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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

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Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#551

Post by zahlman »

michaelmrose wrote: post #522
tuvix wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All arguments like this boil down to semantics at a certain point, but yes large language models can “intuit” because they can generalize between examples. The issue then becomes how you pack new examples into context. Humans can “intuit” based on a much larger, if not unlimited, context. Also I just want to say that human cognition is something so insanely complex and deep that we will not understand it at all in my…

Define insanely complex and deep in a way that isn't illiterate hand waving. Most humans are dumber than a box of rocks. Here in Seattle we had one of many light rail-related fuckups where they had to replace part of the line with buses. People piled into the front of one when it was full. When people got out they never moved back. As the driver struggled to close the door and people struggled to get in the wad of pe…

> People piled into the front of one when it was full. When people got out they never moved back. As the driver struggled to close the door and people struggled to get in the wad of people never moved back to fill the ample space.

This does not demonstrate a lack of intelligence. It demonstrates laziness and a lack of interest in spreading apart. Or just lack of consideration (or even malice) on the part of those at the back of the wad.

> Chatgpt was smarter than the average person a while ago

This is an absurd claim that fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be "smart". Reasoning that would get you to this conclusion would equally well apply to Google's search engine over a decade ago.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#552

Post by strbean »

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…

> When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change?

It's in how they change, not the fact that they change. The skeptics seem to have secret definitions for intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, etc. that amounts to "a thing only humans have". Often that thing is equivalent to a soul. When yesterday's challenge (LLMs don't have X because they can't do Y!) is met, Y changes but X stays the same. This is not the process by which a field matures, it is a rhetorical technique used by skeptics to avoid honestly stating or confronting their internal definitions. That can be revealed by asking the skeptic the following:

"Forget LLMs. What if we made a completely physically accurate simulation of a human being?"

Many say no, that simulated human being still couldn't have (intelligence, consciousness, sentience, creativity, ...). This reveals that there is a necessary metaphysical component to those attributes, at which point any scientific-minded person will leave the debate.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#553

Post by lettergram »

tyre wrote: post #548
sothatsit wrote: post #535

People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps delivering more and more impressive results. The most interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be undergoing, and what won’t. Writing has been quite stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let…

We will get much better at manipulation and better at people “writing” things to justify their own feelings. What’s new about LLMs is that you can scalably manipulate people individually. It used to be that you could either have scale (speeches, tweets, interviews, website, etc.) or individual engagement (replying to mail/tweets/town hall questions.) Now you can pull the history and preferences of an individual, then…

> My guess is that, in the US, the right will cynically adopt manipulation to great effect and the left will take a moral stand against shady practices and lose elections.

I think that statement may itself highlight how prevalent manipulation is.

I fully anticipate all groups to continue maximal manipulation they can. One thing with LLMs is that it'll be a far less unified view, so a "divide and conquer" strategy is what I anticipate.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#554

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

orangecat wrote: post #542
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI companies themselves, who are highly motivated to sell AI as overall positive for society, notwithstanding some security/etc risks, and who have economists on the payroll to think about things like this, do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present. Shane Legg (DeepMind co-founder), one of the more intelligent and thoughtful people you'll find in the industry, could only offer "it's a tou…

do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present See "Machines of Loving Grace" by Dario Amodei: https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace .

This seems more a fantasy than a considered likely outcome. He basically admits that humans will eventually mostly all be out of a job, replaced by AI, but then says (Gemini's summary) that there will be:

"Massive Economic Abundance: Because AI will exponentially grow the total economic pie, overall resource scarcity will diminish. The fundamental challenge shifts from producing wealth to distributing wealth."

So how do we go from everyone out of work, no income to spend on food, or the goods and services that the AI is producing, to "massive economic abundance"?!

It's like the meme:

Step 1: Create AI

Step 2: AI takes all the jobs

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit! (massive economic abundance)

What is step 3?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#555

Post by reducesuffering »

bryan0 wrote: post #414

I think there's another interesting story here about how this was apparently moderately flagged and triggered the flame-war detector which kept the story off the front page of HN 2 days ago[0]. I think people are having a hard time processing this information rationally(?) What can we do to make conversations around these incredibly exciting and important topics more constructive? HN is where I expect to read expert…

> HN is where I expect to read expert comments on these topics, has this style of conversation moved elsewhere?

