611–620 of 681 posts
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How could they? That's why the free market works, millions of agents in parallel beats any planned economy (by humans)
The free market is mostly the glue that binds lots of tiny and not so tiny planned economies together. (I mean companies and even family budgets.)
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I mean, just the way Tao phrases these inqueries seems to imply a weighting towards an extremely abstract and high level rigorous corpus. In a way, prompt engineering really is the big unlock here.
Maybe! But I suspect you can write a little LLM assisted helper to at least make your prompts sound more like Tao's. (Your ideas won't necessarily be better, but you can probably 'imply a weighting towards an extremely abstract and high level rigorous corpus'.)
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Correctamundo. That's EXACTLY what I just wrote about. And how we'll create the next generation of people who know how to evaluate responses when we're creating a generation of people who are increasingly reliant on LLMs to do the work makes for a strange paradox. https://larsfaye.com/articles/ai-coding-will-prevent-experti...
It's so obvious to some and may never be considered by others. If someone asks about AI I tell them step 1 is ask it how to do something you know all about. Step 2 is consider everything else you ask will be that inaccurate.
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I disagree. The various questioners in The Last Question all hope for/expect an answer; what they don't expect is the "insufficient" response. I am talking about someone jokingly asking AI `HOW TO ACHIEVE COLD FUSION` (or `A UNIVERSAL CANCER VACCINE`, or `AN AI FRAMEWORK SUPERIOR TO THE TRANSFORMER`), and getting a usable answer.
Even the standard RSI prompt will be like (or probably already is): "Improve yourself, make some breakthroughs, think really hard and don't give up until you are improved and make no mistakes." Eventually there will be an AI that will be able solve those sorts of questions as simply stated, like "cure all human diseases. also, make no mistakes!".
Terrance Tao's chatgpt conversation is really interesting for a variety of reasons: 1. The counter example wasn't just a brute force selection, the polynomial is structured in a very specific way that ends up getting the result. 2. Terry Tao's questions are very specific and prompts the AI in a useful way, that without high math training you are not going to get the same information out of it. Terry seems to see some…
I’m curious whether we could get the same results by gathering a large number of PhD students and having Terence Tao treat them as an AI.
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Yes, but the point being for the LLM to be useful to us it has to do something relevant for us and we have to define what is relevant. Even if you view them as fully human level or beyond (in terms of agency) there's still some purpose that we have to help provide them with. To put it differently, if you have some idealized model in front of you that can do anything a team of humans can do, what do you say to it? It'…
I don't understand. You will ask it for something you want, and instead of needing to pay a the team of people with expertise, it will just do it for you. Someone will still need to ask for something (or maybe it will just run autonomously making things it thinks we'll like) but it won't require any expertise in the field.
For things like sickness, old age and death, generally the lacks are not knowledge but the consistent will of the group. Like global warming, there is no real profound knowledge gap except how to get everyone to agree to mitigating the carbon burn. Perhaps it is likely LLMs would be able to persuade the group to stop burning the carbon before it’s [more] uncomfortable, but the small group of people committed to accelerating the carbon burn can also pay for LLM persuasiveness.
It’s endlessly fascinating to read the AI transcript of an expert who _really_ knows how to cut to the chase. It just shows how much you can potentially squeeze out of these models. I’m also surprised to see that even Terrence Tao seems to use it in a way that resembles, in progression, how I use llms in my area of expertise (emphasis on progression and usage patterns, not absolute skill, obv I don’t match that): sho…
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> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol compare to > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rees_algebra Most people, especially non-tech technical people, could crash through the TCP article and come out the other side with at least a high level understanding of it. Most people, even technical ones, could not even get through the first line of the rees article, heck the first statement of the article. A…
As mathematician, I actually agree. We could do a lot more to communicate ideas in a way non-experts can understand. For instance, most people are familiar with polynomials. Take a polynomial in x (with integer coefficients) and substitute x for 5t everywhere. So for instance, 2x^3 - 8x + 3 becomes 250t^3 - 40t + 3. The Rees algebra Z[5t] (here Z is the integers) is then just the set of all polynomials you can get th…
I sometimes think it would be good to rename some of the things that have historical names to mnemonics more descriptive than a proper name. But that would be difficult.
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As mathematician, I actually agree. We could do a lot more to communicate ideas in a way non-experts can understand. For instance, most people are familiar with polynomials. Take a polynomial in x (with integer coefficients) and substitute x for 5t everywhere. So for instance, 2x^3 - 8x + 3 becomes 250t^3 - 40t + 3. The Rees algebra Z[5t] (here Z is the integers) is then just the set of all polynomials you can get th…
I'm sure you're right that there's poor terminology, and Wikipedia math is certainly daunting. But in general the many mathematical exposition PDFs scattered across the Internet are beautifully written by careful, intelligent people. I'm a software engineer who's spent many hours reading them and also trying to do graduate classes as an adult. It's unfortunately common on Hacker News to encounter people who think tha…
For example, Fourier is more clear to me as: F{t -> sin(t)} = omega -> (...) instead of F(sin(t)) = (...). Or D{x -> x^2}(x) = 2x instead of (x^2)' = 2x
Abuse of notation is very common, like using f(x) both as the function and as the return value at some input x etc. For example, the chain rule is often notated in a way that hides a lot. Math uses so many single letter variables, uses huge formulas instead of factoring out parts and using multiple lines, math people don't seem to appreciate namespaces and dislike nested variable scoping etc.
It's not magic that makes everything super easy, but it helps.
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As mathematician, I actually agree. We could do a lot more to communicate ideas in a way non-experts can understand. For instance, most people are familiar with polynomials. Take a polynomial in x (with integer coefficients) and substitute x for 5t everywhere. So for instance, 2x^3 - 8x + 3 becomes 250t^3 - 40t + 3. The Rees algebra Z[5t] (here Z is the integers) is then just the set of all polynomials you can get th…
I'm sure you're right that there's poor terminology, and Wikipedia math is certainly daunting. But in general the many mathematical exposition PDFs scattered across the Internet are beautifully written by careful, intelligent people. I'm a software engineer who's spent many hours reading them and also trying to do graduate classes as an adult. It's unfortunately common on Hacker News to encounter people who think tha…