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GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

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Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#61

Post by sscaryterry »

fidotron wrote: post #53
sscaryterry wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a silly and obtuse comment.

You mean the answer betrays the point: customer service is surprisingly hard, we just have a large number of people that are capable of doing it. This is what the whole https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf is about.

I stand by my point, you've not read the author's intent, instead you decided to twist words.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#62

Post by ianm218 »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #33

[flagged]

Cancer is also bottleknecked by a lot more than just intelligence. If you have 100 of the smartest PHd students working on a cancer problem you have to wait for funding, lab experiments, and clinical trials etc. Math is deterministic and requires nothing like that.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#63

Post by lvl155 »

mw67 wrote: post #14

Crazy how intelligence is cheap, efficient and commonplace now. We humans better refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant

Intelligence was always relatively cheap. You can pick up a phone and get answers for free in most academic settings.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#64

Post by fidotron »

sscaryterry wrote: post #61
fidotron wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the answer betrays the point: customer service is surprisingly hard, we just have a large number of people that are capable of doing it. This is what the whole https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf is about.

I stand by my point, you've not read the author's intent, instead you decided to twist words.

What a silly and obtuse comment.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#65

Post by 12345hn6789 »

skeke wrote: post #34
mw67 wrote: post #14

Crazy how intelligence is cheap, efficient and commonplace now. We humans better refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant

Oh brother AI hasn’t even taken the class of jobs associated with customer service lmao

Uh.... Have you ever called customer service lately?

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#66

Post by MinimalAction »

weregiraffe wrote: post #28
mw67 wrote: post #14

Crazy how intelligence is cheap, efficient and commonplace now. We humans better refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant

Mathematics is a human-designed game that involves rearranging symbols.

That view is incredibly reductionist. It really is an efficient encoding of how nature behaves. It might be a human construct, but given how best it allows to understand nature (through principles of physics), it is uncanny to be any different from the language of nature.

Reminds me of Wigner's Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#67

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

weregiraffe wrote: post #28
mw67 wrote: post #14

Crazy how intelligence is cheap, efficient and commonplace now. We humans better refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant

Mathematics is a human-designed game that involves rearranging symbols.

At a very high level mathematics is basically 100% text/symbolic rewriting. You start from some set of postulate assumed true and you do your thing to get a new different set of equivalent assertions in a form that is more useful.

I don’t know if LLMs will kill the working-mathematicians but at least seem like that it doesn’t seem absurd to imagine LLMs will be good at math…

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#69

Post by camdenreslink »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #20
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #10

Two points: - Hasn't been peer reviewed yet, so take with a grain of salt. This applies to all claimed proofs, not just AI-generated ones. Even humans hallucinate proofs too! - The prompt is on page 27 here[1]. It is ten pages of advanced mathematics priming the model in the right direction, apparently informed by a year of prior research. That doesn't invalidate the result if it is genuine, but it is worth noting th…

Saying “solve this problem” doesn’t get good results most of the time with humans either, it’s entirely underspecified so the person assigned that problem may solve it in a variety of unacceptable ways or not at all or perhaps worse solve the wrong problem because you weren’t clear about its definition. This actually happens all the time. What matters is the ability to communicate clearly and with precision as well a…

The subtext of this whole post (or at least a subtext that some might read), is "we don't need mathematicians/programmers anymore" or "we will need much fewer mathematicians/programmers". So the fact that this result required a year of prior research and a 10 page prompt of specialized knowledge goes against that subtext. You still needed the human just as much to get to the result, and the LLM ended up being a tool to find the last bit.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#70

Post by amelius »

mw67 wrote: post #14

Crazy how intelligence is cheap, efficient and commonplace now. We humans better refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant

Everybody can be an armchair mathematician now. Just fling some thoughts in the direction of your AI setup and let it do breadth first search with AI based pruning heuristics.
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