Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 1001 posts

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#651

Post by J_Shelby_J »

dominotw wrote: post #562
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…

> but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there what did you notice ?

I've noticed that out of all LLMs I've ever used that Fable is the MOST LLM; the text it produces is abomination. It's impressive how much I hate it. It is such an awful writer - it assumes the reader has zero context and therefore gives every single bit of context and detail - which is nice if you're writing a legal document I suppose. But it uses, niche, $10 words to describe every facet of everything it's discussing. I had it re-write some docs and I ended up rewriting 1k lines of of Fable torment nexus text to around 100. Because guess what, someone reading highly technical docs has a knowledge base that allows us to compress the topic into a much tighter representation.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#652

Post by samatman »

christofosho wrote: post #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?

Not really. They're an AI company: they develop AI and sell it. There's some room for pulling off flashy marketing stunts, but not all that much.

This is division of labor, and it's a good thing. I'm sure OpenAI employees, who are very well paid, donate some money from their salaries to others working on the areas you're citing: probably more than you think, I say that from having attended some EA parties back in the day.

But that isn't my point: my point is that a company which makes brushless motors should put most of its time and money into solving the "make and sell brushless motors" problem, and if they or their investors feel like they need to do more for the world, give money to the people who have the time and ability to do things about that. There are a lot of quality-of-life improvements which need brushless motors.

Next question is how useful their product (OpenAI, I mean) is to more focused do-good-in-the-world professionals. I'm sure that varies quite a bit. For getting the homeless off the street? I conjecture, not very useful. For 'complete the transition off fossil fuels'? Extremely useful, no one in that field knows how to do their job without AI in summer 2026. I'm certain of this.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#653

Post by sothatsit »

dominotw wrote: post #635
sothatsit wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think it is so clear. Programming has verifiable and non-verifiable aspects. Competitive programming, passing tests, and performance can all be verified. But translating English requirements into actual software, software architecture, taste, or UI design cannot. And yet over the last couple years we’ve seen huge lifts in all of these areas, not just the verifiable ones. Verifiable areas I think are clearly…

> we’ve seen huge lifts in all of these areas, not just the verifiable ones. most gains are still coming from data. isnt that supposed to 'run out' though?

Labs spend billions hiring experts to generate new data, and better models can better filter existing training data and generate new synthetic data. There’s no reason for that to run out, it’s just expensive.

You could view this as just continually patching a leaky ship. But it seems to work.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#654

Post by mekael »

gste wrote: post #573
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.

People will be broken out of their denial by actual economic growth. That's what this is all meant to be for... I think we might start seeing some surprising numbers.

But who benefits from that economic growth? If it's only the capital owning class, and the rest of us are left in the dust, then the growth is irrelevant.

I ,for one, have read enough history to know that it's never the proles who end up benefiting.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#655

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

Marha01 wrote: post #596
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What is step 3? "Massive Economic Abundance" implies massive increase in produced goods. This implies massive deflation, ceteris paribus. So step 3 could be simply printing money to pay for UBI. Deflation from AI productivity increase and inflation from UBI money printing will cancel out.

This doesn't make any sense.

For money to work it has to represent some real value, something that has some scarcity to it such as potatoes or hours of human labor. Ultimately it is just a decoupler in a barter system, a universally recognized IOU.

Why would someone give me a car in exchange for UBI-scrip when that UBI-scrip has no inherent scarcity or value and can be produced in infinite supply by the government ?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#656

Post by mekael »

Chance-Device wrote: post #625
bubblemoth wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually UBI will be the norm I see comments like this tossed around a lot, but what makes you say this? Don't you think its more likely that most people end up in poverty?

No, I think people will demand to not live in poverty. Capitalism allows people to escape poverty by personal effort. An AI future won’t allow it by any means other than collective effort, so that’s what we’ll do.

That will entail an immense amount of violence to be undertaken by the working class against those in power, unless you think they'll gladly give up all of their ill gotten gains out of the goodness of their black little hearts.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#657

Post by watutalkinbout »

fasterik wrote: post #480
rirze wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "matrices"

Saying that AI is "matrices" is like saying human cognition is "neurons." Maybe true at some level, but it's a low-level implementation detail. The important part of a language model is the function that maps tokens to contextual embeddings. You could compute this function using analog computing, biological neurons, or any other substrate.

It isn't an implementation for neurons, unless you believe in a designing god.

Matrices are an implementation detail in reconstructing the surface of human knowledge. It's a complex surface, but it's a regurgitation.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#659

Post by namr2000 »

pbkompasz wrote: post #633

Wow, here are solutions to 10 problems that we spent millions of dollars on out of the 100s/1000s of other problems that we tried and failed to solve.

I understand the frustration with the constant PR-hype these AI labs keep spewing out, but on other hand I just can't understand this sentiment at all. These are real problems mathematicians and computer scientists have been working on and were unable to make progress on. Now they have been given a new tool and using that tool have solved those problems. And its not just one or two problems, its many very difficult problems. The mathematicians I know are saying that the latest crop of models is changing the way people do research math, I think that's a pretty big deal.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#660

Post by xanderlewis »

AlexeyBelov wrote: post #348
eadwu wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the stance of moral superiority is kind of funny. And pure math and art enthusiasts don't think they are closer to being a "god" from understanding/"discovering" math? Stop coping and deluding yourself mate. To begin with, whether AI is the one doing the discovering or not makes no difference. Any "pure math" person would aim to understand regardless - and would be quite glad that they have a longer paved path…

> Stop coping Isn't coping a good and useful mechanism?

Exactly what I think every time someone uses the word 'cope' these days. It's like some kind of virus.
Post reply on HN