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A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

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Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#31

As a TCS assistant professor from Eastern Europe, I always am a little jealous of the biggest names in math having such an easy access to the expensive, long thinking models. Paying for Pro from any of my current academic budgets is completely ouf of the field of reality here -- all budgets tend to have restricted uses and software payments fit into very few categories. Effectively, I'd have to ask for a brand new gr…

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There is a significant gap between what academics are paid across European countries, and since most top universities here are public institutions, you are right -- Eastern European government employees tend to be on the poorer side.

There are several other philosophical arguments against what you propose but I do not wish to go down that route.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#32

A month ago my PhD supervisor told me it rips on proofs but he also said it's useless when formalising arguments in Lean - is this still the case?

Nope. Codex formalizes much better than any tool with exception of Aristotle from Harmonic.

https://github.com/vjeranc/fixed-rtrt

M3 module was formalized fully purely from experimental data and from a nudge by earlier versions of codex in 15-30 minutes in a simple write/compile/fix-first-error loop. I was a bit surprised how fast it picked up the pattern but given there was a paper from '70s it became clear why later.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#33

As a TCS assistant professor from Eastern Europe, I always am a little jealous of the biggest names in math having such an easy access to the expensive, long thinking models. Paying for Pro from any of my current academic budgets is completely ouf of the field of reality here -- all budgets tend to have restricted uses and software payments fit into very few categories. Effectively, I'd have to ask for a brand new gr…

[flagged]

Bruh, $200/m for most people in the US is also a hard "no!". That's a lot of money. Plus Anthropic isn't doing good deals with orgs that spend less than 250k a month. It's ridiculous.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#34
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Lots of people in the west can’t afford 200 a month. How rich are you?

That’s what most people spend on their phone and Internet connections per month in the US. That’s what the average American family spends on just five days of food.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#35
post #6

It's a very long post with a mix of technical (math) and philosophical sections. Here are the most striking points to reflect upon IMHO. > It seems to me that training beginning PhD students to do research [...] has just got harder, since one obvious way to help somebody get started is to give them a problem that looks as though it might be a relatively gentle one. If LLMs are at the point where they can solve “gentl…

But perhaps we should regard it as a major achievement.

I mean in the same way getting Wolfram Alpha to solve a really hard/ugly differential equation I suppose

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#37

As a TCS assistant professor from Eastern Europe, I always am a little jealous of the biggest names in math having such an easy access to the expensive, long thinking models. Paying for Pro from any of my current academic budgets is completely ouf of the field of reality here -- all budgets tend to have restricted uses and software payments fit into very few categories. Effectively, I'd have to ask for a brand new gr…

[flagged]

Average European salary is around $4000/month, in eastern Europe is half of that. Median is probably lower than that. Makes me want to quit visiting places like reddit where everybody claims to be making 100k+/year

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#38
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people in the west can’t afford 200 a month. How rich are you?

That’s what most people spend on their phone and Internet connections per month in the US. That’s what the average American family spends on just five days of food.

Yes and? That's money that is already allocated. It cannot be spent on something else.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#39
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people in the west can’t afford 200 a month. How rich are you?

That’s what most people spend on their phone and Internet connections per month in the US. That’s what the average American family spends on just five days of food.

You can afford five days of food, so that must mean you can also afford a Claude Max plan? What kind of logic is this?

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#40
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people in the west can’t afford 200 a month. How rich are you?

That’s what most people spend on their phone and Internet connections per month in the US. That’s what the average American family spends on just five days of food.

37% of Americans would be unable to cover a 400 usd unexpected expense* without using one or more credit cards. 13% would flat out be unable to cover it. [1]

Are you honestly saying most families would be able to justify 200 usd a month for ChatGPT?

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

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