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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

#901
post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another interesting question is why the frontier labs are piling on pure maths, which has little direct economic value compared to something like law or improving the efficiency of their own models? How much OpenAI and Anthropic are paying to serve these models for ordinary users is the elephant in the room. A cynical take is that the frontier labs are trying their best to pump up their pre-IPO valuation through flas…

> Another interesting question is why the frontier labs are piling on pure maths The reason is that the original scaling axes (parameters, training tokens, test-time compute) have saturated already, but RLVR (reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards) is still scaling well. And math has this nice property where you can synthetically generate arbitrary volumes of rewards to train the model, because math is self-c…

do we have any concrete idea of how well the models are scaling now? I agree with these 10 results being impressive, and it is easy to think "wow, and last year the models were barely able to solve IMOs problems". But for me it is perfectly possible that a non sofic group could be found by 100 good IMO students working on all the different strategies that have been proposed (OpenAIs solution was based on "expander graphs", which were introduced to solve the problem some years ago), so it could be that current AI is simply many (say 1000) old models working in parallel. This is linear scaling, not exponential. It could be I'm completely wrong also, the problem is that we have little information.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#902

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cambridge Analytica gathered data to build targeted profiles and used these profiles for political advertising without informed consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

Yes, but there is little evidence this had a meaningful effect on votes.

Don't think that it matters if it was effective.

There's a reason attempted murder is a crime even if it was unsuccessful

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#903
post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you expand on this?

Not OP, but my interpretation is this.

Quantum waveform collapse has been proposed as explanation for consciousness, allowing to explain how an entity can have free will and yet obey rigid physical laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse

I think OP is suggesting a similar thing happened in the LLM, implying it gained consciousness despite following a well-defined compute process.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigmoidal, not exponential. It would be insane to assume an exponential curve

Everything has limits, of course. But if you've not yet seen a deceleration, it's reasonable to expect that at the least you're in the middle of the sigmoid, not the top.

> But if you've not yet seen a deceleration

We have though. The velocity remains high but the acceleration is decreasing.

The improvement between gpt 2-4 where staggering. to 5, 5.6? Much less so.

The results improve of course, but the difference is no longer mind blowing.

Most of the improvement now has come from agentic harnessing, which is unrelated to the acceleration of the model but the tooling around the use of the model.

So we are seeing a deceleration and the speed is still high due to high prev acceleration but its not growing at the same rate as before and the edges are starting to show themselves

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#905

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the argument here? It's not about the implementation method, it is about the behavior that emerges from it. You could calculate the next token by hand on paper if you had enough time.

It's incredible how the “Chinese Room” argument, as well as its counterarguments, is still incredibly pertinent despite being now more than 40 years old. Scientific American published many articles on this topic in the Eighties; they seem as fresh as ever.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#906
post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

nothing prevented us from defining cryptocurrencies, auto-rewarding new math in objective manners, grading theorem surprisal objectively, etc. before the advent of LLM's. being lucky enough to receive the opportunity of hiding in some academic closet, poking your hand out begging for scraps, was a different, perfectly alternative path humans decided to take instead. It's a bit late to start standing up for your right…

Thats true, although once it stops being a party trick I expect the LLM proof mining to also be paid by someone else and be expensive as shit, the question same remains: who?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#907

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 .

You know, I think Dario should have kept the Richard Brautigan theme in his essay titles. I think that I was trying to describe you to someone is an absolutely perfect match for introducing an AGI that has been achieved. It’s basically the same idea in blank verse, about a spread of a different technology, and made personal along the way.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of the big AI companies have a model that are good at tasks that require learning? For example, every day people teach teenagers how to drive and with only dozens of hours of practice, they are on the road.

is this not essentially what ARC-AGI-3 is? i agree that in-context/continual learning is somewhere the models are still mostly weak at

I don't think any of the ARC-AGI-3 tests are very interesting. At least not as interesting as driving a car. Children literally do a similar task in go karts every day.

Another interesting task would be to take the AI in a robot body into a vegetable garden and teach it to pull weeds. This is another task that lots of children help out with.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#909

In a way the most remarkable thing about this is that it isn't even at the top of the HN homepage. Even if this is a step up from what we've seen before, we're no longer astonished by the idea that AI can make significant advances in mathematics and computer science.

This is not at the top as it is actively flagged by people that can't psychologically cope with the advances of AI. Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.

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Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cambridge Analytica gathered data to build targeted profiles and used these profiles for political advertising without informed consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

Yes, but there is little evidence this had a meaningful effect on votes.

The way the documentary never questioned their sales guys claims felt naive
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