Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

841–850 of 1001 posts

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

#841

Post by bayindirh »

SyzygyRhythm wrote: post #752
biztos wrote: 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…

However, you can assemble a team of humans who knows the whole pipeline. This trajectory lands us squarely in "The Machine Stops" of "Pump Six" territory, where assembling such a team or going back to a simpler system is impossible

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

#842

Post by mxkopy »

biztos wrote: post #731
teiferer wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every day, it grows harder and harder to contain a mental map of recent relevant progress by simple virtue of the amount being produced. And by opening the door to LLM-generated results, you'll see greater and greater amounts without any hope of ever navigating this field again without machine help. It's a little like a software project which more and more gets extended by a AI agents with less and less review by h…

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…

I doubt we’d build anything IRL without understanding how it works first. And we’re pretty good at putting 2+2 together once we have the pieces, for a lot of these things we don’t even have those. After all AI can just explain it to us atp

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

#843

Post by dandaka »

jltsiren wrote: post #210
0x5FC3 wrote: post #30

Is there a reason why we only hear of Erdos problems being solved? I would imagine there are a myriad of other unsolved problems in math, but every single ChatGPT "breakthrough in math" I come across on r/singularity and r/accelerate are Erdos problems.

Erdős problems form a substantial fraction of all mathematical problems that have been explicitly stated but not solved; are sufficiently famous that people care about them; and are sufficiently uninteresting that people have not spent that much effort trying to solve them. Solving problems people have already stated is a niche activity in mathematical research. More often, people study something they find interestin…

Do we have a list of open problems? Would love to see a chart, where AI solves such problems one by one in the upcoming years.

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

#844

Post by withinboredom »

bayindirh wrote: post #841
SyzygyRhythm wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

However, you can assemble a team of humans who knows the whole pipeline. This trajectory lands us squarely in "The Machine Stops" of "Pump Six" territory, where assembling such a team or going back to a simpler system is impossible

Sorta. Take a look at a brick in a house. You'd need everyone from geologists to miners to kiln specialists to construction workers and engineers -- not to mention all the people required to make the tools required to make the tools. The team would likely involve well over 1000 people. So, "just assemble a team" is not quite as simple as you make it sound.

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

#845

Post by pocksuppet »

Nesco wrote: post #714
make3 wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, AI feels like the morbidity of Star Trek teleportation, where it's actually copying the person at to the other end and zapping the original one out of existence. The original human never benefits from the fast transportation. Similarly, we're creating tools to improve knowledge, but we're progressively zapping the human out of the equation. Knowledge is created for something, but it's unclear if very soon huma…

You lost me at “except billionaires”. I don’t see how Jeff Bezos benefits from this one much more than let’s say Terence Tao. Can a tech news stay a tech news, without getting bombardes with leftist subtexts all the time?

Billionaires are going to benefit from AI at the expense of everyone else. That's not leftist ideology, that's just a fact. That's happened with every technology that's ever been created. It happened with the industrial revolution. Why would it be different this time?

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

#846

Post by sigmoid10 »

RealityVoid wrote: post #805
computerex wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that’s already becoming true. I sometimes work on problems/projects where the AI agent is definitely more qualified than me to call the shots. For example, this library here for deep learning is 100% ai generated and far beyond my technical capabilities. https://github.com/computerex/dlgo

I find AI a great scaffolding for improving understanding and mental models. BUT! It's all in how you use it.

The real question is: Do you need to understand it fully for it to improve your life?

For example, if you're in fundamental science (or generally a fan of reductionism), it for sure would be nice to understand the universe instead of just having access to an AI that can comprehend it. But to the majority of the population it only matters that someone (or something) understands it enough to make it useful to others.

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

#847

Post by ninjagoo »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #808
ninjagoo wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

These all are valid, noble points I also used to brood about while being young and financially supported by my parents.

> These all are valid, noble points I also used to brood about while being young and financially supported by my parents.

Ah, the proverbial silver spoon. Sadly, I never had that luxury. If you look through my comments, you'll notice I'm more at the get-off-my-lawn point.

Also, what happened? Real world wear you down and turn you cynical? It is possible to be hopeful and cynical at the same time. This tech is something new we're seeing: the future is as yet unwritten. r/LocalLLaMa works well, so there's hope even if corporate ai goes kaput.

My generation has been lucky to see a few new things, though we certainly live in interesting times. Moon Landings. Berlin Wall fall. Moore's Law. EU (I have the old coinage to serve as a reminder). Space Shuttles. China and India integrating with the world. Cellphones. The Internet. Digital Photos. Linux. Solar. 3D-printing. Smartphones. Tablets. Bitcoin. EVs. Mars rovers. Asteroid visits. Internet from space. FTTH. MRNA. Gene Therapy. MRI. Ultrasound. Wi-Fi. Mesh Wi-Fi. Reusable Rockets. Cubesats. Selfies from space. Drones. LoRa/LoraWAN. Maglev HSR. And now AI, real AI. Chinese-like Whale Language.

There's hope for the future yet. You can help make it happen right. But only if you leave the cynicism at the door. Can't give up - it's our kids' futures at stake.

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

#848

Post by farialima »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #664
virgildotcodes wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we’re looking at a new class of wonderful machines that can potentially make meaningful contributions to the sciences and maybe even humanity as a whole, in addition to far more insidious and destructive capabilities. You are right to point out that the ones who fully own and pilot the machines all belong to the “fuck science and humanity as a whole” group. So the likely outcomes don’t look good. Echoes the e…

> I think we’re looking at a wonderful machine that can potentially make meaningful contributions to the sciences and maybe even humanity as a whole. That's true. But. Maybe you've seen the Oppenheimer movie, there is a moment where Oppenheimer shakes Teller's hand, basically after the guy ruins Oppenheimer's life in a completely immature betrayal. That's what people are angry about, the academy community is Oppenhei…

> You cannot name a single politician who is a mathematician.

I can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9dric_Villani

( and of course Wikipedia has a list :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematician-politici... )

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

#849

Post by pocksuppet »

edbaskerville wrote: post #92
Lerc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just visited a McDonald's for the first time in a while. The self-order kiosk UI is quite bad. I think this is evidence in favor of the idea that an incompetent AI will soon be incompetently running a McDonald's.

Recently I tried to order at a Subway (which has decent quality food outside of the USA). They have kiosks. The kiosk only responded to touch about 60% of the time and took two seconds to respond. The employee who could've easily taken my order was just standing there bored. The future is here and it sucks.

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

#850

Post by withinboredom »

ocimbote wrote: post #778
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noble " save the humankind using the tech nobody fucking understands " textbook goals like curing cancer, solving global warming and achieving interstellar travel would always turn up when owners of trillions of dollars place orders on positive AI narratives, but in reality all of that will wither down to " It's what plants crave! It's got electrolytes. "

That is fascinating how the more knowledge and reasoning we can get our hands on and actually produce, the higher the risk of us, as a species, to become actually much dumber. It's hard to describe the feeling of seeing intelligence being delegated increasingly to AI. If that's not a pivotal moment, a revolution, I don't know what is.

> That is fascinating how the more knowledge and reasoning we can get our hands on and actually produce, the higher the risk of us, as a species, to become actually much dumber.

This has always been true. There was a time where someone had to teach farming to others and that information had to spread and be passed down. Eventually, farmers became better than hunter-gatherers and they became known as hunters. The information on what was safe to gather for civilisation got passed down as 'safe to eat on the hunt' because the farmers were farming. The civilisation collectively "forgets" foraged foods as that knowledge becomes niche.

Does that mean we got dumber?

Post reply on HN