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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

#861

Post by chrisjj »

roncesvalles wrote: post #682
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.

It has had significant quality of life increases for me. I use LLMs for everything from: - travel and restaurant recommendations. my last few outings have been entirely LLM-advised and they turned out excellent. LLMs seem to have ingested every single Google review, photo, and menu of every business on Earth and can answer very nuanced questions like "is the garlic chicken at garnished with coriander?" - fitness, nut…

> perfect two-way communication

That's a surprise. E.g. I've found these bots pretty poor at body language.

> "There are 12 chapters in the book . Can you give me a 2 sentence synopsis of each chapter?"

Really? You tell the bot the chapter quantity?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#862

Post by koe123 »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #766
casey2 wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand, if provided the financial incentive would mathematicians have solved these problems? Its not hard to imagine a world where some hard problems were not selected by the sparse experts for whatever reason (lack of interest, whatever), which could have been solved if someone was throwing down millions for solutions.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#863

Post by chrisjj »

oblio wrote: post #710
roncesvalles wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has had significant quality of life increases for me. I use LLMs for everything from: - travel and restaurant recommendations. my last few outings have been entirely LLM-advised and they turned out excellent. LLMs seem to have ingested every single Google review, photo, and menu of every business on Earth and can answer very nuanced questions like "is the garlic chicken at garnished with coriander?" - fitness, nut…

1. Do frontier lab LLMs make your rent cheaper? Groceries? Healthcare? 2. Do LLMs reduce the loneliness epidemic? 3. Do they reduce population aging in almost all counties around the world? 4. Do they reduce political polarization? 5. Do they bolster democracies? 6. Do they decelerate climate change and general environmental destruction? 7. Do they accelerate sustainability and the circular economy (not circular fina…

> 8. Do they reduce the workweek

Sure. Often to zero.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#864

Post by koe123 »

viccis wrote: post #567
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…

>Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we just get much better at manipulation? Is there even the tiniest reason to suspect that the people steering this progress will use it for the democratic good of all?

In fact the opposite, look at talks by Peter Thiel. At least he’s being honest. These people are bastards, but for some reason moral goodness and wealth has been conflated leading us to venerate greed.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#865

Post by jdub »

snakeboy wrote: post #822
tyre wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the case that they’re secretly, unintentionally evil?

Bad economic policy is subtly "evil", by way of allocating finite resources inefficiently. Usually this is unintentionally done by not appropriately taking second, third, ..., nth order effects into account.

... which would make (our current model of) capitalism especially evil. Compared to a supermarket.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#866

Post by throwthrowuknow »

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.

Excellent job not understanding the point. The party thanks you for your service.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#867

Post by taaha47 »

andai wrote: post #807
MostlyStable wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a mathematician who was intimately familiar with some of these problems [0] >I don’t understand it yet. Maybe it’ll take me an afternoon to check all the calculations, but what would still be missing is why this was an approach that would’ve made sense in the first place. Is there some broader context or theory within which this would’ve been the obvious thing to do? What other results can be proven using these…

I think it might be like waveform collapse, but very high dimensional.

can you expand on this?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#868

Post by jdub »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #714
watutalkinbout wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like Musks duplicitous argument about unlimited abundance. We have a lot of abundance now, we just keep accelerating it all into the hands of fewer and fewer people - whose response is only to want more, and more, and more.

Yeah, we really should just storm the facility where Musk is hoarding all the worlds bread and meat. Wealth in terms of capital doesn't represent material goods, it represents the system's confidence in your ability to direct capital efficiently. But eventually efficient capital bottoms out at consumable goods. Someone like Musk with a lot of capital under his control is contributing to the end goal of unlimited abun…

With his shitty cars, orbital garbage, or CSAM generator? Or his moneyed attacks on democracy and communications? Or his vandalism of government programs without insight, experience, or qualification?

In a free and fair market, his capital would be regarded as a deeply inefficient distortion.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#869

Post by corimaith »

Valakas_ wrote: post #831
5555watch wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have news for you. All humans do is also filling gaps with combinations of known facts and results - in new ways. "Everything is a Remix" is a good watch on youtube that explains this. Picasso might look like he has an invented personal style, but his style is a combination of different little details he took from others and mixed in a new way. Mozart the same. No music artist could ever create music in a vacuum. E…

But do you have vision?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#870

Post by red75prime »

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…

I believe that the decentralization of manipulation (taken in a very broad sense as an effort to modify people's views) spells trouble for democracies. The mass media of old, with all its flaws, created a shared pool of information managed by well-educated people, some of whom understood that they had the power to keep democracy running (keeping populists away from the "manipulation machine," curbing blatant manipulation attempts, and so on).

Decentralized manipulation, by contrast, just runs amok creating echochambers and polarization.

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