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

A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

gowers.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 558 posts

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#91

Post by johndough »

bambax wrote: post #87
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…

OpenRouter lets you pay by the token only (no subscription), has all the frontier models (including Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5) and most of the others, and if you use it sparingly it usually turns out to be quite cheap.

API pricing for Claude is about an order of magnitude more expensive than subscriptions (numbers: https://she-llac.com/claude-limits). But it may be worth it with DeepSeek V4 Pro, which is currently on discount.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#92

Post by hodgehog11 »

jdale27 wrote: post #74
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 applicat…

Exactly. Gowers is in the unique position to think about the "glory" of frontier mathematics, but for essentially everybody (especially those working outside of number theory), that dream died long ago. There are far too many mathematicians now.

Many mathematicians work because they love the breakthrough (a certain quote of Villani comes to mind). They love finding new results, uncovering new mysteries. From that point of view, having an AI that can build on your basic ideas and refine them into more powerful arguments is awesome, regardless of who gets the credit. There are those that treat it more like solving puzzles so the result is not of interest. From that point of view, I can see the dissatisfaction. But I have found those with that viewpoint don't tend to make it as far in academia as those with the other viewpoint.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#93

Post by cubefox »

mixtureoftakes wrote: post #79
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.

Gemini is certainly not behind Claude in terms of physics.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#94

Post by adaml_623 »

"It is the sort of idea I would be very proud to come up with after a week or two of pondering, and it took ChatGPT less than an hour"

This comment about time is very interesting to me. I know it's "just" doing mathematical proofs but the possibilities of speeding up planning, proposals and decision making in the physical world should excite people.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#95

Post by teiferer »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #76
vthallam wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@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.

[flagged]

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#96

Post by sidkshatriya »

einrealist wrote: post #77

"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 gate…

> "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?

Whatever the Joules... (convert to $ using your preferred benchmark price) it is a fraction to what it might take a human Ph. D. weeks to feed and sustain themselves when working on the same problem. The economics on LLMs is just unbeatable (sadly) when compared to us humans.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#97

Post by wg0 »

mixtureoftakes wrote: post #79
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.

Gemini feels deep and philosophical. Especially for product management. Tell him you're a product manager and we're a team of two.

But regular reminder - All LLMs can be wrong all the time. I only work with LLMs in domains I'm expert in OR I have other sources to verify their output with utmost certainty.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#98

Post by hodgehog11 »

MinimalAction wrote: post #12

As a graduate student, this piece made me sad. I always believed that my work speaks for itself and transcends beyond my limited time on this cosmic experience. This notion of immortality was just a small intangible bonus I hoped for when I jumped into grad school. AI is making me feel less worthy.

As someone who is much further down the track, I would kindly suggest you drop that line of thought. I've seen far too many brilliant and ambitious people drop into depression because of it.

You are worthy of doing this work because you are able to do it. Do the work because you love it and because you love the mystery. Enjoy every moment that you get to do it. Find joy in the great fortune you have to do this work while others toil away on tasks that bring them no satisfaction. Sometimes it's tedious, but sometimes it's incredibly rewarding in its own right.

Don't work for the possibility of eternal glory though, it just doesn't exist anymore.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#99

Post by bambax »

johndough wrote: post #91
bambax wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenRouter lets you pay by the token only (no subscription), has all the frontier models (including Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5) and most of the others, and if you use it sparingly it usually turns out to be quite cheap.

API pricing for Claude is about an order of magnitude more expensive than subscriptions (numbers: https://she-llac.com/claude-limits ). But it may be worth it with DeepSeek V4 Pro, which is currently on discount.

Depends very much on usage! If you connect it to tools like Cursor, etc. then yes a subscription is probably cheaper -- although, you'd have to subscribe to each provider if you want to use them all.

But if you ask questions occasionally, (and don't resend, for example, your whole codebase with each request), then the API feels really cheap, even for the frontier models.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#100

Post by bambax »

mxwsn wrote: post #27

> Here’s a thought experiment: suppose that a mathematician solved a major problem by having a long exchange with an LLM in which the mathematician played a useful guiding role but the LLM did all the technical work and had the main ideas. Would we regard that as a major achievement of the mathematician? I don’t think we would. This is a cultural choice. It makes sense that in the mathematics culture we currently hav…

It may not be a major achievement by the mathematician (although it's debatable) but it would still be a major result.
Post reply on HN