For people who have been paying attention to accurate predictions leading to our present state of the world, HN has collectively been reactionary, incorrectly dismissive, and incredibly behind the curve. In public, people are better informed on LessWrong and AI Twitter circles. That's where frontier researchers are. Barely here

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#556

Post by samatman »

deaton wrote: post #402
lkey wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your 'serious' proposal is unlimited global military bombing campaign on civilian infrastructure by the United States (which is currently losing a war using the same strategy) to 'solve safety' preemptively against a 20% number you just made up? And you accuse the 'other side' of 'suicidal apathy'?? You should put down the AI and do some self-reflection on how you came to hold these views.

If the thesis that "If anybody builds it, everyone dies" is true, or has any chance of becoming true, then it is the logical thing to do. As Geoffrey Hinton said, "If you want to know what it's like not to be the apex intelligence, ask a chicken."

If the Judeo-Bolshevist theses were true, then Operation Barbarossa was the logical thing to do, and everything which came with it.

Powerful word, `if`. "You're not only wrong you're a fulminating psychopath" is a perfectly valid response to getting it wrong like a fulminating psychopath.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#557

Post by Philpax »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #463
energy123 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they were not. These were his 5 predictions in 2022: """ 1. By 2029, AI will still be unable to watch a movie and accurately explain the characters, events, conflicts, and motivations. 2. By 2029, AI will still be unable to read a novel and reliably answer questions about its plot, characters, conflicts, and motivations beyond what is stated literally. 3. By 2029, AI will still be unable to work as a competent coo…

Well I don't typically side with GM, but playing devil's advocate: 1. still not wrong? Unless it's just feeding the audio or screenplay I don't think you can feed AI a full movie in a single context window yet? 2. Not sure, but can you prove this wrong? Can you feed a full, unseen new book and get that kind of answer? 3. Not wrong. 4. I think he'd probably pull you up on 'bug free' - I don't think that frontier model…

4. I think they can, especially if the problem statement is well-specified and, importantly, autonomously testable. Of course, specifying a problem that meets these requirements is non-trivial, but the claim requests _a_ counterexample :P

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#558

Post by zahlman »

tuvix wrote: post #530
michaelmrose wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define insanely complex and deep in a way that isn't illiterate hand waving. Most humans are dumber than a box of rocks. Here in Seattle we had one of many light rail-related fuckups where they had to replace part of the line with buses. People piled into the front of one when it was full. When people got out they never moved back. As the driver struggled to close the door and people struggled to get in the wad of pe…

I’m not talking about the actions we take or how we might perform at certain tasks, I’m talking about how our brains actually work. My point is that we have no idea how I’m able to imagine an apple and see it in my mind’s eye. It’s basically biological magic to us at this point. There are processes at work there that we don’t even have the language to describe.

Not only that, but we do it with a processor that is basically required to operate in a narrow temperature band below 40C, using a mere 86 billion neurons (although the equivalence with either machine-learning "neurons" or LLM parameters is not at all clear) operating on a few dozen watts; and with this we operate many other systems besides language processing. It's not clear that our reasoning process requires language, either.

(86 billion is the number ChatGPT, ironically enough, has given me a couple of times. I remember hearing for a long time that it was estimated to be somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion. This is not my field of study.)

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#559

Post by user43928 »

jetsetk wrote: post #323
amazingamazing wrote: post #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.

Downvoters mind to explain?

Boring doom and gloom.

AI probably did not take your job yet. How many AI queries did you use last month, and how much time has it saved compared to digging through the web?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#560

Post by lkey »

cubefox wrote: post #516
lkey wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not 'logical' to imagine a hypothetical doomsday scenario that justifies a preemptive nuclear war. (which is what the grandparent commenter's bio contemplates, 'nuke the datacenters' is their central credo). Does it bother you that the people who are publicly cocksure that P(doom) is moments away are the same people that have profited most handsomely from that pronouncement? That the 'humanists' that want to do…

> It is not 'logical' to imagine a hypothetical doomsday scenario that justifies a preemptive nuclear war You hallucinated the "preemptive nuclear war". He didn't say anything about nukes. That's your own invention. > Does it bother you that the people who are publicly cocksure that P(doom) is moments away 20% is not "cocksure". The "moments" is again an exaggeration.

I did not, I read kypro's (the OP I was replying to) bio, to whit:

Every problem is a search problem. Nuke the data centers.

P(doom) = 98.9% (Aug-2026) P(doom) = 98.2% (July-2026) P(doom) = 98.2% (Jun-2026) P(doom) = 98.5% (May-2026) P(doom) = 98.8% (mid-April-2026) P(doom) = 98.7% (April-2026) P(doom) = 98.7% (March-2026) P(doom) = 98.5% (mid-Feb-2026) P(doom) = 97% (Feb-2026) P(doom) = 94% (Jan-2026) P(doom) = 93% (Dec-2025) P(doom) = 95% (July-2025)

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