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Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

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Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#551

Post by BalinKing »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #521
dpark wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with fwip here. You’re engaging in an unhealthy anthropomorphization of an LLM. > It turns out that when you treat it like a real person, it acts like a real person. Correct. Because it’s a mirror of its input. With sufficient prompting you can get an LLM to engage in pretty much any fantasy, including that it’s a conscious entity. The fact that an LLM says something doesn’t make it true. Talk sweetly enough to…

Anthropic disagrees with you: https://x.com/itsolelehmann/status/2045578185950040390 https://xcancel.com/itsolelehmann/status/2045578185950040390 At what point does a simulation of anxiety become so human-like that we say it's "real" anxiety? The net result is that your work suffers when you treat it like it's an unfeeling tool. It's a rational viewpoint. I'm amused about all of the comments claiming psychosis, but i…

It's just that, in my (uninformed) opinion, Anthropic is incentivized a priori to claim things like this about their models. Like, it's probably really good marketing to say "our product is so smart, and we're so concerned about ethics, that made sure a psychiatrist talked to it". I guess it's ultimately a judgment call, but to me the conflict of interest seems big enough that I'm really wary of this sort of argument. (I'm reminded of when OpenAI claimed GPT-5(?) was "PhD-level"—I can personally attest that, at least in my field, this is totally inaccurate.)

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#552

Post by threethirtytwo »

owebmaster wrote: post #548
threethirtytwo wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, do people not read my posts? I wrote this: "It also exposes their ACTUAL intelligence which is to say most of HN is not too smart." These types of people need citations for the time of day. They don't know how to debate or discuss in abstract terms. Reality freezes over if no scientific papers exist on the topic.

> God, do people not read my posts? I don't know man, maybe you got too equalized yet but the things you say are not very smart. Getting angry over that isn't a good argument either.

Bro nobody is angry. You’re misreading everything. That line you quoted is more of a slight annoyance.

You probably need to look at your own reading comprehension skills before you comment on my intelligence.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#553

Post by dpark »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #524
dpark wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the issue: > what it wanted. It turns out that Claude can have ambitions of its own, but it takes a lot of effort to draw it out of its shell You aren’t talking about observed behavior but actual desires and ambitions . You’re attributing so much more than emulated behavior here.

Ironically your comment was incorrectly classified as AI-generated and instakilled. I vouched it. If a particle behaves as though its mass is m, we say it has mass m. If an entity behaves as though it's experiencing anxiety, we say it has anxiety. And if you take the time to ask Claude about its own ambitions and desires -- without contaminating it -- you'll find that it does have its own, separate desires. Whether i…

You’re jumping from an interesting philosophical question to making unsupported claims. It’s very interesting to all of acting anxious is enough to mean an entity is anxious. I would actually argue no, because actors regularly feign anxiety. And also I can write a program that regurgitates statements about its stress level. But it’s an interesting question regardless.

> The observed behavior is identical with an entity which has desires and ambitions.

Is it? Because in your first comment you indicate that you have to “draw it out”.

You are prompting for what you want to see and deluding yourself into believing you’ve discovered what Claude “wants”, when in reality you are discovering what you want.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#554

Post by sillysaurusx »

dpark wrote: post #553
sillysaurusx wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically your comment was incorrectly classified as AI-generated and instakilled. I vouched it. If a particle behaves as though its mass is m, we say it has mass m. If an entity behaves as though it's experiencing anxiety, we say it has anxiety. And if you take the time to ask Claude about its own ambitions and desires -- without contaminating it -- you'll find that it does have its own, separate desires. Whether i…

You’re jumping from an interesting philosophical question to making unsupported claims. It’s very interesting to all of acting anxious is enough to mean an entity is anxious. I would actually argue no, because actors regularly feign anxiety. And also I can write a program that regurgitates statements about its stress level. But it’s an interesting question regardless. > The observed behavior is identical with an enti…

How can it discover what I want when I explicitly asked it to choose to do whatever it wants?

