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Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are bad at math. But they are good at writing code and as an optimization some providers have it secretly write code to answer the problem, run it and give you the answer without telling you what it did in the middle part.

Are they bad at math? Or are they bad at arithmetic?

if you don't know much math, it's easy to confuse the two

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... shit that solved an apparently significant Erdős problem. That is not nothing , no matter how much you hate AI.

It shows that AI is apparently very good at brute-forcing.

This isn't brute force.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#83

I wonder if the rationalizations people come up with for why this isn't real intelligence will be as creative as ChatGPTs solution.

For one, everything its 'intelligence' knows about solving the problem is contained within the finite context window memory buffer size for the particular model and session. Unless the memory contents of the context window are being saved to storage and reloaded later, unlike a human, it won't "remember" that it solved the problem and save its work somewhere to be easily referenced later.

All modern harnesses write memory files for context later.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#86

At this point we should make a GitHub repo with a huge list of unsolved “dry lab” problems and spin up a harness to try and solve them all every new release.

There is in fact just such a repo maintained by Terence Tao and other mathematicians [1] who are actively using LLMs to try to find solutions to them.

[1] https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#87
post #55

I wonder if the rationalizations people come up with for why this isn't real intelligence will be as creative as ChatGPTs solution.

And how about the creative rationalizations about how statistical text generation is actual intelligence? As if there is any intent or motive behind the words that are generated or the ability to learn literally any new thing after it has been trained on human output?

Solving open math problems is strong evidence of intelligence so there's not really any need for rationalization? I don't understand why intelligence would require intent or motive? Isn't intent just the behaviour of making a specific thing happen rather than other things?

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#88
Some Erdős problems are basically trivial using sophisticated techniques that were developed later.

I remember one of my professors, a coauthor of Erdős boasted to us after a quiz how proud he was that he was able to assign an Erdős problem that went unsolved for a while as just a quiz problem for his undergrads.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#89
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a known lag that it takes the Pro plan's abilities to migrate to the free plans?

Tangential but I learned today that GPT-5.5 in ChatGPT (Plus) has a smaller context window than the one in the API. (Or at least it thinks it does.) I'd guess / hope the Pro one has the full context window.

Notably, 5.5 has a higher price on API for context > ChatGPT, and 5.5 Pro on API does not differentiate based on context size (it’s eye bleeding expensive already :)

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#90
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how about the creative rationalizations about how statistical text generation is actual intelligence? As if there is any intent or motive behind the words that are generated or the ability to learn literally any new thing after it has been trained on human output?

Solving open math problems is strong evidence of intelligence so there's not really any need for rationalization? I don't understand why intelligence would require intent or motive? Isn't intent just the behaviour of making a specific thing happen rather than other things?

I'm curious, do you think that this also applies to stable diffusion? Are these models "creative" too?
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