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

251–260 of 558 posts

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#251

Post by agnishom »

sdeframond wrote: post #246
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…

> Would we regard that as a major achievement of the mathematician? I don’t think we would. 1. Does it matter, really? 2. Is it very different from previous computer-aided proofs, philosophically?

1. It matters because there are human mathematicians who pride themselves for their mathematical achievements. Mathematics is art to them.

2. Yes, it is. Because pre-LLM era computer-aided proofs were about using the computer to either solve a large number of cases or to check that each step in a proof mechanically follows from the axioms.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#252

Post by lexoj »

mentos wrote: post #249
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 watched the movie '21' (2008) for free on YouTube yesterday. The opening of the movie features the MIT campus full of students navigating its grounds and all the promise and status that higher education brings. [0] Gave me the same sense of sadness realizing how much will fall to AI. [0] - https://youtu.be/0lsUsWdkk0Y?si=TJl7f_b1RcWcDqF8&t=278

Not free in my country, didn’t know YouTube was broadcasting full movies in certain regions as you imply.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#253

Post by doginasuit »

aspenmartin wrote: post #248
doginasuit wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creation of the system is deeply impressive, so are compilers but I don't raise a toast to it each time I build my code. Like generated art, people aren't going appreciate it on the same level.

Wow you consider this on the same level of impressiveness as a compiler?

I actually consider compilers more impressive, and a compiler was an important part of making this possible.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#254

Post by eiieue »

MrDrDr wrote: post #166

> "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…

Theres a simple test for this.

Limit the knowledge an llm to some point in time at which a discovery was made. And check to see if the llm could produce the discovery.

If you think OAI hasn’t already tried this then think again - they have every incentive to do so and announce it to the world.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#255

Post by djeastm »

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…

>Would we regard that as a major achievement of the mathematician? I don’t think we would

For some reason this reminds me of AI images and a domain like comedy.

If an image makes people laugh, the person who prompted it to make the image certainly doesn't get credit for the vast majority of the work in its creation, but perhaps they do get credit for the initial prompt idea and then the "taste" to select that particular one from whatever drafts they went through or otherwise guiding it.

So if a mathematician comes up with an amazing result that an LLM "did", I think they could still get a bit of credit for prompting it to do it and being its guide.

But whereas the first person could perhaps be called a comedian and not an artist, would the mathematician still be called a mathematician or something else?

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#256

Post by aspenmartin »

doginasuit wrote: post #253
aspenmartin wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow you consider this on the same level of impressiveness as a compiler?

I actually consider compilers more impressive, and a compiler was an important part of making this possible.

To each their own. I mean compilers didn’t produce trillions of dollars of investment, and produce serious and profound philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness but you’re right, thank god we have C

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#257

Post by eiieue »

eterm wrote: post #174
MrDrDr wrote: post #166

> "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…

Mathematical objects are an invention of the mind - they are abstract objects that only an entity who can process abstractions can make sense of.

There is no ‘discovery’ here nor was it waiting to be found. The human has to sacrifice and pursue the path of exploring reality and thereby is inherently inventing.

Humans built up mathematics iteratively from smaller bases extending into large ones. Is this what LLM’s do? Of course not - They are fed with vast amounts of information from the off.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#258

Post by le-mark »

gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #224
FrojoS wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no reason to believe the progress of LLMs [...] will stop anytime soon Wrong. Every advancement has followed a s curve. Where we are on that curve is anyones guess. Or maybe "this time its different".

Great. You see a shape in graphs. And that shape tells you that _at some unknown point in the future_ progress will slow (but likely not stop). Now back to the point, what reason do you have to believe progress will stop soon ? If you have no reason, then it sounds like you agree with OP. Which makes the patronizing sarcasm all that much more nauseating.

Nausea aside, what evidence does anyone have that “super intelligence” of the sort your argument alludes to is even possible? Because that’s what we’re really talking about; greater than human intelligence on this sort of academic task. For example; When llms start contributing meaningfully to their own development, that would be a convincing indicator imo.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#259

Post by bdelmas »

nicoburns wrote: post #229
StrauXX wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which indications are that?

The cost factors on the new models compared to the old models.

You are mixing cost and progress. It’s not because it’s more and more expensive that progress is slowing down by itself.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#260

Post by le-mark »

nl wrote: post #238
nicoburns wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the sense that the incremental improvements in capabilities that we've been seeing in recent models seem to taking exponentially growing amounts of compute to achieve.

But they don't? Mythos is a 10T model. Opus is a 5T model. That's not an exponentially growing amount of compute but it is achieving exponential improvements (eg from Mozilla: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer... )

> but it is achieving exponential improvements

“Exponential” used here is pure hyperbole. Can you justify it?

Post reply on HN