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

101–110 of 558 posts

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#101

Post by hodgehog11 »

adammdaw wrote: post #28

This is certainly interesting, though I would say that based on my understanding of how the current models work combinatorial problems would be an area where they could be particularly successful. They are pretty good at combinatorial creativity - its the exploratory and transformational aspects that are still pretty tricky, and I expect would come to bear in other areas of mathematics.

Indeed, analysis is a bit more loose in its arguments, and so I've found LLMs tend to make more mistakes there.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#102

Post by bambax »

> quite a lot of perfectly good human mathematics consists in putting together existing knowledge and proof techniques

Creativity is connecting ideas from different domains and see if something from one field applies to another. I do think AI is overhyped generally; but a major benefit from AI could be that after ingesting all the existing human knowledge (something no single human can ever hope to achieve) it would "mix and connect" it and come up with novel insights.

Most published research sits ignored and unread; AI can uncover and use everything.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#103

Post by maximamas »

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…

LLMs are at their best when you have an expectation for their output. I generally know the shape of the correct response and that allows me to evaluate it's output on it's "vibes", rather than line by line. If there's no expectation then I have to take everything at face value and now I'm at the mercy of the machine.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#104

Post by teiferer »

revolvingthrow wrote: post #68
fakedang wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their loss if they don't move to regional pricing. AI will continue to remain an upper-management luxury then, and won't reach the mass adoption required to justify their outsized valuations.

Regional pricing makes sense for products that don’t have ongoing costs or where most of the input cost can be offset by local labor. You’re not buying server racks nor electricity at 1/3 of the price to serve poorer markets

AI pricing is not mainly about cost, it's about market realities, i.e., charging exactly the sweet spot to maximize profit.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#105

Post by hodgehog11 »

globular-toast wrote: post #65

I wish people would stop generating stuff they don't understand only to forward it to someone who does. Something about that really rubs me the wrong way.

May I remind you that this is Timothy Gowers. He says he doesn't understand, but he most certainly has far greater capacity than most to detect complete junk from a maybe plausible argument. His colleague is even better able to judge this, hence why he sent it to him.

Also if he did send me complete junk, I would still parse it for multiple days to see what is there.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#106

Post by hodgehog11 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #57

AI generated article btw. Maybe if you find AI to be doing stuff you find impressive, the stuff you were doing wasn't that impressive? Worth ruminating on your priors at least.

This is beyond ridiculous to say considering whose blog this is.

For those that don't know, this is Timothy Gowers. He is one of the most accomplished mathematicians in the world. Like Terence Tao, he is considered one of the world leaders in mathematics and tends to have good judgement in where the field is going.

Even without that knowledge, no, this article is certainly not AI generated. It has none of the tells.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#107

Post by bambax »

pmontra wrote: 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…

> by solving hard problems you get an insight into the problem-solving process itself, at least in your area of expertise, in a way that you simply don’t if all you do is read other people’s solutions. One consequence of this is that people who have themselves solved difficult problems are likely to be significantly better at using solving problems with the help of AI, just as very good coders are better at vibe coding than not such good coders

Yes but it's not just that if you solved a problem yourself, you're better at solving other problems; it's also that you actually understand the problem that you solved, much better than if you simply read a proof made by somebody (or something) else.

I see this happening in the enterprise. People delegate work to some LLM; work isn't always bad, sometimes it's even acceptable. But it's not their work, and as a result, the author doesn't know or understand it better than anyone else! They don't own it, they can't explain it. They literally have no value whatsoever; they're a passthrough; they're invisible.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#108

Post by hodgehog11 »

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.

ChatGPT and Gemini are actually fairly comparable.

Claude has been utterly useless with most math problems in my experience because, much like less capable students, it tends to get overly bogged down in tedious details before it gets to the big picture. That's great for programming, not so much for frontier math. If you're giving it little lemmas, then sure it's great, but otherwise you're just burning tokens.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#109

Post by palata »

pmontra wrote: 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…

I feel like you slightly miss both points.

> Training must start from the basics though.

Sure, but the point is that at some point (e.g. when starting a PhD) one needs to do research, not learn the basics. And LLMs make that harder, because they solve the "easy research" part.

Take a young lion "fighting/playing" with another young lion as a way to learn how to fight, and later hunt. And suddenly they get TikTok and are not interested in playing anymore. Their first encounter with hunting will be a lot harder, won't it?

> People pay coders to build stuff that they will use to make money and I can happily use an AI to deliver faster and keep being hired.

Again, that's true but missing the point: if you never get to be a "good coder", you will always be a "bad vibe coder". Maybe you can make money out of it, but the point was about becoming good.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#110

Post by Scea91 »

teiferer wrote: post #90
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)

While this sounds generous (and in some ways it is), it does not address the general point that GP is making. That is, the systematic disadvantage which large parts of humanity have w.r.t. to access to the tools. You could say they can't drive a Lambhorgini either, but that also doesn't solve the problem.

Its a problem of the individual institutions and countries. The budget required for AI tools currently is negligible compared to other university expenses. We don't need to call everything a systemic disadvantage when the disadvantaged (at the institution level) have agency here.
Post reply on HN