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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

#131

Post by charcircuit »

walrus01 wrote: post #16
resident423 wrote: post #8

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.

As another commenter pointed out these models are being trained how to save and read context into files so denying them to use such an ability that they have just makes your claim tautological.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#132

Post by tptacek »

emp17344 wrote: post #129
tptacek wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2022 called, wants this argument back. When you're "statistically generating text" to find zero-day vulnerabilities in hard targets, building Linux kernel modules, assembly-optimizing elliptic curve signature algorithms, and solving arbitrary undergraduate math problems instantaneously --- not to mention apparently solving Erdos problems --- the "statistical text" stuff has stopped being a useful description of what'…

But the systems that do that impressive work are no longer just LLMs. Look at the Claude Code leak - it’s a sprawling, redundant maze relying on tools and tests to approximate useful output. The actual LLM is a small portion of the total system. It’s a useful tool, but it’s obviously not truly intelligent - it was hacked together using the near-trillions of dollars AI labs have received for this explicit purpose.

What does this matter? You can build a working coding agent for yourself extremely quickly; it's remarkably straightforward to do (more people should). But look underneath all the "sprawling tools": the LLM itself is a sprawling maze of matrices. It's all sprawling, it's all crazy, and it's insane what they're capable of doing.

Again if you want to say they're limited in some way, I'm all ears, I'm sure they are. But none of that has anything to do with "statistical text generation". Apparently, a huge chunk of all knowledge work is "statistical text generation". I choose to draw from that the conclusion that the "text generation" part of this is not interesting.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#133

Post by in-silico »

walrus01 wrote: post #16
resident423 wrote: post #8

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.

For one, everything humans' "intelligence" knows about solving the problem is contained within the finite brain size for the particular person and life. Unless the memory contents of the brain are being saved to storage and reloaded later, it won't "remember" that it solved the problem and save its work somewhere to be easily referenced in a later life.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#134

Post by threethirtytwo »

famouswaffles wrote: post #104
resident423 wrote: post #8

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

None of it is really from logical thought. The rationalizations don't make any sense, but they haven't for a while. It's an emotional response. Honestly, It's to be expected.

It's because HN is not really full of smart people. It's full of people who think they're smart and take pride in that idea that they're pretty intelligent.

ChatGPT equalizes intelligence. And that is an attack on their identity. It also exposes their ACTUAL intelligence which is to say most of HN is not too smart.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#135

Post by thesmtsolver2 »

resident423 wrote: post #91
thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when people thought multiplying numbers, remembering a large number of facts, and being good at rote calculations was intelligence? Some people think that multiplying numbers, remembering a large number of facts, and being good at calculations is intelligence. Most intelligent people do not think that. Eventually, we will arrive at the same conclusion for what LLMs are doing now.

Remember when people thought solving Erdos problems required intelligence? Is there anything an LLM could ever do that would cound as intelligence? Surely the trend has to break at some point, if so what would be the thing that crosses the line to into real intelligence?

When will LLM folks realize that automated theorem provers have existed for decades and non-ML theorem provers have solved non-trivial Math problems tougher than this Erdos problem.

Proposing and proving something like Gödel's theorem's definitely requires intelligence.

Solving an already proposed problem is just crunching through a large search space.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#136

Post by resident423 »

bsder wrote: post #116
resident423 wrote: post #8

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

My mistake. Responded to a bot but can't delete now. Sorry.

No, but I'm interested to know what it is?

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#137

Post by jedmeyers »

SR2Z wrote: post #72
y0eswddl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they're great at interpolation - they'll just never be worth much at extrapolation.

Luckily for us, whole fortunes can be made by filling in the blanks between what we know and what we realize .

And by having more of those blanks filled humans might be able to come up with much better extrapolations than what we have right now.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#138

Post by CSMastermind »

ripped_britches wrote: post #66

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.

That's literally what the Erdős problems are. This post is about one of them being solved.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#139

Post by shybear »

It seems like alot of scientific advancements occurred by someone applying technique X from one field to problem Y in another. I feel like LLMs are much better at making these types of connections than humans because they 1) know about many more theories/approaches than a single human can 2) don't need to worry about looking silly in front of their peers.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#140

Post by ArtIntoNihonjin »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #3

Here is the chat: don't search the internet. This is a test to see how well you can craft non-trivial, novel and creative proofs given a "number theory and primitive sets" math problem. Provide a full unconditional proof or disproof of the problem. {{problem}} REMEMBER - this unconditional argument may require non-trivial, creative and novel elements. Then "Thought for 80m 17s" https://chatgpt.com/share/69dd1c83-b164…

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