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A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

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Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#421

Post by joe_mamba »

bambax wrote: post #107
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 codi…

> They literally have no value whatsoever; they're a passthrough; they're invisible.

Then middle management also have no value, since they're also a passthrough between upper management and ICs, yet they never went extinct.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#422

Post by ziofill »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #159
bambax wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 codi…

Are you a cutting edge research scientist or something? Everyone I know works in the same domain every day. The problems are the same. People aren't solving brand new problems to humanity every day. We make budgets and look at ticket counts. Roll out patches. Replace hardware. Upgrade software packages. Make a new dashboard to track a project. I guess if every day is a completely novel thing for you, ok. I feel like…

I’m sorry, but who cares if this doesn’t apply to you?

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#424

Post by perching_aix »

energy123 wrote: post #405
crthpl wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it can! That's the whole point of RL! it generates slightly out of distribution rollouts, and rewards good rollouts to change the distribution of the output

That's not out of distributíon, that's inside the distribution of the rollout. If you don't create rollouts for the game of Chess then it doesn't know how to play Chess no matter how smart it is at tasks you've created rollouts for. It's structurally stuck in its distribution.

[dead]

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#425

Post by pickleRick243 »

illiac786 wrote: post #126
timschmidt wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can form new associations between concepts via their input prompts and thinking text. That is a form of learning. Just not very durable. I liken it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia

yeah, I should have been more specific: I meant the type of learning that mentoring fosters, the long term learning.

a little glib, but there is in fact long term learning. It's just that you are not the one mentoring- the models go to intensive OpenAI/Anthropic/Google school for a quarter or half a year and come back (hopefully) improved. You just hope they're getting a good education. Certainly it's a very prestigious one.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#426

Post by kang »

layer8 wrote: post #287
kang wrote: post #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 P…

The task of a proof verifier is much simpler than the task of a proof finder (it’s basically equivalent to P vs. NP), and hence the bar for the required skills is lower. Merely verifying proofs isn’t research, and doesn’t impart research skills.

Verification on its own is not research, but judgement is research.

"Hey, Prove something a machine can't", sure I can't, "Hey, Say something worth proving & judge it well", ah, now I might have a few unique observation/ideas/curiosities/problems from my having being a human.

Imo, the feeling of intelligence or the process of originality(originativity) test for ai is subjective & is coming down to 4 paths: novel relative to a reference class, valuable within a domain, counterfactually sensitive to internal state and environment, and revisable through learning.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#428

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

antisthenes wrote: post #355
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only "statistically generated" in the same way that your brain is just "neurons firing." That's the low-level description of what's happening, but on a higher level, it's correct to say that it's being smug.

> it's correct to say that it's being smug. It's not correct to say that it's being smug, because when people are being smug, we do it for a purpose - e.g. to signal higher social status or superior knowledge. A machine has no such imperative, so what you call 'being smug' is statistical mimicry.

The LLM has learned certain behaviors, including smugness. Its motivations for being smug may be different, but it's being smug nonetheless.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#429

Post by iberator »

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…

Its good. You should work hard if you are in the public sector! Using claude (cheating) and getting check from government is unethical

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#430

Post by chis »

teiferer wrote: post #297
Scea91 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The budget required for AI tools currently is negligible compared to other university expenses. Is it? Do you have any idea what the salary of a mid-tier university researcher in an Eastern European country is? Or in Africa or south-east Asia? With sota LLM pricing you easily get into the same order of magnitude, so essentially labour cost would double for researchers at such universies. Not "negligible" at all.

I feel like this is one of the most advantaged times in history in terms of regular citizens having access to cutting edge tools.

Looking online it seems like the low end estimate might be $30k a year for such math researchers? And ChatGPT pro or whatever you want will run $100 a month, and should be coverable by grants. I’m quite sure matlab alone cost more in the past

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