We have a non peer reviewed proof in a niche area of mathematics claiming to have been "co-written" by an LLM. What are the comments about? Lamenting or celebrating humanity's intellectual death... Very insightful.
GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
381–390 of 414 posts
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#382Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#383I can't see this article as Reddit doesn't allow me to view it. Do we have to use Reddit though? It's a horrible website.
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you write is what's profoundly depressing. The only way you see people flourishing is through coercion, by society or by the world. You'd explicitly rather prolong this codependency for your aesthetic preferences even, as per your own words. We're already just circus monkeys in your world. You cannot fathom people pursuing self-improvement because e.g. developing or being capable is inherently enjoyable. You onl…
Yes, not everyone will agree with me. Maybe some people just want to consume AI abundance forever and live on UBI, like Altman’s wet dream. But there will be some group of people, the people who wanted to be skilled tailors, skilled wood workers and apply them towards others before industrialization ruined them and of course the best mathematicians, the best programmers, before AI revolution will ruin them. We want n…
> Maybe some people just want to consume AI abundance forever and live on UBI, like Altman’s wet dream.
Callousness like this is not exactly the hallmark of clear minded reasoning, which is your responsibility, I hope you haven't forgotten. Like no, there are more options than the two convenient strawmans you crafted. Kind of what my whole comment's been about.
Maybe it doesn't matter though, we seem to have already lost you to some neo-Amish fantasy. Except this is not even me being callous in response, you quite literally spelled it out. You'd quite literally take your current gripes and extend them indefinitely, forever shaking your fist at the sky, arrogantly refusing to even attempt to adapt to the (already present) world, all while being dependent on being tolerated in your historical reenactment. Apparently this makes sense to you, just like all the other vile ideas you pitched.
There truly are no stronger limitations than one's own mind.
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#385[flagged]
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was trained as a mathematician and worked as a math researcher for a little while (now working as a private tutor), and based on my experience I'd say this description is basically right, with one extra wrinkle. In order to get a Ph.D., you have to do some sort of original research, so in that sense you're working on "previously unsolved stuff" basically right from the start. But that doesn't entail doing anything…
> In order to get a Ph.D., you have to do some sort of original research, China has now introduced "practical PhDs" where you have to build some practical machine instead.
That is exclusive to engineering PhDs, entirely irrelevant to the discussion of math PhDs.
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
So I wrote a whole bunch about college paintball statistics here: https://www.pbnation.com/showthread.php?t=3949120 Then I wrote some more about pro paintball stats in the below three Reddit posts: 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/paintball/comments/1h17f2m/intro_to... 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/paintball/comments/1jy5xqp/paintbal... 3. https://www.reddit.com/r/paintball/comments/1k6bzi7/paintbal... Some highlights: - I…
> Made it harder to be the "come on guys! we can win this" coach when we were down on points + bodies.
Would you say that paintball on that level is almost deterministic? Compared to, for example, (American) football where momentum and perseverance can turn games around completely.
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In order to get a Ph.D., you have to do some sort of original research, China has now introduced "practical PhDs" where you have to build some practical machine instead.
That is exclusive to engineering PhDs, entirely irrelevant to the discussion of math PhDs.
Unless, of course, the machine being constructed is the prover (and prompts) that proved the results (or achieved whatever result instead of the human achieving it.)
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to create an account to respond to this because I am quite convinced these math problems they are "solving" are pure marketing. Why is it only GPT doing this, why not Claude? Why does Terrance Tao do marketing for OpenAI? I suspect OpenAI has hired math researchers to solve obscure problems and put them in their training set, purely for marketing reasons. There was a good comment on the Pelican bicycle svg yest…
I (author of the paper) can't speak for others, but I have no affiliation whatsoever with OpenAI and have not received anything from them (I even pay for my subscription lol). I've thrown this problem at each model with new model releases, and 5.6 was the first one to solve it, so that's my side of that story.
Thanks for responding. I don't personally believe you have affiliation, more that OpenAI saw the problem was being worked on, gathered training data for solving it and training the model on it, then eventually you found it through the model (and now it's a big impressive thing for OpenAI)
Part of me agrees with the other comments that it sounds absurd, especially because of how involved/intricate your prompting was. But given you have been prompting this problem for a year, OpenAI could easily have seen your attempts/progress, and worked towards solving it with human intelligence that the agent was then trained on. Given the lengths these companies go to for training these things (Meta literally reorganizing their engineering department to provide training data for engineering problems), and also how much difficulty these models have with problems outside their dataset, I really have to wonder if it's the model being "intelligent" or if it has been trained on it
Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
#390Earlier 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.
Ah, so you're saying none of us will benefit from the discovery of new mathematical knowledge? You've just condemned funding math, even human-produced math. Either math is useful, in which case AI math is useful, or math is not useful, in which case we can save money by having mathematicians sell shoes or clean toilets.
Look carefully at the portion of derac's comment that was quoted.
> I want accelerated material science, medical science, energy, better outcomes for people across the world.
Does it mention mathematics?
Let AI make advances in all these fields. But if most of the power and capital in society is captured by a tiny minority, then these advances will become inaccessible to common people.