Live data from Hacker News

An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

openai.com

601–610 of 1001 posts

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#602
post #597

As I have stated before, AI will win a fields medal before it can manage a McDonald's A difficult part was constructing a chess board on which to play math (Lean). Now it's just pattern recognition and computation. LLMs are just the beginning, we'll see more specialized math AI resembling StockFish soon.

Hey ChatGPT, if a person spills hot McCoffee on themselves who is at fault?

Well, brikym, exactly how hot is this hot coffee? If it’s within normal expectations for coffee it is likely that person’s fault. If it is 210 degrees F, it is likely McDonald’s fault.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#603

I like how everyone laughed when OpenAI said their models will have "PhD-Level Intelligence" and now the goalpost has been moved to if AI can create new math (i.e., not PhD-Level, but Leibniz/Euler/Galois level.)

What's laughable is an OpenAI employee invented the term "PHD level intelligence" and you think that " PHD Level intelligence" is a real term that describes a real thing and you are repeating it here.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#604
post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have enough knowledge to dismiss them, but you still laugh? For?

Do you have enough knowledge? I laugh at everyone who accepts these claims in the light they're presented despite knowing so little.

The GP said "I like how everyone laughed when OpenAI said their models will have PhD-Level Intelligence", and you said you still laughed, so I just wanted to confirm if you did laugh at that. Apparently you did not. Thanks for the confirmation. I think you should not, given your admittedly limited understanding.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are conflating composition and prediction. LLMs don't compose higher abstractions from the "axioms, symbols and rules", they simply predict the next token, like a really large spinning wheel.

Show me on the anatomical prop where the magical " real reasoning " gland is.

Nice smug attitude, but LLMs fall flat on their face over and over and over again at tasks no human would fail. They can't even reason out things that literal children succeed at. It's ludicrous to claim that they have some kind of reasoning ability.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#606

As I have stated before, AI will win a fields medal before it can manage a McDonald's A difficult part was constructing a chess board on which to play math (Lean). Now it's just pattern recognition and computation. LLMs are just the beginning, we'll see more specialized math AI resembling StockFish soon.

> A difficult part was constructing a chess board on which to play math (Lean). Now it's just pattern recognition and computation. However, this was not verified in Lean. This was purely plain language in and out. I think, in many ways, this is a quite exciting demonstration of exactly the opposite of the point you're making. Verification comes in when you want to offload checking proofs to computers as well. As it s…

how would they calculate "probability of solving" without automated verification?

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#607
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that idea is deeply fascinating, AND have no problem that we still credit mathematicians with discoveries. Most discoveries are indeed implied from axioms, but every now and then, new mathematics is (for lack of a better word) "created"—and you have people like Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, Euler, Ramanujan, Galois, etc. that treat math more like an art than a science. For example, many belive that to…

Creation is done by humans who have been trained on the data of their life experiences. Nothing new is being created, just changing forms. A scientist has to extract the "Creation" from an abstract dimension using the tools of "human knowledge". The creativity is often selecting the best set of tools or recombining tools to access the platonic space. For instance a "telescope" is not a new creation, it is recombinati…

I’ve long been fascinated by this idea. It’s interesting that in religious texts, god is often called the “Creator” and that is what differentiates him from man. To be able to create would be to be a god.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mean, my reaction to God coming down and saying they were bored of being God and instead they would just sit around and answer all of the mathematician's questions would largely be the same, so yes, who cares if its God's book or the machines Xeroxed copy?

"The Book" is more interesting to me if I am the one coming up with the ideas to fill it in. Maybe this is a bit egotistical, but I'd like to think it is allowed to have a desire that you, personally, are contributing to something in a meaningful way. Like, if you are on a sports team, it'd be more fun to win a game if you were on the field than if you were benched, and I think that's okay. And ultimately I don't find dredging for proofs from an LLM particularly meaningful, nor do I see it as a particularly personal contribution, as anybody else could have done the exact same thing with the same prompt.

This isn't to say I wouldn't love to read the proofs in "The Book" for problems I care about, I just think I'd eventually get bored of only reading. And so its hard to be enthusiastic when this book is being built through an LLM.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#609

To all AI skeptics: What is preventing AI from continuing to improve until it is absolutely better than humans at any mental task? If we compare AI now vs 2022 the difference is outstandingly stark. Do you believe this improvement will just stop before it eclipses all humans in everything we care about?

> What is preventing AI from continuing to improve until it is absolutely better than humans at any mental task?

Well, there's the fact that it hasn't yet improved since what we had 3 years ago. That doesn't really bode well for the prospect of future improvement, though it's not technically impossible.

Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

#610
Many folks are upset about the supplanting of human effort by ai. Umanwizard voiced this valid concern below [1], but his comment got downvoted, unfairly, IMHO, instead of just being addressed. So putting out at least my response as its own top-level comment for visibility.

> the closer the expertise you spent your whole life building is to being worthless.

Perhaps it is time for life to be considered intrinsically valuable, instead of being "worthy" only based on output or capability. Disability, animal and environmental advocates have been fighting for this for a long time. Not too long ago women and minorities were in the same boat. Even now, there are many advocating and fighting for a return to the dark old days.

> Along with all the rest of what humans find meaningful and fulfilling.

Some humans. Many are content to enjoy simply existing, and the beauty of life and the universe around us. Just like many non-scientists today enjoy and benefit from the work of scientists, tomorrow too many will enjoy learning from, and applying the coming advancements and leaps in many fields.

And those of a scientist or other research-type mindset? No doubt they will contribute meaningfully by studying the frontier, noting what remains unanswered, and then advancing the frontier, just like researchers do today; just because scientists in the past solved many questions doesn't mean that there aren't any questions to answer today.

IMHO, AI means that the frontier expands faster, not that it is obliterated. Even AI cannot overcome the laws and limitations of physics/universe: even Dyson spheres only capture the energy of one star, thus setting a limit on the amount of compute, and thereby a limit on intelligence. And we are a loooong way from a Dyson sphere.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215122

Post reply on HN