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

321–330 of 558 posts

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#321

Post by logicprog »

aspenmartin wrote: post #206
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".

It’s more of a guess if you don’t know about things like scaling laws and RL with verification. The onus of “we’re going to saturate” anytime soon is on that claim because every measurement points to that not being true.

Yeah. People (Gary Marcus) have been claiming that AI will hit a wall or is hitting a wall or already has hit a wall since 2023, basically. And yet every time they proclaim that the AI industry found new ways of training their AI's, new ways of integrating them with external tools and feedback loops, new architectures and more to keep the exponential growing. And sure enough if you look at literally every attempt to objectively rate and verify the capability of these models, including things like the METR time horizon autonomy index or the artificial analysis intelligence index, you see exponential or even greater than exponential growth, continuing smoothly through each of the points people claimed that it would begin to slow down, with no sinus slowing down or stopping at all. So yeah, I think at some point the onus has to lie on the ones that are making the claim that keeps being wrong and the continues to be wrong and it completely goes against the current tangent of the curve that we're seeing in all objective metrics. Especially when they can't give specific new reasons for progress to stop beyond the ones they gave last time. It didn't stop and really can't give specific reasons at all besides vague general points about stochastic parrots and S curves.

I really have to highlight the S-curve nonsense because, like, yes, I think this technology's improvement will follow an S-curve. It's absurd to think that it will just follow an exponential up towards infinity forever because nothing in the world really works like that. However, like everyone else in this thread is saying, we have no idea where on the S-curve we actually are, and it's impossible to know until it's already slowed down. So really all appeals to the S curve do are as function as a sort of non-specific, unfalsifiable prophecy that someday it will slow down, which doesn't really tell us anything useful, and also frees the person referencing the S curve from ever actually having to worry about being wrong. Just like the Singularity people, the slowdown of the S curve is always near. This is actually a known and well-established tactic of religions and other people that want to make prophecies without having to worry about turning out to be wrong — unfalseifiable vague prophecies with no actual timeline, and thus no clear import to the present so that they can never be shown to be wrong.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#322

Post by 34qJhah »

bustermellotron wrote: post #2

I saw Tim Gowers give a talk at the AMS-MAA joint meeting in Seattle about ten years ago where he predicted that in 100 years humans would no longer be doing research mathematics. I wonder if he’s adjusted his timeline. At the time I thought the key missing tool was a natural language search that acted like mathoverflow, where you could explain your problem or ideas as you understood them and get references to releva…

And Teichmüller thought that Germany would win WW2 and volunteered for the Eastern Front.

Being a gifted mathematician does not make you right. In fact, mathematicians have a lot of bizarre theories.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#323

Post by timedude »

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.

Let me tell you, there is a ton more to learn in this reality than llms are capable of finding out on their own, especially when it comes to truth, ethics and morality. And those are the only thing that matter in the end when you leave this reality. A greater challenge does not exist.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#324

Post by vld_chk »

charleshn wrote: post #193
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…

Yes, they can. Some people like to parrot "next token prediction", "LLMs can only interpolate", and other nonsense, but it is obviously not true for many reasons, in particular since we introduced RL. Humans do not have the monopoly on generating novel ideas, modern AI models using post training, RL etc can come to them in the same way we do, exploration. See also verifier's law [0]: "The ease of training AI to solve…

I genuinely start to think that we, as humanity, severely overestimate our cognitive abilities. We act so surprised “just a few years of LLM with a few RL tweaks match our PhD levels! It must be hidden inside our knowledge base!”. Em, what if no? What if our “PhD level” is just very low level comparing to upper boundaries of measurable intelligence? What if we need to learn being humble and stop treating our minds as “sacred source of creativity and intelligence”?

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#325

Post by MinimalAction »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #98
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 w…

Thank you for this comment. I often fall into the why of graduate school many times. The pay is insufficient, hours are long, but at least I find it very satisfying on good days. It is just the feeling that what I do may not be unique anymore is what sucks. I didn't necessarily mean to find glory through incredible work alone, but through being unique in the problems I choose. Anyway, I digress.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#326

Post by MinimalAction »

kranke155 wrote: post #285
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.

try meditation.

