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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

openai.com

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Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#131
post #6

My main gripe here is the lack of transparency around the total experiment and construction. I doubt that they simply pointed their model at these ten specific problems alone and gave the model one shot; therefore the $2000 number could be completely misleading, similar to P-value hacking by not disclosing the total experimental setup. I want to know: 1. How many total problems were given to the model, and what perce…

> therefore the $2000 number could be completely misleading, similar to P-value hacking by not disclosing the total experimental setup.

I don't think that comparison to p-hacking is fair. I mean not reporting price of all run is nothing like committing scientific fraud and fake results.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#133
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why you think that?

I guess that's because there are serious problems on which many professional mathematicians worked on years. If it was just a matter of hiring an expert, they would've been solved long time ago.

I guess expert+chatgpt beats chatgpt alone, so why not hire top experts to drive the search?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#134
I would love more time and money put into real-world problems by these companies. Climate, food insecurity, pollution, technology for convenience and/or to help people have a higher quality of life.

I'm sure they must do some of this type of work, right?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#135

Any advances in theoretical physics yet? Are there any fundamental obstacles? I would have thought not, but I haven't seen anything reported.

The Maxwell conjecture was a conjecture in theoretical physics (though not a particularly important one)

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#136

I would love more time and money put into real-world problems by these companies. Climate, food insecurity, pollution, technology for convenience and/or to help people have a higher quality of life. I'm sure they must do some of this type of work, right?

Yes, but all of those are orders of magnitude harder than math.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#137
Can’t wait for this stuff to have quality of life increases for the average person. So far all I see is that AI has made owning a computer more expensive, made some jobs redundant, increased spam and distrust with questionable authenticity of content and of course made some Americans very rich.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#138
post #5

I wonder what the total cost of this research was, including the salary for their mathematicians and engineers.

Why would you factor in salary unless they had to baby it through. You would only count the hours for setting up the harness and prompt and checking the result. Training the model is going to be amortized over other uses.

> Why would you factor in salary

Say that it turned out that the total cost of the proof of the Erdős unit-distance conjecture was $50 million.

Then the question really becomes: yes, these models are capable of proving important mathematical results, but at a very high cost. Is it worth it?

If a mathematician applied for a research grant of $50M USD for proving the same thing, they would have been laughed out of the bank.

What's more is that when you have a research grant, you train PhDs and postdocs, you hire new staff, and you disseminate. That is, you get much more value for the money spent.

I'm just curious what the cost is.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#139

I would love more time and money put into real-world problems by these companies. Climate, food insecurity, pollution, technology for convenience and/or to help people have a higher quality of life. I'm sure they must do some of this type of work, right?

Yes, but all of those are orders of magnitude harder than math.

They are political problems, a computer could never solve them.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#140

Now that we've seen AI produce a fair number of proofs (and disproofs), I'm curious when we'll start seeing it build genuinely novel theory. Does anyone have predictions on when and how we'll get there and will it take new architectures/ training paradigms, or is the current approach enough?

I’m personally hoping for the next big AI gangbanger to be theoretical physics. Boy does that field need a good reshuffle. I think when any novel mathematical theory can be done by AI you’ll see simultaneously theoretical physics getting wrecked as hard as pure math is. At that point we might see new physics or paradigm shifting technology emerging.
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