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An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

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

#821
post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I guess sci-fi movies were right all along. Nobody in Star Wars knows how hyperspace travel works, it just works. The little robots know everything but almost no human bothers to care. People just carry on with their bickering lives while the bots whiz in the background, and these robots are astonished at human inefficiency every single time, but rarely do anything about it. And people are still people.

That's only because movies like Star Wars are not sci-fi movies, but more like westerns in space.

Sounds of explosions and engine whine in vacuum beg to differ!

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

#822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ve AI narratives, but in reality all of that WILL wither down to... Looks like you're pretty sure of that. Every time I see argument like this delivered with confidence I wonder how is it different from, say, digital calculators. Or better yet, books - Greek philosophers moaned that young people will stop understanding anything and just check books when they want to know anything.

> Looks like you're pretty sure of that. Knowing the history of the humankind is what makes me pretty sure of that. The extent of misery and destruction is directly proportional to the level of technological advancements, and I don't like the idea of sacrificing millions of lives in the name of the figurative HVAC, smartphone and other benefits of civilization . Or billions in the name of whatever benefits the next V…

Are we just going to totally ignore the Polio vaccine? Modern medicine? Modern agriculture?

If you had a magic button that turned off all those "benefits of civilization", millions would die. If you managed to drag agriculture down with the rest, the death toll would be in the billions.

I don't understand how you can possibly think you "know history" without recognizing that technological progress has taken us from constant warfare to such a state of abundance that war is actually rare and noteworthy in much of the world.

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

#823

I'd like to know how many tokens in total went into solving this problem. Have they talked about this? It matters whether they got this result in 10 million tokens or 10 billion. Whether it's closer to 1 human working on this for 1 year or 1000 humans for 1 year. The news feels different when the probability of one AI run solving this is 1 in a thousand vs 1 a million. Approximately I'm asking about the amount of mon…

Any answer to this question must also consider the current cost/token and its downward trajectory as algo and hardware advances drive down costs.

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

#824

I am cautious about AI "discoveries" after Mythos paper. What was the process of a writing a paper? Was the question asked by a mathematician? Was the paper right from a get-go or was there someone who pointed out mistakes? How much attempts were made before solution was found? I will eat my words if an AI oneshotted that one without any external help, but for know I am left wandering whether it's a new way to attrib…

> I will eat my words if an AI oneshotted that one without any external help

like having a colleague peer review your paper, or bouncing ideas off a mentor before you write them down?

I agree there's a lot of AI marketing BS at the moment, but revising approaches based on feedback is a good thing.

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

#825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if they train the model on verification assisted by Lean.

Same could be said for human mathematicians that learn from tools like Lean.

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

#827
post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no mathematician but it seems like if this happens, we get to a quite intriguing place as a species. Say we achieve interstellar travel, but nobody actually knows how it works. Or we cure cancer, but the "cure" requires a microrobotic implant, and it runs as a blackbox AI, and only the other AIs can make one, and there's no guarantee they will know how to make one tomorrow. Or we solve global warming but it requi…

That's already how civilization works. There's no one person that knows everything about (say) modern food production, from top to bottom. If it ever stopped working (because too much knowledge was lost somehow), most people would die. And yet the system seems fairly resilient. Mostly, only local knowledge ever seems to be necessary to keep the whole thing running. Super-intelligence (or even just super-normal-intell…

[dead]

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

#828
post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no mathematician but it seems like if this happens, we get to a quite intriguing place as a species. Say we achieve interstellar travel, but nobody actually knows how it works. Or we cure cancer, but the "cure" requires a microrobotic implant, and it runs as a blackbox AI, and only the other AIs can make one, and there's no guarantee they will know how to make one tomorrow. Or we solve global warming but it requi…

That's already how civilization works. There's no one person that knows everything about (say) modern food production, from top to bottom. If it ever stopped working (because too much knowledge was lost somehow), most people would die. And yet the system seems fairly resilient. Mostly, only local knowledge ever seems to be necessary to keep the whole thing running. Super-intelligence (or even just super-normal-intell…

We can reach a different situation

1/ No one knows how even small components work, because their inner working mechanism is too hard to understand by human mind

2/ The whole society is run (in intelligence sense) by alien minds

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

#829

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.)

Yet it still codes like a junior developer that memorized all of stack overflow.

this is not true at all. I'm using Opus and it's great at very complex problems.

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

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ve AI narratives, but in reality all of that WILL wither down to... Looks like you're pretty sure of that. Every time I see argument like this delivered with confidence I wonder how is it different from, say, digital calculators. Or better yet, books - Greek philosophers moaned that young people will stop understanding anything and just check books when they want to know anything.

> Looks like you're pretty sure of that. Knowing the history of the humankind is what makes me pretty sure of that. The extent of misery and destruction is directly proportional to the level of technological advancements, and I don't like the idea of sacrificing millions of lives in the name of the figurative HVAC, smartphone and other benefits of civilization . Or billions in the name of whatever benefits the next V…

10000 years ago we had 10-15% deaths from violence (skeletal evidence). As well as infections, child mortality, starvation and injuries.

Benefits of civilization eliminated most of that + increased quality of life dramatically.

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