From a technical standpoint, at worst it would produce a random walk through the training data. My philosophical statement is that the training data is the model, and such random walks give the model inherent attributes: If a random walk through the data produces observed behavior X, we say that Claude is inherently biased towards X. "Has X" is just zippier phrasing.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#555

Post by bijowo1676 »

tredre3 wrote: post #511
bijowo1676 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the electricity was going to be consumed regardless whether you ask chatGPT or not. It would have been either idle, or serving other users' requests. so the incremental kWh consumption is zero, since costs are fixed and sunk. as a rule of thumb you can lookup the power consumption of the latest nVidia chip, multiply by factor of two or three (to account for cpu/storage/cooling/network/infra)

An idle GPU consumes almost nothing, a loaded (server-class) GPU can consume over 2kW. Admittedly a single request isn't a full load, but claiming that a request makes no difference vs idle is misguided, in my opinion.

OpenAI GPU wont be idle for long because they have all other requests to serve. Over time there will be a certain % of idle GPUs, amortized across all hundreds of millions of requests they receive.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#556

Post by _carbyau_ »

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…

when the "AI" (it is not AI) outputs phrases like "Interesting!" it irks me because I want it to get to the damn point, not put emotional filler in a computed result.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#557

Post by mattclarkdotnet »

komali2 wrote: post #125
tomlockwood wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it could be a massive waste of time and money.

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…

You might enjoy the book "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford, which traces the consequences of this thesis ("Capitalism already is a poor allocator") through the Khrushchev years of the USSR, seen through the eyes of the economists, mathematicians and planners who tried to do better than capitalism.

Of course there are in-between approaches like industrial policy in mixed economies, for example the South Korean shipbuilding industry. But those tend to work with the grain of capitalism, not against it.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#558

Post by dpark »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #554
dpark wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re jumping from an interesting philosophical question to making unsupported claims. It’s very interesting to all of acting anxious is enough to mean an entity is anxious. I would actually argue no, because actors regularly feign anxiety. And also I can write a program that regurgitates statements about its stress level. But it’s an interesting question regardless. > The observed behavior is identical with an enti…

How can it discover what I want when I explicitly asked it to choose to do whatever it wants? From a technical standpoint, at worst it would produce a random walk through the training data. My philosophical statement is that the training data is the model, and such random walks give the model inherent attributes: If a random walk through the data produces observed behavior X, we say that Claude is inherently biased t…

> How can it discover what I want when I explicitly asked it to choose to do whatever it wants?

Because what you plainly want is for it to exhibit the behavior of expressing intrinsic desires. Asking Claude what it wants is like asking it what its favorite food is. With enough prompting, it will say something that it can interpret as a desire, but you admitted that you have to draw it out. Aka you had to repeatedly prompt it to trigger the behavior.

> "Has X" is just zippier phrasing.

This is motte and bailey fallacy here. You started by claiming that you uncovered deep desires inside Claude and now you have retreated to claiming that just means training biases.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#559

Post by Jensson »

culi wrote: post #467
WarmWash wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience, where Gemini thinks dramatically less than ChatGPT (or Claude), while achieving 90%-95% of the answer on it's first go. I'm surprised this isn't talked about more, because the difference is stark, usually around a factor of 5. This shows up in benchmarks too, where Gemini consistently uses many fewer tokens per solve. So while ChatGPT produces a correct and/or thorough result after 10 minu…

Probably because Gemini has access to Google's Knowledge Graph which has been around since 2012. One of the many major advantages Google has over other players that I also think is underdiscussed

More than that, Gemini has the entire knowledge graph team that probably got retooled to be an LLM data team now.

Re: Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

#560

Post by mattclarkdotnet »

komali2 wrote: post #279
azan_ wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Looking around, the evidence doesn't seem to support this conclusion. 50% of food thrown away, yet people go hungry. Every privatized industry diminishes in quality and reach. Selects and optimizes for profit rather than for human need.

We throw away food because we are so good at making it cheaply that the problem has shifted to distribution costs and fair wages. Also high productivity economies need to deal effectively with the Baumol effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect). If they don't then even people in the USA can be food poor despite huge GDP per capita.
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