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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

#501
post #96

Replace philosophers for mathematicians and Douglas Adams was spot on again. Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures, they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do. I suppose there really are some mathematicians out there today, whose last few years of study, have just been up-ended by this. -- "Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are…

> Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures People keep saying this. Why? Surely the AI can complete the prompt “Generate new research questions based on these observations”? When I read the reasoning traces of coding models they are constantly asking themselves questions and attempting to answer them.

I like the illustration that the models are working on a convex hull of known information. Filling gaps with linear combinations of known facts and results.

They can't exit the hull until the "intuition" starts spawning points outside the convex hull.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have had to deal with getting their jobs automated away for centuries. None of this is new, and perhaps reminding ourselves of this is the best way to cope.

I understand your sentiment, but I think this really is something different. This isn’t a craft going away, or even an industry being replaced, it’s potentially everything we do. It’s the ground being pulled away beneath people’s feet, everyone, everywhere all at once. I think the vacuum it leaves in people’s lives needs to be filled with something, and I haven’t heard any good ideas about this or how the transition…

There is a glaring fallacy in your “AI will change everything as it is super intelligent” hypothesis. If it is so great thinker which can do everything why not just solve this social impact thingie? Or maybe it is not so capable?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#503

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…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but all of the aforementioned advances were made in the last year? Until very recently few people had access to these tools. Most people still don't know how to use ChatGPT, and very few use tools like CC regularily. If in a few years these frontier tools become commonplace and people upskill we would should see a network effect?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#504

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.

The models are frequently getting worse at items that they aren’t being benchmarked for — and that’s happening more and more over time! Other people in other fields aren’t idiots, they are accurately perceiving the fact that these models are being hyper optimized for our industry, and are becoming less capable in other domains over time. Models of the same scale are massively worse at writing a broad variety of style…

Proof?

In my experience modern models are better at all tasks than models from two years ago, especially complex multi-step tasks.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#505
post #373

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#506
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to an extent zitron is saying its not useful, but as a more nuanced opinion, "ai is not cost effective, nor is it improving profits or revenue"

From a random article I grabbed of his ( https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/ ): "it isn't clear whether generative AI actually provides much business value at all" "cannot seem to find a product that people will pay for, in part because the results are so mediocre" "Last week, we got our first real, definitive glimpse of what’s around that corner that future. And boy, was it underwhelming." "OpenAI claims that o1…

It’s comical and honestly incredibly embarrassing…

But it seems we have somehow optimized away shame. It wasn’t good for profits, I guess.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#507

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.

Which straw man are you arguing against?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#508

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.

It is a fact of experience, and indeed effectively a theorem, that the better they get at coding and math, the dumber they are. These are the wages of RLVR etc

completely false

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#509
How do we know that these solutions don't exist in the training data? It is open secret that they have used pirated materials for training. Perhaps it plagiarized solutions from works of some obscure Belgian mathematician from the sixties, who did not get mainstream acceptance. I wouldn't be surprised if they also got access to mathematics done in the "defense contractor" setting from various three letter agencies.

Without a searchable index of training data, it is hard to put faith into these claims.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#510

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.

it is very hard for people to eat crow, as the replies will show
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