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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

#371

Post by enraged_camel »

gowld wrote: post #356
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And ag…

What you are doing is "motte and bailey". The motte is "AI useful". The bailey is "Singularity is nigh".

>> The motte is "AI useful". The bailey is "Singularity is nigh".

But there are people like Ed Zitron, frequently posted and cited here, who disagree even with the former.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#372

Post by Windchaser »

gowld wrote: post #356
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And ag…

What you are doing is "motte and bailey". The motte is "AI useful". The bailey is "Singularity is nigh".

The unified position which many folks deny is "AI is powerful" or, alternatively, "AI will be powerful soon".

(I'm personally still skeptical about this, but I'm being pulled towards accepting it).

"AI is useful" is too low of a bar, and "singularity is nigh" is too high. "AI is on its way to upending society" is about in the middle, and still vastly contentious among laypeople.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#373

Post by kypro »

I want to iterate the most important thing about this is that it's yet more evidence of AI's accelerating competency in solving math and comp sci problems, and suggests we're now getting close to the point where you could throw AI at AI research challenges (which are largely just math and comp sci problems) and potentially find very real algorithm improvements.

AI development is likely to be more compute bottlenecked than solving math problems since validation of any algorithmic improvement would likely require significant compute. But you could imagine that at this point it could be economical for a frontier lab to task 10,000 agents to work non-stop on finding novel algorithmic improvements then validating the top 50 out of 1,000 candidates on a GPT-2 sized network.

I would suggest RSI is now very close. The singularity could be less than 6 months away. I'm not saying I'd put a high probability on that, but I'd give it at least 20%, and I'd double that if looking 12 months out.

I know I'm just a crazy man shouting at the clouds, but please take to the consequences of this seriously. I understand that for whatever reason AI risk seems abstract and doesn't seem real, but this should terrify any person thinking logically about where this could all be heading.

We haven't even solved the most basic AI safety problems yet. RSI right now would almost certainly result in an extremely bad outcome for humanity.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#374

Post by c7b »

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.

And what does taking it seriously entail?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#375

Post by mag7269 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #198
danparsonson wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never understood all this talk about moving goalposts - you understand that's how science works, right? We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. If we never "moved the goalposts", we'd be stuck scoring the same goals over and over.

> We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And ag…

“AGI will only, truly, be achieved when the machine can destroy an industrial-type toilet after downing a Supreme Burrito and a large Baja Blast.”

-Alan Turing (allegedly)

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#376

Post by Windchaser »

danparsonson wrote: post #283
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And ag…

If it seems like I don't understand the meaning of that very well-known phrase, then clearly I have failed to make my point. I'll try again. And please note that I will use some generalizations to make my point more clearly, rather than because I don't understand nuance; kindly grant me a charitable reading. In recent years, I have commonly seen the phrase "you're moving the goalposts" deployed by the "it might be se…

> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

To me, the goalposts were already defined by the person you were responding to. "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".

Note that this does not depend on things like AI sentience or defining "intelligence" more rigorously, it just depends on AI impact.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#377

Post by enraged_camel »

slashdave wrote: post #212
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…

> we are also seeing incredible advances in software performance Incredible? > open ai announced like 15% improvement by fixing gpu kernel issue That is... ordinary software optimization.

There's nothing ordinary about downloading a new GPU driver and having performance go up by 15%.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#379

Post by ryan_n »

Chance-Device wrote: post #159
datakan wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I can deal with apathy, that’s the norm. What bothers me are all the people who think they can suppress AI by talking it down. That’s what’s counterproductive, just pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Tell other people it doesn’t exist either. I get it, it’s threatening socially, economically, maybe existentially. It’s also not going away.

So you think it’s a potentially existential threat but are bothered by people who maybe want to suppress it… Hopefully you acknowledge there is a bit of lack of self awareness here eh?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#380

Post by Windchaser »

tim333 wrote: post #331
ls612 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental obstacle is that we have no conceivable way to produce the energy levels to test the predictions that new theoretical physics would produce. We are like over a dozen orders of magnitude off.

There's a lot of everyday stuff in physics which is unexplained like the particle masses we have.

And a lot of condensed matter physics. Type II superconductivity is a well-known one, but there are a lot of more less well-known ones
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