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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

#311

Post by fn-mote »

natsucks wrote: post #182
zarzavat wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

i'd take a yoga class from a bot

How would this be different from taking a yoga class from a video?

I would be willing to be proven wrong, but I doubt the ability of LLMs to give useful corrections in yoga much more than their ability to write useful code.

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

#312

Post by piloto_ciego »

eichin wrote: post #306
piloto_ciego wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the ad hominem? I mean, seriously, you think I haven't been "in the trenches?" Dude, I'm nearly 40. I've seen the shit. When I was flying for a living, literal close friends died because of the results of avarice. Dream big dude! This constant "doom and gloom" narrative is toxic to your ability to flourish. I have been there, I understand the urge to doom and gloom, but we make the world we want to live in. We do…

what's getting built is more like Asimov's Spacers/Solarians, though. (Vastly reduced population wielding thousands of robots each)

I mean, birth rates are crashing hard here in the US so this might be decent future?

Maybe average human lifespan gets kicked up to 200 years or whatever and we make do with robots to fill in the gaps in labor with robots?

I don’t know? But this kind of seems to track with how we’re trending now?

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

#313

Post by _zoltan_ »

dag100 wrote: post #262
derac wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should also burn books and lobotomize ourselves to make science more fun and challenging. The ego here sickens me. I don't care about your ego. I want accelerated material science, medical science, energy, better outcomes for people across the world.

> I want accelerated material science, medical science, energy, better outcomes for people across the world. There will be people benefiting from advances in these fields. Neither you nor I will be one of them.

If that's your starting position then for sure you won't, buddy.

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

#314

Post by fn-mote »

onraglanroad wrote: post #193
xorcist wrote: post #145

Earlier 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.

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.

> more absurd to think that humans are near the top of that curve rather than right at the bottom

The “absurd” dimension does not enter. This is a situation where you have no evidence at all.

In the absence of any information, the average (mean or median) is your best guess. Now where that average is, you have no idea.

> There might be a thing beyond intelligence that we can't even conceive of.

This statement already supposes there is a thing called “intelligence”. People have been pretending to measure this for more than a century. Modern thinking at least says what we call intelligence is not a single concept.

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

#315

Post by gizmodo59 »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #113

In the Reddit post there was clarification that this was done with Sol Pro not Ultra - curious what is everyone’s mental model of the difference. My understanding is that ChatGPT Pro is effectively a multi agent system, or somehow uses multiple LLMs in parallel and selects a best answer. And Ultra is more similar to Claude-Code UltraCode where the main agent can choose to create a dynamic JS workflow that determinist…

ultra in codex is just a way to run multi agent system, pro is similar to other pro models like 5.5

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

#316

Post by moomoo11 »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #313
dag100 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want accelerated material science, medical science, energy, better outcomes for people across the world. There will be people benefiting from advances in these fields. Neither you nor I will be one of them.

If that's your starting position then for sure you won't, buddy.

“you’re talking to someone who woke up a loser today”

looks like you met the reverse Huang lol

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

#317

Post by neerajsi »

smaudet wrote: post #291
YZF wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody knows. It's not a zero sum game. You can have AI "senior engineers" working under humans building bigger things than we've been able to. We also don't know where the capabilities of current AIs will plateau. The benchmarks aren't really telling the entire story. From my perspective of using the models there are certain axis where they're not making a lot of progress, like being able to have large accurate cont…

> It's not a zero sum game. Resources are, though. The planet cannot support a race of digital super-people, and us, and an continually growing economy. It's the height of folly to think that, as things are going, we are going anywhere "good".

I was arguing with a friend about this point today. I'd posit that our economy has been growing in a way where goods that require more human time and natural resources to produce are giving way to goods that are intangible.

Once we've met our basic material needs, we're tending to consume things that are replicable with low marginal costs, and which do not interfere with the production of other goods. So maybe we can actually support a continually growing digital and entertainment economy, at least for a few more generations.

Maybe these mathematical contributions will also impact the efficiency and capabilities of our material production systems as well, which is another way to keep the economy growing.

I'm optimistic that we'll do more with our resources rather than trying to optimize for doing the same more efficiently with less resources.

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

#318

Post by Vasbarlog »

xeromal wrote: post #165
_alternator_ wrote: post #76

I know a bit about this field. This conjecture reads as somewhat more niche than the cyclic double cover conjecture recently proved by OpenAI, but nevertheless represents a real contribution. You want to know how long it takes to solve an optimization problem, in this case over convex, lipschitz functions. (The restriction to a spherical domain is not really a restriction, you can just change variables for any bounde…

Sometimes I read a comment on HN that is so advanced that it's just as readable to me as Greek. Love reading it just to see someone work though!

Έχεις απόλυτο δίκιο!

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

#319

Post by cornell532 »

moomoo11 wrote: post #294
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this depressing and bleak? No one is stopping you from doing math if that's what you want to do. Should I ban table saws because they make people too good at woodworking? Should we ban right-angles? This line of thought doesn't lead anywhere fruitful.

just ignore these people gig economy is a blessing to keep the LCD busy and doing something productive instead of being nihilistic losers it’s better to focus on how to keep these “knowledge” workers busy for the AI age they don’t like to work and complain even on a w2 job (where someone else had to figure out how to capitalize them) so in many ways they’re far more dangerous and hopeless.

Don’t be so nasty about w2 workers. Incredibly unbecoming.

Also see comparative advantage re best roles for each actor in an economy

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