561–570 of 1001 posts
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Why would it excite you, rather than terrifying you? The better LLMs get at math, the closer the expertise you spent your whole life building is to being worthless. Along with all the rest of what humans find meaningful and fulfilling.
Does it terrify you to look at children? Not so many years from now, some of them will surpass you. A few years after that all (that survive to that point) will surpass you. Does that terrify you just as much?
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Because for many people who pursue these fundamental truths, the reward is not necessarily personal fame, fortune, or even personal understanding. Advancing humanity's total knowledge (even if that knowledge is by proxy through AI) is reward enough.
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What's happening is the verbal/linguistic equivalent of the invention of calculus. No intellectual field will ever be the same again. Who wouldn't find that exciting, and want to experience it?
I'm not sure I grasp the analogy to the invention of calculus. Calculus helped us solve new and interesting math/physics problems. Repeated for emphasis: helped *us* solve. This technology is solving interesting math/physics problems for us, which is completely different.
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I cannot quite share your enthusiasm. The clearest analogy that I can think of to try to explain why I feel this way is that it seems there will eventually be a phantom textbook of all of mathematics contained in the weights of an LLM; every definition, every proof, etc; and the role of a mathematician is going to be reduced towards reading certain parts of this phantom textbook (read: prompting an LLM to generate a…
It’s funny because the shift from handmade goods to automated factories didn’t seem so bad. Same for mechanized farming instead of mules and people. Shifting from “human calculators” to machines for arithmetic is also hard to argue against. I think what makes the AI transition difficult is it impacts a wide range of high-value activities that would have been implicitly assumed to always remain human. I do have great…
You admit this possibility so I'm not arguing with you, but it seems far more plausible to me that we can build something better than the brain.
In the limit we can just grow brains and put them in computers anyway, then the debate is moot. That's a really hard problem but of course not physically impossible.
For anyone using LLMs heavily for coding, this shouldn't be too surprising. It was just a matter of time. Mathematicians make new discoveries by building and applying mathematical tools in new ways. It is tons of iterative work, following hunches and exploring connections. While true that LLMs can't truly "make discoveries" since they have no sense of what that would mean, they can Monte Carlo every mathematical tool…
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Because for many people who pursue these fundamental truths, the reward is not necessarily personal fame, fortune, or even personal understanding. Advancing humanity's total knowledge (even if that knowledge is by proxy through AI) is reward enough.
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Even taking a purely Kantian interpretation that would scale this beyond mathematicians - and that itself is a logical leap! - making a universal law out of "a discovery can be beautiful regardless of whether created by humans or AI" is is much more specific than the straw extrapolation you've created.
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Personally I don't find this to be true anymore! It's not always great and does still will often tend towards unneeded complexity (especially if not pushed a bit), but I often find GPT 5.5 writing code I would have written myself. This was very much not true with earlier models (who make something that worked, but I'd always have to rewrite to make it "good code").
Personally I found 5.5 a massive step back from 5.4. Both of them still use way too many fallbacks and unnecessary checks, especially if you're having it output php. It's fine if you're just one person and checking everything and able to catch and correct. But it's really bad when you have a team all using it, not checking the output and trusting it's output leading to spaghetti code. Technically works, but very mess…
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I cannot quite share your enthusiasm. The clearest analogy that I can think of to try to explain why I feel this way is that it seems there will eventually be a phantom textbook of all of mathematics contained in the weights of an LLM; every definition, every proof, etc; and the role of a mathematician is going to be reduced towards reading certain parts of this phantom textbook (read: prompting an LLM to generate a…
In Erdös idiosyncratic nomenclature, all the best proofs are "in the book" and it was always a joyful thing to not only find a proof, but to find the proof that is in the book. Who cares if it is God's book or the machine's Xeroxed copy?
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Because for many people who pursue these fundamental truths, the reward is not necessarily personal fame, fortune, or even personal understanding. Advancing humanity's total knowledge (even if that knowledge is by proxy through AI) is reward enough.
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"Let's try to think posts through."
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I disagree. It will be able to perform work deserving if a fields medal before it is capable of running a McDonalds. I think it will be running a McDonalds well before either of those things happen, and a fields medal long after both have happened.
Not necessarily. Obviously playing Kasparov on the board requires more planning ability than managing a McDonald's but look at where chess bots are now. There's much more to being human than our "cognitive abilities"
Not obvious and in fact I think the opposite is way more likely. Chess is well-defined and self-contained in a way that managing a restaurant with fleshy customers never will be.