So when will the Riemann hypothesis be proven or disproven?
Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
451–460 of 607 posts
Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
#452Earlier 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'…
Consider that you don't want to hear "statistical generation" because it reminds you of the unchangeable nature of the underlying technology and its ultimate limitations that all the money and data centers in the world will never solve. Despite how amazing and useful they are, they are not intelligent agents. Even in this very thread, someone mentioned they thought the thing was capable of feeling an emotion. Was tha…
I responded to your point empirically, with problems not conventionally understood to be solvable with "text generation", and your response was in effect that I must be wrong because I'm afraid you might be right. Not an especially strong debate move.
Can you refute the argument I made, or do you just want to claim LLMs are drinking all our water?
Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
"But I'm also allergic to arguments like "they're just statistical text generators", because that truly does not capture what these things do or what their capabilities are." Umm, why doesn't it capture it? Why can't a statistical text generator do amazing things without _actually_ being intelligent (I'm thinking agency here)? I think it's important to remind ourselves, these things do not reflect or understand what…
I reject the premise. I read the outputs I generate carefully (too carefully, probably). They don't "continue to output nonsense". Their success rate exceeds that of humans in some places. To clarify: the problem I have with "statistical text generator" isn't the word "statistical". It's "text generator". It's been two years now since that stopped being a reasonable way to completely encapsulate what these systems do…
Do you think it's akin to Ilya's [1] claim that next token prediction is reality? E.g. any deeper claims about the structure of that intelligence or comparing to humans?
To be clear, I'm 100% with you that "next token predictor" is stupid to call what these machines are now. We are engineers and can shape the capability landscape to give rise to a ton of emergent behavior. It's kind of amazing. In that sense, being precise about what's going on, rather than being essentialist (technically, yes, the 'actual' algorithm, whatever that even means, is text prediction), is just good epistemology.
I still think it's still a very interesting question though to ask about deeper emergent structures. To me, this is evidence of a more embedded cognition kind of theory of intelligence (admittedly this is not very precise). But IDK how into philosophy you are.
Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
#454Here 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…
“Don’t search the internet” Wasn’t it basically trained by scraping the entire internet?
Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't expect a hand-crafted proof by an amateur to be much different.
Wouldn’t the expectation for ChatGPT be that it presents a well refined report, rather than hand crafted proof / notes? Because from what I gather, they basically had to go through the equivalent of a pile of notes to find the crux.
Yeah, I also expect better than amateur-level redaction from a system that OpenAI marketing sells as a team of PhD in your pocket.
Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider that you don't want to hear "statistical generation" because it reminds you of the unchangeable nature of the underlying technology and its ultimate limitations that all the money and data centers in the world will never solve. Despite how amazing and useful they are, they are not intelligent agents. Even in this very thread, someone mentioned they thought the thing was capable of feeling an emotion. Was tha…
I responded to your point empirically, with problems not conventionally understood to be solvable with "text generation", and your response was in effect that I must be wrong because I'm afraid you might be right. Not an especially strong debate move. Can you refute the argument I made, or do you just want to claim LLMs are drinking all our water?
Well, I don't believe the LLM solved those problems. I believe the user did. The LLM aggregated large amounts of information statistically, then the user read that and realized there was something to it and fixed it. Those accounts don't mention the 1000 other prompts that technical user did that yielded garbage results and the user was intelligent enough to disregard those.
Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we know that AI isn't feeling genuine surprise then?
Because it's a statistical process generating one part of a word at a time. It probably isn't even generating "surprise". It might be generating "sur", then "prise" then "!"
But what is surprise really? Something not following expectation. The distribution may statistically leverage surprise as a concept via how it has seen surprise as a concept e.g. "interesting!"
So it can be both true that it has nothing to do with the emotion of surprise, but appear as the emulation of that emotion since the training data matches the concept of surprise (mismatch between expectation and event).
Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the AI says things like “Interesting!” My experience of those utterance is that it’s purely phatic mimicry: they lack genuine intuitive surprise, it’s just marking a very odd shift in direction. The problem isn’t the lack of path, is that the rhetorical follow-up to those leaps are usually relevant results, so they stream-of-token ends up rapidly over-playing its own conviction. That’s why it’s necessary (and often…
And what I find fascinating is I see similar mimicking by my 5 year old. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to call this a lack of being genuine. Sometimes emotions are learned in humans but we wouldn’t call them fake. I don’t want to declare machines to have emotion outright, but to call mimicry evidence of falsehood is also itself false.
most emotions in humans are learnt in self exploration, this is more obvious in kids.
first there is only good and bad, then more nuanced emotions based on increased understanding of the context in which they arise
Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
#459Here 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…
“Don’t search the internet” Wasn’t it basically trained by scraping the entire internet?
Thats not the point. They dont want the bot searching the internet and just linking something that might be related.
Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
#460Here 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…
“Don’t search the internet” Wasn’t it basically trained by scraping the entire internet?
LLMs are modeled with Internet content so that they have a good model of human languages. When you use them via most UIs currently offered right now, however, they will first come up with a few search queries and use the result of those queries to augment their answer.