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

Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 607 posts

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#311

Post by bsza »

simianwords wrote: post #293
bsza wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could've done the same Please show me the steps to get a $200 subscription for free that works 100% of the time regardless of who you are. I'm listening.

ChatGPT flattened the difference between top .0001 percentile mathematician and an amateur. This is the definition of making intelligence more available. You are exaggerating the situation by essentially claiming since some people can’t afford 200 dollars this means ChatGPT is not democratising intelligence. It’s a bit strange to claim this because according to you it only becomes affordable when maximal number of pe…

> ChatGPT flattened the difference between top .0001 percentile mathematician and an amateur

It flattened the difference between a top epsilon percentile mathematician and an amateur with money. It didn't flatten the difference between an amateur with a little money and an amateur with a lot of money. It widened it. That's the part I'm scared about.

You are shrugging this off because it currently isn't that expensive. But we're talking about the massively subsidized price here, which is bound to get orders of magnitude higher when the bubble pops. Models are also likely to get much better. If it gets to a point where the only way to obtain exceptionally high intelligence is with an exceptionally high net worth and vice versa, how is that going to democratize anything?

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#312

Post by yfee »

latexr wrote: post #289
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of "can/cannot do math" didn't change. That's not up for debate. 2 years ago they couldn't solve an erdos problem (people have tried, Tao has tried ~1 year ago). Today they can. Definitions don't change. The idea that now that they can it's no longer intelligence is changing. And that's literally moving the goalposts. Read the thread here, go to the bottom part. There are zillions of comments saying th…

> The definition of "can/cannot do math" didn't change. That's not up for debate. That is not the argument. The point is that the way you phrased it is ambiguous . “Math” isn’t a single thing, and “cannot” can either mean “cannot yet” or “cannot ever”. I don’t know what the “expert” said since you haven’t provided that information, I’m directly asking you to clarify the meaning of their words (better yet, link to the…

He’s a booster and I don’t think he argues in good faith.

He seems to be fixated on this notion that humans are static and do not evolve - clearly this is false. What people thought as being a determinant for intelligence also changes as things evolve.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#313

Post by utopiah »

logicprog wrote: post #303
utopiah wrote: post #177

Mandatory disclaimers https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/Disclaimers-and...

They explicitly say many of these disclaimers don't apply in the article.

Which one do you trust most, the disclaimers or the article?

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#314

Post by utopiah »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #299
smallnamespace wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and the child comment’s point is that formalizing the problem is likely easier than having the LLM verify that each step of a long deduction is correct, which is why Lean might be helpful.

But both of you are ignoring the parent comment! Actually you're ignoring the context of the thread. Originally someone said "I wish I was math smart to know if [this vibe-mathematics proof] worked or not." They did NOT say "I'd like to check but I am too lazy." Suggesting "ask it to formalize it in Lean" is useless if you're not mathematically mature enough to understand the proof, since that means you're not mathem…

thanks

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#315

Post by yfee »

azan_ wrote: post #253
komali2 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism already is a poor allocator of human effort, resources, and energy, why lock in on this specifically? There's entire professions that are essentially worthless to society that exist only to perpetuate the inherent contradictions of this system, why not focus more on all that wasted human effort? Or the fact that everyone has to do some arbitrary sellable labor in order to justify their existence, rather th…

> Capitalism already is a poor allocator of human effort, resources, and energy, why lock in on this specifically? It's absolutely best allocator of human effort there is. It has some problems but compared to alternatives it's almost perfect.

No it is the best of what we know.

There’s something else out there that nobody has the imagination to personally figure it out and get alignment toward it.

It can also be true that capitalism is transitory to get to a place where much of the capital one needs is invented.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#316

Post by etaKl »

1) How do you know the clanker respects the instruction not to search the internet?

2) Jared Lichtman is indeed a mathematician at Stanford University but involved in the AI startup math.inc, which seems more relevant here. Terence Tao is involved in a partership program with that startup.

3) Liam Price is a general AI booster on Twitter. A lot of AI boosting on Twitter is not organic and who knows what help he got. Nothing in this Twitter is organic.

4) Scientific American is owned by Springer Nature, which is an AI booster:

https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/ai

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#317

Post by renticulous »

shybear wrote: post #139

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.

> someone applying technique X from one field to problem Y in another

Witten is the canonical example of someone taking mathematics techniques and applying them to physics problems, but what made him legendary was the opposite direction: he used physical intuition and string theory to solve open problems in pure mathematics.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#318

Post by notahacker »

urutom wrote: post #265
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…

What I find fascinating about the shared prompt isn’t just the result, but the visible thinking process. Math papers usually skip all the messy parts and just present the polished proof. But here you get something closer to their notepad. I also find it oddly endearing when the AI says things like “Interesting!” It almost feels like a researcher encouraging themselves after a small progress. It gives me rare feeling…

The actual iteration through various learned approaches to dealing with problems I'd probably find fascinating if I understood the maths! Especially if I knew it well enough to know which approaches were conventional and which weren't.

I find the AI pronouncing things "interesting!" less interesting on the basis that even though in this case it crops up in the thinking rather than flattering the user in the chat, it's almost as much of an AI affectation as the emdash.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#320

Post by downboots »

azan_ wrote: post #246
downboots wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if you use a car or go there walking. If your goal is cave exploration, the tools are irrelevant.

But in this specific case AI actually explored the cave for you. Comparing it to car getting you to the cave is really bad comparison.

Whoosh
Post reply on HN