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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

#471

Post by genxy »

joe_mamba wrote: post #421
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…

> 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.

Working on it!

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#472

Post by kang »

ianm218 wrote: post #452
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…

Verification is generally a much lower bar than solution generation. I don’t think it’s likely sorting out the right from wrong will end up being this huge PhD level effort.

Verification & solution generation are both part of problem generation & defining the passing test - judgement.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#473

Post by nxobject »

adammdaw wrote: post #28

This is certainly interesting, though I would say that based on my understanding of how the current models work combinatorial problems would be an area where they could be particularly successful. They are pretty good at combinatorial creativity - its the exploratory and transformational aspects that are still pretty tricky, and I expect would come to bear in other areas of mathematics.

I wonder as well whether large-but-finite contexts can handle algebraic questions that require traversing up and down levels of abstraction, at least not without "thrashing".

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#474

Post by ricardobayes »

ignoramous wrote: post #433
refulgentis wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship sailed looooong ago.

> looooong Just as an fyi, the words you are looking for are ages/eons/an eternity.

If we are having this meta-discussion, you can usually guess a person's age by which letter they are elongating. Millenial generation uses the vowel (as above) but gen alpha elongates the syllable - "longggg". Doesn't add anything to the convo just an interesting tidbit.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#475

Post by pmontra »

dmbche wrote: post #337
pmontra wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I replied to a comment about AI in sports and I build on that. We praise car drivers despite most of the performance in their sport comes from the car. The driver makes the difference when two cars are close in performance. Brilliances or mistakes. Horse riders too. In the case of math, the human can lead the LLM on the right track, point it to a problem or to another one. So it deserves some praise. Then the team th…

Could you win an F1 race with the latest winning car against F1 drivers?

I'm not sure I understood your question. Literally, of course not, but how does it relate to my points?

If I had a car 100 km/h faster on straights, after some training I would probably win Monza, but that would be a car that does not conform to F1 rules (or we would have that kind of speeds now) so that would not be a F1 race.

Maybe your question is about the sharing of praise between the team and the driver. I think that every race fan agrees that when a team did a much better job than all the other ones and have a dominant car, the championship is a competition between the two drivers of that team. So the car is the single most important factor. Then the best driver wins. Nobody can overcome a one second difference in a season of 24 GPs.

But maybe you asked a different question.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#476

Post by agnishom »

snoman wrote: post #459
agnishom wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. And some that are equally skilled that don’t. It matters, internally, to them but it needn’t matter to anyone else.

On the flip side, there are people (like me) far less skilled that do (take joy in the appreciation of mathematics as art).

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#477

Post by globular-toast »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #105
globular-toast wrote: post #65

I wish people would stop generating stuff they don't understand only to forward it to someone who does. Something about that really rubs me the wrong way.

May I remind you that this is Timothy Gowers. He says he doesn't understand, but he most certainly has far greater capacity than most to detect complete junk from a maybe plausible argument. His colleague is even better able to judge this, hence why he sent it to him. Also if he did send me complete junk, I would still parse it for multiple days to see what is there.

Yeah, it doesn't make a difference for me. It's the generation part. Gowers should have sent his prompts to the colleagues, not the generated paper. That's all. I feel like it's creating obligations for others to help with the remaining 20% which always takes the most time, while you get to have all the fun of doing the first 80%.

I'm not criticising Gowers directly in this instance because he's exploring the possibilities, my disdain is towards the more general pattern I see emerging where people just send each other LLM outputs.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#478

Post by Thanemate »

pear01 wrote: post #435
Peaches4Rent wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference so far is that these LLMs are owned by corporations, and very aggressive American corporations at that. So now you are essentially reliant on them. Not saying that this is something new, but times they are a changin

Don't use your laptop. Or your phone. It's owned by a corporation. Do you hear yourself? If you don't want to rely on corporations go live in the woods.

I think it's intellectually dishonest to dismiss the absolute accumulation of human's knowledge under very specific brands for profitability using false equivalencies. When I build something using chatGPT, especially if I was unable to build it before, I arrive at a result that I could have previously arrived with "hard work" by skipping the "hard work" part.

Now, many will argue that you wouldn't have poured in time and energy in that endeavour anyways, so it's fine. But the crucial part missing here is the effort. We're about to witness the side effects of societal-wide reliance on LLM's, the same way we're still paying the price for the social media boom, misinformation, propaganda, echo-chambers and algorithmic bubbles.

Notice that none of the above actually invented misinformation, etc. they just magnified an existing problem. LLM's magnify the need to "get it done, fast" but I don't see the engineering excellence everyone promised me that I'll see at any level.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#479

Post by intexpress »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #96
einrealist wrote: post #77

"After 16 minutes and 41 seconds, it came back" ... "further 47 minutes and 39 seconds" ... "After 13 minutes and 33 seconds" ... "After 9 minutes and 12 seconds" ... "After 31 minutes and 40 seconds" ... plus other computations Anyone spotting the issue here? What did that really cost? I am not against compute being used for scientific or other important problems. We did that before LLMs. However, the major LLM gate…

> "After 16 minutes and 41 seconds, it came back" ... "further 47 minutes and 39 seconds" ... "After 13 minutes and 33 seconds" ... "After 9 minutes and 12 seconds" ... "After 31 minutes and 40 seconds" ... plus other computations Anyone spotting the issue here? What did that really cost? Whatever the Joules... (convert to $ using your preferred benchmark price) it is a fraction to what it might take a human Ph. D. w…

Not necessarily. Humans brains use a tiny amount of power. Most of the human cost would be due to the very high cost of housing in many locations.
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