The problem is that we're going to have another deepseek moment when someone uses GLM or Kimi K3 to do this.
What was the first DeepSeek moment? (genuine question, I'm out of the loop on what you mean)
GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
191–200 of 414 posts
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Around here AI isn't really more of a threat to juniors than it is to seniors. It's a threat to the people who have been taught "recipies" rather than applied computer science. You can have excellent seniors who can do TDD, DRY, SOLID and so on, who also happen to have no idea what a L1 cache miss is. The current AI models know all of those things, but they struggle applying them correctly without someone piloting th…
Interesting, thanks. I don't know where "around here" is, but the signals I've seen in a lot of articles is that the demand for junior software people has taken a dive since a year or two back, with student programs etc getting cancelled. One googler said they were getting a junior to their team and that was kind of a big deal because it hadn't happened in that whole department for a long time. In relation to that, I…
I'm from Denmark and I've been an external examiner for various CS educations for the previous 13 years now. Some of them teach you a lot about how the hardware works, others mainly teach you design patterns. Five years ago the latter was in high demand, because a lot of software development frankly doesn't need computer science (until it does). Now there is almost no demand for them.
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you’re claiming that AIs will suddenly (and very soon) stop improving, they are obviously a threat to everyone’s job. Calling notable conjectures that have been open for decades “low-hanging fruit” is an act of desperation. Most professional mathematicians couldn’t have proved those conjectures if their lives depended on it.
The thought that anything could improve without bounds would be absurd. We are living in the physical world after all. The (open, interesting) question is how close we are to the limit.
Types of technology - of which we can include intelligence - move along S curves, but it's more absurd to think that humans are near the top of that curve rather than right at the bottom.
There might be a thing beyond intelligence that we can't even conceive of.
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thought that anything could improve without bounds would be absurd. We are living in the physical world after all. The (open, interesting) question is how close we are to the limit.
It’s safe to assume that after less than a decade of LLM development, we’re nowhere close to the limit yet. In fact, progress still seems to be accelerating at the moment.
If anything, it should be safe to assume by now that capabilities don't scale linearly with model size.
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
>what stops an LLM from applying similar lines of thought* in a manner that results in a novel conjecture? One thing is that an LLM can never assume, or find out, an inconsistency in its training data. Novel ideas often require correction of existing assumptions. As far as I understand, it is impossible, by design, for LLMs to contradict what is in its training data. For example, an LLM trained on the data from an in…
They can, but it's limited to that specific chat context.
They can spot contradictions in the the prompt. But not in their own training data.
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Around here AI isn't really more of a threat to juniors than it is to seniors. It's a threat to the people who have been taught "recipies" rather than applied computer science. You can have excellent seniors who can do TDD, DRY, SOLID and so on, who also happen to have no idea what a L1 cache miss is. The current AI models know all of those things, but they struggle applying them correctly without someone piloting th…
AI is a threat to everyone. People who claim that AI will never be able to do X have consistently been proven wrong. The only people who are safe are those whose jobs depend in some way on their humanity. e.g. yoga teachers, bouncers, etc
This was sort of what I wanted to say, but I guess I should have worded it differently. I certainly didn't mean to say that I thought AI would stop improving. If anything I'm surprised at how much we have to fight the AI models to do what NASA has been doing for 60(?) years.
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so advanced that it's just as readable to me as Greek I used to feel this way about statistics. The language and terms are hard to understand and many of the formulas are taught as "just memorize this" instead of building up from first principles. But then I started using statistics to analyze something I cared a lot about (paintball) and I quickly realized it's like learning anything new: - there is jargon - and c…
I gotta know what you use stats for regarding paintball. I haven't played in years but I loved playing back in the tipman 98 custom era (not sure if that's still a popular marker).
That era is now! (Still)
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#198Two 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…
> but it is worth noting that this wasn't a matter of "ChatGPT, solve this unsolved problem. Make no mistakes."
It wasn't the case for this, but when OpenAI disproved the Unit Distance Conjecture, it was really done autonomously by an automated AI pipeline with a completely AI-generated prompt. No human expertise required at all in the process (well, except for the final human verification).
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#199This is all a depressing and bleak future that I don’t look forward to. One solution is to ban LLM’s, to artificially create a demand for human thought, that just feels like living in an artificially constructed zoo. Another solution is humans don’t do anything that AI can do better , / doesn’t need the human touch. So I suppose we will all become artists, sportsmen or politicians, the only jobs that will remain exce…
It genuinely scares me that some people's first reaction to this news is banning LLM.