Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many indications that model progress is slowing down, so that is not entirely accurate.
Which indications are that?
Nobody is releasing NEW models
A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
181–190 of 558 posts
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Gemini’s smug... Anthropomorphizing these systems is dangerous, whether coming from the bullish or bearish perspective. The output is statistically generated by a machine lacking the capability to be smug.
>Anthropomorphizing these systems is dangerous That ship has sailed. Humans will anthropomorphize a rock if you put googly eyes on it.
First I thought to myself, "my daughter does this and it looks so cute". And only as a second thought, that your comment just proved itself.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#183I 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…
What that means practically is that we've got a generation - 25 years or less - to evolve these things not to need the fallback. If such a thing is possible.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#184I found the section on publishing very interesting. Even if the quality of the output is up to snuff, where should it go? Arxiv doesn't allow AI written work. The author proposes that only work that has been certified by human should be published. However, now the field is in the same boat as software engineering where we are facing a glut of pull requests and not enough time and people to review them.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Watching a teenager approach their homework, instead of struggling to answer questions they don't know, they ask Gemini. Unfortunately, I think the mental struggle to approach an answer is where much of the learning is. They also miss out on the reward for persistence of seeing things fall together. It is troubling. It suggests a plateauing of human understanding.
It absolutely is where the learning is, that's pretty well established brain science.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#186> "Even though I can motivate it in retrospect, ChatGPT’s idea to use h^2-dissociated sets to control relations of order at most h feels quite ingenious. As far as I can tell, this idea is completely original." The question that keep bothering me is can an LLM generate an idea that is truly novel? How would/could that actually happen? But then that leads to the question - what are we actually doing when we think? Per…
My own take, and it's veering into the Philosophy of Mathematics, but there's a debate about whether Mathematics is "Invented" or "Discovered". If it's "invented", then it requires ingenuity. If it's "discovered", then it was always already there, just waiting for the right connections to be made for it to be uncovered and represented in a way we can understand. Invention requires ingenuity, but discovery does not. S…
I like this distinction, but it would then seem the only 'invention' would be the axioms of your mathematics. There exists numbers (natural, imaginary...), there exist shapes (a point, a line...). All the work from that point on could be 'discovered'. I agree that I don't see LLMs inventing in this way. But again, it raised the question - what are our brains doing when we 'invent' something?
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#187>> but it was definitely a non-trivial extension of those ideas, and for a PhD student to find that extension it would be necessary to invest quite a bit of time digesting Isaac’s paper The "non-trivial" is for human abilities. The weights lifted by a crane are also "non-trivial". People keep getting amazed at machine's abilities. Just like a radio telescope can see things humans can't, microscope can see the detail…
Too many people are wrapped around the ego axle thinking (assuming) their ideas are both them and somehow unique and special.
It usually takes dissolving that, often through difficult experiences, before they can see it as a machine, something that could be separated from them.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#188I 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…
This doesn't surprise me since the coding agents are similar. I've previously compared them to very fast, ambitious junior programmers. I think they are probably mid-level coders now, but they continue to make mistakes that a senior programmer wouldn't. Or at least shouldn't.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#189> The lower bound for contributing to mathematics will now be to prove something that LLMs can’t prove, rather than simply to prove something that nobody has proved up to now and that at least somebody finds interesting.
5.5pro is amazing but this implication might not be true & is the core argument of this piece.
AI will prove all sort of things - interesting, boring & incorrect.
To sort it will be the task of the PhD.