222

Post by ahnick »

mfgk wrote: post #215
ahnick wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are the key points outlining why thewanderer1983's response misinterprets noch's comment and contains inaccuracies: Misinterpretation of the Original Point: Intelligence vs. Moral Superiority: Noch discusses the intelligence level of a mediocre graduate science student compared to the general population. Thewanderer1983 misreads this as a claim of moral or inherent superiority over "the rest of humanity," which…

An excellent example of an LLM (or an imitated LLM output) that fiercely defends the status quo, is overly verbose, does not come to the point, makes incorrect assumptions and lectures from a high horse. LLMs are good for mediocre poems and presidential speeches that have no shame.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#223

Post by jazzyjackson »

segmondy wrote: post #194
talldayo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I have gotten 100x more useful answers out of Siri's WolframAlpha integration than I ever have out of ChatGPT. People don't want a "not completely incompetent graduate student" responding to their prompts, they want NLP that reliably processes information. Last-generation voice assistants could at least do their job consistently, ChatGPT couldn't be trusted to flick a light switch on a regular basis.

Then you have a skill issue. 10 million paying are for GPT monthly because a large of them are getting useful value out of it. WolframAlpha has been out for a while and didn't take off for a reason. "GPT couldn't be trusted to flick a light switch on a regular basis" pretty much implies you are not serious or your knowledge about the capabilities of LLM is pretty much dated or derived from things you have read.

Wolframalpha is a free service, really kind of an ad for all the (curated, accurate) datasets built into Wolfram Language

Wolfram Research is a profitable company btw

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#224

Post by jazzyjackson »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #52
wenc wrote: post #5

Once GPT is tuned more heavily on Lean (proof assistant) -- the way it is on Python -- I expect its usefulness for research level math to increase. I work in a field related to operations research (OR), and ChatGPT 4o has ingested enough of the OR literature that it's able to spit out very useful Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulations for many "problem shapes". For instance, I can give it a logic problem like "…

But many of the low-effort comments seem to mostly fall into (1) and (2) -- cynicism rather than cautious optimism. One good riposte to reflexive LLM-bashing is, "Isn't that just what a stochastic parrot would say?" Some HN'ers would dismiss a talking dog because the C code it wrote has a buffer overflow error.

Id rather live in the world without talking dogs if their main utility is authoring buggy code

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#225

Post by [deleted] »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #220
kiba wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are more limited by our emotions, and then our skills in learning and acquiring knowledge. Intelligence is probably a distant third.

Nah. Dogs are far emotionally better than most humans. Their intelligence is their limitation. Also “skills in learning and acquiring knowledge” is basically intelligence

[deleted]

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#227

Post by KHRZ »

sweeter wrote: post #207
skydhash wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much Much more productive world by just knuckling down and learning how to do the work. The fact everyone that say they've become more productive with LLMs won't say how exactly. I can talk about how VIM have make it more enjoyable to edit code (keybinding and motions), how Emacs is a good environment around text tooling (lisp machine), how I use technical books to further my learning (so many great books out here)…

Or people say "I've been pumping out thousands of lines of perfectly good code by writing paragraphs and paragraphs of text explaining what I want!" its like what are you programming dog? and they will never tell you, and then you look at their github and its like a dead simple starter project. I recently built a Brainfuck compiler and TUI debugger and I tested out a few LLM's just to see if I could get some useful o…

One good use case is unit tests, since they can be trivial while at the same time being cumbersome to make. I could give the LLM code for React components, and it would make the tests and setup all the mocks which is the most annoying part. Although making "all the tests" will typically involve asking the LLM again to think of more edge cases and be sure to cover everything.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#228

Post by lolc »

rvnx wrote: post #151
skydhash wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing that you can't get result with LLMs, I'm just asking is it worth the actual effort especially when there's better way to get that result you're seeking (or if the result is really something that you want). An LLM is a word (token?) generator which can be amazingly consistent according to its model. But rarely is my end goal to generate text. It's either to do something, to understand something, or to…

It works quite nicely if you consider LLMs as a translator (and that’s actually why Transformers were created). Enter technical specifications in English as input language, get code as destination language.

English as input language works in simple scenarios but breaks down very very quickly. I have to get extremely specific and deliberate. At some point I have to write pseudocode to get the machine to get say double checked locking right. Because I have enough experiences where varying the prompting didn't work, I revert to just writing the code when I see the generator struggling.

When I encounter somebody who says they do not write code anymore, I assume that they either:

1. Just don't do anything beyond the simplest tutorial-level stuff

2. or don't consider their post-generation edits as writing code

3. or are just bullshitting

I don't know which it is for each person in question, but I don't trust that their story would work for me. I don't believe they have some secret sauce prompting that works for scenarios where I've tried to make it work but couldn't. Sure I may have missed some ways, but my map of what works and what doesn't may be very blurry at the border, but the surprises tend to be on the "doesn't work" side. And no Claude doesn't change this.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#229

Post by cma »

nybsjytm wrote: post #181
fragmede wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By using Lean, a proof assistant and a functional programming language. Here's @tao on mathstodon saying he's learning it. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/111206761117553482

To code proofs in lean, you have to understand the proof very well. It doesn't seem to be very reasonable for someone learning material for the first time.

Tao says that isn't the case for all of it and that on massive collaborative projects he's done many nonmathemeticians did sections of them. He says someone who understands it well needs to do the initial proof sketch and key parts but that lots of parts of the proof can be worked on by nonmathemeticians.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#230

Post by lalaithion »

It needs a bigger context, but the moment someone can feed an entire GitHub repo into this thing and ask it to fix bugs... I think O2 may be the beginning of the end.
Post reply on HN