Thanks. This might help. Are you suggesting any particular form?

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#327

Post by MinimalAction »

alexashka wrote: post #151
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.

> I always believed that my work speaks for itself and transcends beyond my limited time on this cosmic experience Any statement preceded by the word 'believe' is a coping mechanism. > This notion of immortality was just a small intangible bonus I hoped for when I jumped into grad school Any statement preceded by the word 'hope' is a coping mechanism. > AI is making me feel less worthy Worth comes from understanding,…

I strongly disagree on beliefs and hopes are coping mechanisms. Coping from what? Beliefs and hopes are what they are.

But I agree worth should be derived from understanding, not through achievement.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#328

Post by thfuran »

stingraycharles wrote: post #198
illiac786 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the word “Mentoring” is anthropomorphic and subconsciously makes you think it will learn. It does not, and it is for the human brain a formidable task to remember that something as smart as an LLM does not learn. I keep catching myself making the same mistake. It’s also because it is so annoying to have to manage the memory of the LLM with custom prompts/instructions manually. I have not yet played with the lon…

> Using the word “Mentoring” is anthropomorphic and subconsciously makes you think it will learn. I think this is a bit pedantic. Obviously the parent you’re replying to is referring to the concept of “in-context learning”, which is the actual industry / academic term for this. So you feed it a paper, and then it can use that info, and it needs steering / “mentoring” to be guided into the right direction. Heck the wh…

But in-context learning is like a student only remembering what they’re being taught for the duration of the discussion. That’s not really how mentoring is meant to work, so pointing out the issues with the metaphor seems pretty reasonable.

In other news: That words can change meaning doesn’t mean that every possible change in meaning would be beneficial to communication and therefore desirable. Would you advocate in support of someone suggesting to use “left” to mean “right” simply on the basis words can change in meaning?

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#329

Post by logicprog »

rklampp wrote: post #310

Gowers has always been a proponent of Lean (naturally). He receives funding from the "AI for Math" fund, which is sponsored by a fund that is a front organization for venture capitalists: https://www.renaissancephilanthropy.org/ The "brighter future" of course is that everyone is redundant and all capital is further concentrated. It is always Gowers, Tao and Lichtman (math.ínc startup) who are pushing these technolog…

> It is always Gowers, Tao and Lichtman (math.ínc startup) who are pushing these technologies.

In your mind does this mean that they are lying, or driven by motivated reasoning and cognitive bias, or whatever you'd like to say?

Because I feel like people bring up these facts as a way to discount everything that these people are saying, but whether or not they've chosen to align themselves with AI aligned venture capital funding or not. The question is really, did what they say is happening happen or not? Are these capabilities real or not?

To my mind, mathematics is pretty definitely, externally, objectively verifiable, so it would be easy to catch them in a lie. In the case of the Erdös problem that was recently solved in a novel and productive way, it wasn't even initiated by them and the chat GPT transcript is public for all to see. And the proof could easily be verified by other people, for instance.

In addition, I think it's unlikely that they're not explaining things as they honestly see them and also doing their due diligence to make sure that they are seeing them as close to correctly as possible. Because their positions with these organizations not to mention their entire reputation and life's work and passion depends on their reputation in academic mathematics. If they were to give that up by falsifying these claims or not verifying them sufficiently, they would lose everything.

I think it's also worth pointing out that it is totally possible for someone to align themselves with such organizations after the fact because they agree with them instead of being bought out by such organizations. Otherwise, it would be possible to dismiss the opinion of anyone working at any NGO dedicated to being against AI and denying AI's capabilities or whatever, as well by the same logic of their salary being paid by an organization dedicated to pushing those ideas.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#330

Post by minitech »

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... )

I know parameters don’t translate directly like that (and that linear and exponential aren’t the only types of growth) but a doubling as a go-to example of “not exponential growth” is pretty funny.
Post reply on HN