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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

#441

Post by idiotsecant »

y1n0 wrote: post #404
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #389

This jives with what I've experienced in the brief time I had access to 5.5 Pro. It's the very first LLM that I feel like I can wrangle into solving tedious, but straightforward, problems correctly. It still makes a ton of mistakes and needs to be very rigidly guided, but it does a pretty good job of tracing its own reasoning and correcting itself in a way that the other models do not. The downside (not noted in the…

> This jives with what I've experienced Just as an fyi, the word you are looking for is jibes. Jive is something else entirely.

The only thing worse than complaining about this is being the guy complaining about the guy complaining about this. So congratulations on being second most annoying.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#442

Post by optimalsolver »

lexoj wrote: post #252
mentos wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you able to watch this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdUI_0mIkec

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#443

Post by DoctorOetker »

qwrahg wrote: post #350
robot-wrangler wrote: post #343

A very interesting comment from Baez, I'll just quote part of it. > Where does the value of thinking and having deep ideas come from? We need to think about this now. If it comes primarily from their scarcity – the fact that having certain ideas is hard – then indeed this value may drop precipitously when the manufacture of ideas can be automated. But if the value comes from the utility of the ideas – the benefit tha…

I note that it is always the same online pundits (even if they are distinguished academics) who push anything new. Meanwhile Wiles and Perelman stayed offline and solved real problems.

would Wiles be willing to transcribe his proof for the metamath verifier? it can be done offline indeed...

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#444

Post by foobar10000 »

aspenmartin wrote: post #290
doginasuit wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compilers just made it all possible, but they are not new and shiny. LLMs did not produce the philosophical questions, but they do raise them. It's worth noting that computers have been changing the way we think about consciousness long before LLMs, largely thanks to compilers.

Yea there’s no logical stopping point when you use that logic. Why not say electricity or the element silicon?

I mean - I'd say electricity, agriculture, steam power, metallurgy, silicon computing (cmos), atomic power, the scientific method - these are _all_ very impressive - all lead to drastic changes for humanity. Not sure how I'd rank them.

I personally think AI will end up sitting in the top 3 of these - but that is an opinion. I do think it is obvious it is at least _somewhere_ in that list.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#445

Post by wslh »

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…

I assume that once LLMs are trained with large [synthetic] information about 3D Clifford algebras it will work better.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#446

Post by datadrivenangel »

doginasuit wrote: post #439
pear01 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an adversarial economy. Using a LLM at work doesn't mean the work is challenging. A lot of jobs are "bullshit jobs". People are using LLMs because it gives them back time. If they don't use it their colleague will and make them look bad. Company might fire you tomorrow. Fundamentally if a LLM can do the job it's not just employees at risk, it is also the company. There is a lot of symmetry actually with how comp…

I have also come to the conclusion independently that a lot of companies are bullshit companies, maybe that is closer to the core issue. For the individuals who do have some choice in the matter, I think it is important to hold on to their skills by continuing to use them. It sucks that our work culture is so competitive, but from that angle I believe they will stand out eventually as more competent.

Most companies are real, it's just that a good fraction of the work is mostly unnecessary. Partially because of the overhead of doing business activities that is unneeded most of the time, partly because we don't know what work will be useful, and partly for silly social reasons

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#447

Post by jdub »

munksbeer wrote: post #348
jdub wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reinforcement learning for "reasoning" perturbs the model to generate completions in a particular chain of thought / alternative selection structure. It's three next token predictors in a trench coat.

When these things start solving many more long standing problems, and start introducing more novel problems, will people finally admit that the "next token predictor" is not the gotcha they think it is?

It's not a gotcha. It's incredible what these things can do despite being next token predictors from a weird dataset. That's at the heart of the "bitter lesson", and you don't have to believe in magic to see it.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#448

Post by djeastm »

energy123 wrote: post #298
charleshn wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

RL or no RL, AI cannot escape the distribution it's trained on. It's just that the labs will put so much into the distribution that we won't be able to tell the difference that easily, nor will it matter for most tasks. The reason AI does well on ARC-AGI-2 is because the labs created synthetic training data using similar puzzles.

What if it doesn't need to escape the distribution, it can just exhaust the current distribution we have much more broadly and efficiently than humans can?

So the answers we're seeking to our bleeding edge questions are already there, we just need an AI's ability to target the answers. Then re-train on the improvements and go from there.

Just a thought.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#449

Post by zarzavat »

lhd1 wrote: post #419
zarzavat wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three species of mathematicians: The first species is the pure problem solver. Tao is the poster child for this group. Their currency is interesting problems and solutions to those problems. The second species is the pure theory builder. The poster child for this group is Conway. Their currency is theories and ideas rather than theorems, they are most interested in expanding the territory of mathematics and…

I was expecting Grothendieck. Conway is hardly the poster child for theory building.

Yes, I should have just said "explorer" or "inventor" rather than theory builder which is too specific.

Grothendieck is a better specifically for building theories. Conway is famous for his various ideas and inventions so he also fits the bill as an "anti-Tao".

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#450

Post by nostrebored »

dang wrote: post #396
nostrebored wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2024-2025 was filled with huge improvements. 2025-2026 has not been, outside of open source. The idea that we’re at the point where it’s superseded our ability to tell just makes no sense. I’ll be happy if we can get to a point where I don’t have to tell Claude not to tail every bash command or make a job that writes throughout instead of once at the end. I’ll be happy if “continue this interaction naturally, you are…

> I think this is a pretty ridiculous take. This falls in the category of swipes/name-calling in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - can you please edit those out? You're a good contributor - it's just all too easy for unintentional sharpness to downgrade the conversation, and when it's a good conversation like this one, that's especially regrettable.

Noted, doesn’t seem like I’m able to edit anymore though
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