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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

#521

Post by aspenmartin »

jplusequalt wrote: post #500
aspenmartin wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What a weird fucking measuring stick. By your logic crypto is one of man's greatest achievements because it received oodles of investor cash, and kicked up tons of conversations online about the nature of finance and banking.

It’s not the measuring stick, what it can do is the measuring stick. Another person comparing a system that can do Erdos proofs to a compiler or even worse, crypto? Everyone has a right to be unimpressed i just find it incredible to be so dismissive with a straight face.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#522

Post by brookst »

jplusequalt wrote: post #499
brookst wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools don’t eliminate work, they abstract and amplify work. Those who miss this point are doomed to become the folks who say “back in my day we walked to school in the snow, uphill both ways”. The map isn’t the territory; thinking about what to build is just as valid as thinking about how to build it. Architects aren’t carpenters, but that doesn’t mean there’s no value in architecture.

>The map isn’t the territory; thinking about what to build is just as valid as thinking about how to build it If this was the case, the demand for architects would be different than what see today.

Not following. The demand for architects is gated by the cost of building. And the metaphor is that all if us who used to be carpenters can be architects, in the software sense. Maybe some people don’t want to be, but it is still a very thought-intensive profession.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#523

Post by whimsicalism »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #514

All this sounds to me like mathematicians spooking themselves with stories of how ChatGPT solved a problem, when it's mathematicians solving a problem using ChatGPT as a tool. E.g. from the twitter thread by Timothy Gowers: >> All I did was say things like, "Yes, it would be great if you could explore that idea and see whether you can get it to work," or "Could you rewrite that argument as a LaTeX file in the style o…

Sorry, just so I fully understand your comment - your claim is that asking it to “explore that idea further” and “write the paper in latex” constitutes “taking the horse to the water and making the horse drink”?

thank you for the morning laugh

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#524

Post by sillyfluke »

slibhb wrote: post #506
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…

> I see this happening in the enterprise. People delegate work to some LLM; work isn't always bad, sometimes it's even acceptable. But it's not their work, and as a result, the author doesn't know or understand it better than anyone else! They don't own it, they can't explain it. They literally have no value whatsoever; they're a passthrough; they're invisible. According to the blog post linked in the OP, the LLM-gen…

I think you are misunderstanding the parent's comment.

>the LLM-generated results were read, understood, and confirmed by the mathematician whose work they built on.

The mathematician and the blog author are not the same person (as you seem to understand). Nathanson (the mathematician) is the one who is the expert verifier. He is the person who has the higher value and won't be fired in some hypothetical.

>>They don't own it, they can't explain it. They literally have no value whatsoever; they're a passthrough; they're invisible.

This is the blog author in the parent's description. If their boss asks them what they need to prove that the AI is more than capable in this domain and the author tells their boss they need Nathanson (the mathematician) to verify the results, his boss will thank him for demonstrating the AI's capability in this domain, fire him, pass his prompt history to Nathanson, and keep Nathanson on the job (the expert verifier).

Which is the parent's point after all, because he's referring to the hypothetical job security of the blog author not the mathematician.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#526

Post by [deleted] »

whimsicalism wrote: post #523
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #514

All this sounds to me like mathematicians spooking themselves with stories of how ChatGPT solved a problem, when it's mathematicians solving a problem using ChatGPT as a tool. E.g. from the twitter thread by Timothy Gowers: >> All I did was say things like, "Yes, it would be great if you could explore that idea and see whether you can get it to work," or "Could you rewrite that argument as a LaTeX file in the style o…

Sorry, just so I fully understand your comment - your claim is that asking it to “explore that idea further” and “write the paper in latex” constitutes “taking the horse to the water and making the horse drink”? thank you for the morning laugh

[deleted]

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#527

Post by pessimizer »

billfor wrote: post #467
y1n0 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Blame The Bee Gees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jive_Talkin '

"Jive" is anacronistic black American slang for bullshit.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#528

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

whimsicalism wrote: post #523
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #514

All this sounds to me like mathematicians spooking themselves with stories of how ChatGPT solved a problem, when it's mathematicians solving a problem using ChatGPT as a tool. E.g. from the twitter thread by Timothy Gowers: >> All I did was say things like, "Yes, it would be great if you could explore that idea and see whether you can get it to work," or "Could you rewrite that argument as a LaTeX file in the style o…

Sorry, just so I fully understand your comment - your claim is that asking it to “explore that idea further” and “write the paper in latex” constitutes “taking the horse to the water and making the horse drink”? thank you for the morning laugh

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#529

Post by ComplexSystems »

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…

Absolutely. Who cares if the LLM automates some of the grunt work? Mathematicians are artists, and they paint with ideas. The goal is map out more of the beautiful structure of how things work. The enjoyment in it derives entirely from the payoff of seeing the larger view of how things fit together. If part of their process involves bouncing things off of other people, or even LLMs, I don't think it matters much, nor does it take away from the enjoyment in getting things figured out.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#530

Post by fasterik »

elAhmo wrote: post #482
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…

> 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. I swear that people have said the same thing with effectively every new model that came out in the last six mo…

> I swear that people have said the same thing with effectively every new model

That is definitely true, and at the same time, we can measure progress by who is making that claim. When Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medalist, says that models are now capable of "producing a piece of PhD-level research in an hour or so, with no serious mathematical input from me," we can be pretty confident that we are getting into seriously interesting territory.

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