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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

#71

Post by cyanydeez »

ziotom78 wrote: post #62

I am a physics professor and often use Gemini to check my papers. It is a formidable tool: it was able to find a clerical error (a missing imaginary unit in a complex mathematical expression) I was not able to find for days, and it often underlines connections between concepts and ideas that I overlooked. However, it often makes conceptual errors that I can spot only because I have good knowledge of the topic I am di…

I've been watching the automation of things like flight control systems for the past decade, and the evolution of the fallback to a real pilot in the event of a emergency is what's most concerning about where LLMs are being embedded.

Right now, we have a lot of smart people who have trained for decades to understand where these things go wrong and how to nudge them back, but the pool of people are going to slowly be replaced by less knowledgeable.

At some point, a rubicon will be crossed where these systems can't fallback to a human operator and will fail spectacularly.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#74

Post by jdale27 »

few wrote: post #7

>So if your aim in doing mathematics is to achieve some kind of immortality, so to speak, then you should understand that that won’t necessarily be possible for much longer — not just for you, but for anybody. This made me a little sad

I don't know that it's that disappointing. I doubt most of the great mathematicians were actually doing it to achieve immortality. I suspect most of them were either after (possibly indirect) practical applications (via the math -> physics -> engineering pipeline) or just "for the love of the game", appreciation of the beauty of math and the intellectual joy of doing it. AI might also take over the practical application side, but the other aspects are still there for the taking.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#75

Post by skrebbel »

dyauspitr wrote: post #49
skrebbel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw your comments here read to me as “I’m super rich and everyone I know is super rich too, and I can’t imagine that anyone isn’t”.

People spend much more than that on just commuting to work if you can spend $200 a month to supercharge what you do at work and 1000x your productivity it’s a no-brainer.

From what money? Just pause the health insurance for a while? Stop paying the rent? No diapers for the kid?

Your entire story only makes sense if you have many hundreds of dollars/euros of entirely disposable income every month left, after all unavoidable expenses have been paid for. I understand that this holds for you and everyone you know but I’d like you to appreciate that for very many people it doesn’t.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#76

Post by NotOscarWilde »

vthallam wrote: post #45
NotOscarWilde wrote: post #11

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…

@NotOscarWilde drop your email here, I will reach out and happy to get you a pro account for a few months so you can try 5.5 pro.(work at OAI)

This requires a major "dox" of myself, but I am really grateful for the offer, so these are my academic contacts:

https://pastebin.com/hNYrCjhL

I probably will erase the contents in a few days.

Even if you just drop an email and it doesn't work out, I appreciate this gesture so much. Thank you.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#77

Post by einrealist »

"After 16 minutes and 41 seconds, it came back" ... "further 47 minutes and 39 seconds" ... "After 13 minutes and 33 seconds" ... "After 9 minutes and 12 seconds" ... "After 31 minutes and 40 seconds" ... plus other computations

Anyone spotting the issue here? What did that really cost?

I am not against compute being used for scientific or other important problems. We did that before LLMs. However, the major LLM gatekeepers want to make all industries and companies dependent on their models. And, at some point, they need to charge them the actual, unsubsidized costs for the compute. In the meantime, companies restructure in the hopes that the compute costs remain cheap.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#78

Post by johndough »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #11

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…

At my university, everyone had to pay their AI subscriptions out of their own pocket, until a communal AI service was introduced recently. It took 2 years to set up and only serves gpt-oss-120b, so everyone is still using other services. But at least some admin can scatter the word "AI" all over the university's website now and has an excuse to reject any requests for AI subscriptions because "we already have AI".

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#79

Post by mixtureoftakes »

ziotom78 wrote: post #62

I am a physics professor and often use Gemini to check my papers. It is a formidable tool: it was able to find a clerical error (a missing imaginary unit in a complex mathematical expression) I was not able to find for days, and it often underlines connections between concepts and ideas that I overlooked. However, it often makes conceptual errors that I can spot only because I have good knowledge of the topic I am di…

please, sign up for a paid plan of either chatgpt or claude. gemini is while close, still noticeably behind

you deserve opinions shaped by interactions with the best tools that are out there.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#80

Post by m_mueller »

alsetmusic wrote: post #42
NotOscarWilde wrote: post #11

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…

It’s a classic example of the best positioned people being in the best position to keep reaping all the rewards. There’s the example of a poor person and a rich person buying boots. The poor person’s boots wear out and have to be replaced while the rich persons boots last for many years due to higher quality craftsmanship. Over years, the poor person’s boots wear will pay may for boots.

here I think it's less about "poverty" (non-US acedemic budgets are still high, though not in the same sphere), but it's about having red tape when it comes to software. My experience doing a PhD in Japan was: Everything you can touch was basically a free for all - including $500 keyboards and $10k Mac Pros, especially if you are a valued researcher. But software, oh man, how can we prove receipt of goods to accounting...
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