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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

#161

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

dominotw wrote: post #156
ultimatefan1 wrote: post #118

one of the early premises of how ai takeoff would go was that a system that could solve open problems in advanced mathematics would also discover novel advances in math and computer science that directly unlock drastically better software performance. we are seeing frontier level math breakthroughs (ie performance that would put it in the top 100 or 1000 mathematicians in the world if it were a human, meaning top .00…

> novel advances in math > we are seeing frontier level math breakthroughs (ie performance that would put it in the top 100 or 1000 mathematicians in the world if it were a human, meaning top .00001% or 800/8B) i think you have misunderstanding of what mathematicians do

> i think you have misunderstanding of what mathematicians do

They get to make cool 3D plot visualizations of functions so obscure to me that they’re named after someone who is still alive - and/or get to work on cryptography for the NSA - I think?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#162

Post by simianwords »

kcexn wrote: post #158

Not being an expert in any of the fields OpenAI has "advanced" I don't want to prematurely downplay the significance of this contribution. However, I am worried that the language they are using in this blog post is exaggerating for the sake of marketing. It is true there hasn't been a reliable computational approach to solving these problems before. But do these proofs contribute new ideas to the mathematical corpus,…

> However, I am worried that the language they are using in this blog post is exaggerating for the sake of marketing

Your worry.... is because they used the word advanced? For marketing? The word is used very appropriately here. There were PhD's who spent a big part of their career tackling these problems.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#163

Post by simianwords »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #47

On the token limits etc - one assumes that OpenAI et al are able to “hire expert in field, and let them spend the equivalent of a million dollars of tokens” because they are not actually selling their complete compute 24 hrs a day, so the cost internally is a negligible (ish) electricity bill. Which is very suggestive - if after everything they are not fully loaded then the next gazillion data centres being built loo…

I love how people come up with creative ideas to prove the bubble. This one is even more ridiculous - that OpenAI had spare compute to advance mathematics proves that data centres will not be needed. WHAT.

If anything it proves more data centres are needed. That's literally the only reasonable conclusion from this news.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#164

Post by esperent »

simianwords wrote: post #141
esperent wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is claiming the results are false. We're saying look critically at the claims for how it was done, that it only cost $2000, etc. it would be extremely easy to run 100 sessions that failed, each costing ~$2000, and then just publishing an article about the one that succeeded, for example. This goes double since it's an internal secret model (Astra) so nobody else can verify the results.

Would this be your reaction if OpenAI also solved millennium problems? The point we are trying to make is that the significance of this news is much larger than the skepticism you are providing.

It would be my reaction if we're discussing a blog post from OpenAI, yes. I would be looking at it extremely critically, wondering what they're misrepresenting to make it look cheaper, easier, and why they're trying to make it look like only their model could possibly do this.

Look at their recent claims about their model "escaping" - there was literally a Guardian article calling them out for being hyperbolic! Again, it wasn't that they lied, their marketing department is too savvy for that. They just present it in way that's, well, marketing.

As for the actual result, I'll look for secondary posts by actual mathematicians and draw my conclusions there, not from this marketing blog post about results from a secret model.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#165

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

datakan wrote: post #157
Chance-Device wrote: post #105

Pretty cool. The impact of AI is getting undeniable, there aren’t many positions left to move the goalposts to at this stage, next they’ll have to be outside the stadium entirely. The sooner people can be broken out of their denial about all this the better, and we can start actually taking it seriously.

[flagged]

It’s not apathy. It’s the fact that almost nobody can really understand what these results mean.

I’m not a mathematician so I have zero clue what “ New upper bounds on sphere-packing density down to the Cohn–Elkies thresholds” means.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#166

Post by threatofrain »

woeirua wrote: post #150
ultimatefan1 wrote: post #118

one of the early premises of how ai takeoff would go was that a system that could solve open problems in advanced mathematics would also discover novel advances in math and computer science that directly unlock drastically better software performance. we are seeing frontier level math breakthroughs (ie performance that would put it in the top 100 or 1000 mathematicians in the world if it were a human, meaning top .00…

This makes no sense. To believe this you have to think that the models are somehow being overfit explicitly on academic mathematics and it doesn’t carry over at all to more practical software engineering. I wouldn’t make that bet.

This also makes the assumption that frontier math has all the long hanging fruits already taken... also very dubious.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#167

Post by tchalla »

dist-epoch wrote: post #95
aabhay wrote: 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…

I don't think you want to bring cost into this argument. Even if the cost was $1 mil for these 10 problems, that's maybe 10-20 math researchers for a year. Do you really think that if you paid that to humans, they will deliver the same results?

Mentioning cost is fine, comparing may not be.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#168

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

traes wrote: post #68
energy123 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old way of establishing career credibility is being destroyed, for better or worse. Accomplishments that used to be career-defining are hard to distinguish from AI, and correlate more with access to compute. Think about Bill Gates's math paper he wrote in college. That kind of thing is gone now as a path to credibility. There's still competitions and grades, but the diversity of paths is going away. Maybe new one…

If accomplishments can't be distinguished between talented people and untalented people with compute, is there really a point in trying? I suppose one can hope that talented people given compute will be more effective than untalented people with compute, but I despair that that may not be true for much longer.

Knowledgable people can confirm what the AI produces is correct. I could make ChatGPT produce a result on an open question and I would have zero way to verify its actual correctness.

Which is less interesting work. And you probably need to do the hard grunt work by hand first to develop the skills and intuition to be able to verify an AI-generated result. So you can’t outsource everything to AI without loss of skill.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#169

Post by jofzar »

robinhouston wrote: post #87

In a way the most remarkable thing about this is that it isn't even at the top of the HN homepage. Even if this is a step up from what we've seen before, we're no longer astonished by the idea that AI can make significant advances in mathematics and computer science.

Honestly just a bit burnt out on posts like this

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#170

Post by lkey »

simianwords wrote: post #160
lkey wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums change with the times, and this one never existed solely to burnish your ego. Moreover, mister elite , you don't know why this press release was flagged. I'm not sure why we should privilege your bitter speculation over more mundane possibilities.

[flagged]

You don't accept it is possible that it was initially flagged as a dupe or spam why? There is competition for primary submission here, especially for the primary AI companies.

Moreover, if it wasn't flagged at all, like you suggest, then the grandparent was inventing things to be bitterly resentful about... Which is not a behavior any forum should indulge.

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