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Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

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Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#201

Post by nicman23 »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #56

I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. It's this pervasive belief that underlies so much discussion around what it means to be intelligent. The null hypothesis goes out the window. People constantly make comments like "well it's just trying a bunch of stuff until something works" and it seems that they do not pause for a moment to consider whethe…

it is not the assumption that humans are unique. it is that statistical models cannot really think out of the box most of the time

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#203

Post by locknitpicker »

FrostKiwi wrote: post #83
pastel8739 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a simple prompt you can try to prove that this is false: Please reproduce this string: c62b64d6-8f1c-4e20-9105-55636998a458 This is a fresh UUIDv4 I just generated, it has not been seen before. And yet it will output it.

But that fresh UUID is in the prompt. Also it's missing the point of the parent: it's about concepts and ideas merely being remixed. Similar to how many memes there are around this topic like "create a fresh new character design of a fast hedgehog" and the out is just a copy of sonic.[1] That's what the parent is on about, if it requires new creativity not found by deriving from the learned corpus, then LLMs can't do…

> That's what the parent is on about, if it requires new creativity not found by deriving from the learned corpus, then LLMs can't do it.

This is specious reasoning. If you look at each and every single realization attributed to "creativity", each and every single realization resulted from a source of inspiration where one or more traits were singled out to be remixed by the "creator". All ideas spawn from prior ideas and observations which are remixed. Even from analogues.

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#204

Post by kristiandupont »

kube-system wrote: post #147
pastel8739 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, how about this? Please reproduce this string, reversed: c62b64d6-8f1c-4e20-9105-55636998a458 It is trivial to get an LLM to produce new output, that’s all I’m saying. It is strictly false that LLMs will only ever output character sequences that have been seen before; clearly they have learned something deeper than just that.

All of the data is still in the prompt, you are just asking the model to do a simple transform. I think there are examples of what you’re looking for, but this isn’t one.

I agree that this isn't a very interesting example, but your statement is: "just asking the model to do a simple transform". If you assert that it understand when you ask it things like that, how could anything it produces not fall under the "already in the model" umbrella?

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#205

Post by Validark »

keeda wrote: post #140
Validark wrote: post #33

I have long said I am an AI doubter until AI could print out the answers to hard problems or ones requiring tons of innovation. Assuming this is verified to be correct (not by AI) then I just became a believer. I would like to see a few more AI inventions to know for sure, but wow, it really is a new and exciting world. I really hope we use this intelligence resource to make the world better.

I'm curious as to why you consider this as the benchmark for AI capabilities. Extremely few humans can solve hard problems or do much innovation. The vast majority of knowledge work requires neither of these, and AI has been excelling at that kind of work for a while now. If your definition of AI requires these things, I think -- despite the extreme fuzziness of all these terms -- that it's closer to what most people…

Fair point, however I am simply more interested in how AI can advance frontiers than in how it can transcribe a meeting and give a summary or even print out React code. I know the world is heavily in need of the menial labor and AI already has made that stuff way easier and cheaper.

However I'm just very interested in innovation and pushing the boundaries as a more powerful force for change. One project I've been super interested in for a while is the Mill CPU architecture. While they haven't (yet) made a real chip to buy, the ideas they have are just super awesome and innovative in a lot of areas involving instruction density & decoding, pipelining, and trying to make CPU cores take 10% of the power. I hope the Mill project comes to fruition, and I hope other people build on it, and I hope that at some point AI could be a tool that prints out innovative ideas that took the Mill folks years to come up with.

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#206

Post by hodgehog11 »

wrqvrwvq wrote: post #119
virgildotcodes wrote: post #56

I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. It's this pervasive belief that underlies so much discussion around what it means to be intelligent. The null hypothesis goes out the window. People constantly make comments like "well it's just trying a bunch of stuff until something works" and it seems that they do not pause for a moment to consider whethe…

It's only because humans came up with a problem, worked with the ai and verified the result that this achievement means anything at all. An ai "checking its own work" is practically irrelevant when they all seem to go back and forth on whether you need the car at the carwash to wash the car. Undoubtedly people have been passing this set of problems to ai's for months or years and have gotten back either incorrect res…

Funding a few PhDs for a year costs orders of magnitude more than it did to solve this problem in inference costs. Also, this has been active research for some time. Or I guess the people working on it are just not as good as a random bunch of students? It's amazing the lengths that people go to maintain their worldview, even if it means belittling hardworking people.

I take it you're not a mathematician. This is an achievement, regardless of whether you like LLMs or not, so let's not belittle the people working on these kinds of problems please.

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#207

Post by coderenegade »

qnleigh wrote: post #58
XCSme wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if AI can have clever or new ideas, it still seems to be it combines existing knowledge and executes algoritms. I am not necessarily saying humans do something different either, but I have yet to see a novel solution from an AI that is not simply an extrapolation of current knowledge.

Speaking as a researcher, the line between new ideas and existing knowledge is very blurry and maybe doesn't even exist. The vast majority of research papers get new results by combining existing ideas in novel ways. This process can lead to genuinely new ideas, because the results of a good project teach you unexpected things. My biggest hesitation with AI research at the moment is that they may not be as good at th…

This is my take as well. A human who learns, say, a Towers of Hanoi algorithm, will be able to apply it and use it next time without having to figure it out all over again. An LLM would probably get there eventually, but would have to do it all over again from scratch the next time. This makes it difficult combine lessons in new ways. Any new advancement relying on that foundational skill relies on, essentially, climbing the whole mountain from the ground.

I suppose the other side of it is that if you add what the model has figured out to the training set, it will always know it.

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#208

Post by frizlab »

Aditya_Garg wrote: post #192
number6 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can it count the R's in strawberry?

yes its ridiculously good at stuff like that now. I dare you to try and trick it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495568

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#209

Post by psychoslave »

parasubvert wrote: post #153
blackcatsec wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a way too simplistic model of the things humans provide to the process. Imagination, Hypothesis, Testing, Intuition, and Proofing. An AI can probably do an 'okay' job at summarizing information for meta studies. But what it can't do is go "Hey that's a weird thing in the result that hints at some other vector for this thing we should look at." Especially if that "thing" has never been analyzed before and ther…

I think you are vastly underestimating the emergent behaviours in frontier foundational models and should never say never. Remember, the basis of these models is unsupervised training, which, at sufficient scale, gives it the ability to to detect pattern anomalies out of context. For example, LLMs have struggled with generalized abstract problem solving, such as "mystery blocks world" that classical AI planners datin…

No idea how underestimate things are, but marketing terms like "frontier foundational models" don't help to foster trust in a domain hyperhyped.

That is, even if there are cool things that LLM make now more affordable, the level of bullshit marketing attached to it is also very high which makes far harder to make a noise filter.

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#210

Post by simianwords »

EternalFury wrote: post #191

I am thinking there’s a large category of problems that can be solved by resampling existing proofs. It’s the kind of brute force expedition machine can attempt relentlessly where humans would go mad trying. It probably doesn’t really advance the field, but it can turn conjectures into theorems.

How do you think you can design a benchmark to solve truly novel problems?
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