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

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#761

Post by mahogany »

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.

> No, I think people will demand to not live in poverty

What about other countries in the world where people... live in poverty?

> Capitalism allows people to escape poverty by personal effort

Isn't it possible that there is a future where AI makes the average value of human labor (or, "personal effort") plummet? Perhaps capitalism will lose some of its edge against a technology like this.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#762

Post by ninkendo »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #417
kcexn wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're talking about No. 5, the arithmetic circuit complexity bound? The existence of a lower bound than state-of-the-art is certainly a significant result and worth publishing. But the wording of the result makes it sound like we don't know what the lowest possible complexity bound might be. So, prior to this result did we think there couldn't be a lower possible bound? Or did the arithmetic circuit communi…

Circuit complexity lower bounds (and lower bounds in general) are notoriously difficult to come across. For example, despite our best efforts, the state of the art lower bounds on time complexity of algorithms for solving 3SAT is O(n). In contrast, our best algorithms for the task run in time roughly O(2^n). That’s an exponential gap. This is despite decades of trying to find lower bounds.

> the state of the art lower bounds on time complexity of algorithms for solving 3SAT is O(n)

Wow, that’s pretty stark.

“What’s the minimum time it would take to solve this problem?”

“Well, at the very least you’d have to read the input the whole way through”

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#763

Post by bryan0 »

reducesuffering wrote: post #555
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 researc…

Thanks for the pointer to lesswrong. The relevant article on this topic appears to be here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQYEPitFqztcRvBsS/openai-s-u...

Just glanced at it and it looks pretty good!

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#764

Post by lettergram »

tyre wrote: post #749
lettergram wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In US politics, the right is far, far better at winning elections than the left. This isn’t about personal preference. It’s objective political science. Look at the most contentious issues in the US: abortion, climate change, taxing the wealthy, gun control, Affordable Healthcare Act. The Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one. Every one of those issues has >60% support with voters an…

Objectively?

> Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one.

It depends on the pollster and where you're polling. I guarantee you rural Tennessee will not agree with downtown Washington DC on any of these issues. In contrast, rural California will likely agree with rural Tennessee. It's not as cut and dry as a homogeneous national poll of 2500 people. Every state, city, county are different. That's why there are federal, state, city, and county governments.

For instance, Abortions are legal nationally. States can individually decide how, or if, they wish to restrict it. This is as the constitution intends under the 10th amendment:

> powers not delegated to the federal government nor prohibited to the states are reserved to the states or the people.

This allows for democracy to take place at the local level, rather than having particular regions thousands of miles away from each other ultimately oppress the other.

To the point on LLMs, I think it's abundantly clear they will be used to propagandize and similar to social media will lock people in a bubble without alternative opinions. It'll be the worst of both worlds, the question is who's the puppet master. At some point soon, I imagine it'll be the AI.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#765

Post by ninkendo »

GPerson wrote: post #442
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…

I don’t really like AI but let’s stop kidding ourselves, no human mathematician could make progress on a dozen major open problems in a week or two. If you’re measuring it against humans then it is by far the best mathematician to ever live.

> I don’t really like AI but let’s stop kidding ourselves

If I had to create a tagline to describe my opinions about AI in a single sentence, that’d be it.

It’s possible to both hate AI and be impressed by it at the same time. Lying to ourselves about its capabilities does us no good. It’s emotionally difficult to do, but people need to come to grips with what’s happening and shake themselves out of a state of denial.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#766

Post by akoboldfrying »

casey2 wrote: post #709
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 definitely are not on an exponential. Don't say we are because this isn't up for debate. AI progress is logarithmic the million dollar question is 2x or 10x for linear improvement. The nearest qualitative shift would be very fast inference so people could start writing real software on top of LLMs. A 0.001% optimization on a packing problem just isn't interesting for the amount of investment.

> A 0.001% optimization on a packing problem just isn't interesting for the amount of investment.

I think you have completely misunderstood what OpenAI have accomplished here. Almost certainly no one cares about the specific concrete results achieved; they only care about (a) how difficult it would be for an intelligent human to achieve the same feat (ETA: the feat is the proof), which can be estimated by the amount of time the problem has remained open/a public conjecture, and (b) how general this artificial "intelligence" appears to be, which can be estimated by the diversity of topics where it was able to prove a difficult result.

It's as if I showed you a dog that I had taught to speak German fluently, and you remarked: "What point is a dog that can speak a language that less than 2% of the world speaks? Nothing to see here."

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#767

Post by beering »

cwiz wrote: post #583
jstummbillig wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Because science is a branch of philosophy and machine existence brings plethora of unanswered questions. Imagine humankind meets another race, another race shares it's scientific knowledge and humans accept it without experiencing process of discovery. In that case do we really got this knowledge? If we follow machine discoveries like we follow problems in textbook then we acquire knowledge but we don't discover anyt…

Almost everything I’ve learned in school is learnings handed down from others, not things I discovered. Is all that knowledge useless?

And no, science is not a branch of philosophy and not everything is a philosophical question, despite what the philosophers like to say.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#768

Post by ninkendo »

blovescoffee wrote: post #253
slashdave wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

a 15% improvement at a trillion dollar scale company is massive

15% improvements are usually called “fixing a mistake in the code” or “getting to that task in the backlog for optimizing that code we had to ship on a deadline”. They’re more likely the bigger the company: more contributors working in disparate areas means more low hanging fruit is probably lying around.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#769

Post by sedivy94 »

tyre wrote: post #745
attila-lendvai wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the fact that the useless left/right divide is still so widely used shows that manipulation is working well even pre LLMs... when it comes to the important question, then both "sides" are the same team. or if you want it with a pinch of humor: when a boot is on your face, it makes precious little difference whether it's the left or the right boot. (i lived the first 10 years of my life in communism)

If you think that the American Left is anything like communism, I’m sorry, but, respectfully, I can’t take your comments seriously. The left in the US would be center-right in Europe, who are certainly not communist (they have separate parties that are communists!) Even the socialist strain of the US has nothing to do with socialism scaremongering about Venezuela, etc.

The parent comment wasn’t making that comparison. In fact, quite the opposite. The communism comment emphasized personal experience with a boot in one’s face, not that the boot was communist.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#770

Post by beering »

amai wrote: post #235

Have blog posts replaced peer-reviewed academic papers when it comes to publishing advanced in science?

If you were a mathematician and came up with any of these results, people would pay attention even if you published it on your blog. What’s the requirement for needing to publish it in a journal? OpenAI is not trying to achieve tenure.
Post reply on HN