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

941–950 of 1000 posts

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#941

Post by birdsongs »

rayiner wrote: post #917
tyre wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

None of those are single issues, and the political fault lines are in the sub-issues. For example, while most Americans support "gun control," only 20% of Americans support a ban on handguns : https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx . That figure has been trending steadily downward--from 38% in 1999 to 20% in 2024. That makes it much easier for Republicans to hold the line on that issue: portray all gun control e…

> Apart from that, republicans are ridiculously inept.

They're not. They're really not. They're incredibly capable and are currently executing long term plans successfully, one after another. This goes all the way back to Regan and the disenfranchisement of education. They know exactly what they're doing to erode democracy.

Calling them inept is dangerously stupid at best, and at worst is just right wing propaganda to try and lull people into a false comfort and not act.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#942

Post by ragequittah »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #878
tyre wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

both democrats and republicans take their money from the same donors. its all a show.

It's a show until you're rounded up by ICE or you can't get an abortion in your state (or others because of mass surveillance).

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#943

Post by reducesuffering »

slashdave wrote: post #833
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.

Those that claim their opponents are in denial are most likely in denial themselves

How's that going for climate change and its denialists?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#944

Post by reducesuffering »

dominotw wrote: post #568
whimsicalism wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is very hard for people to eat crow, as the replies will show

Really? has anyone ever claimed that ai will never be able to prove theorems and conjectures ?

Hundreds of comments with 100% confidence AI/LLMs only regurgitate existing knowledge and can not produce anything novel

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#945

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

annzabelle wrote: post #782
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are they right or wrong about the sigmoids?

I dunno. They've been saying this for decades, including in a very well read Harry Potter fanfic, and I'd always dismissed them as kooks, but maybe they're right in the end.

Saying the same thing for decades, when things progress over those decades along the general trend line that you were worried it would, is decent evidence of a prescient prediction. Climate scientists also seemed pretty kooky in the 80s when they sketched out their trendlines, but now their concerns are all over the headlines as reality caught up, and the same is becoming true of the AI safety people.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#946

Post by zacmps »

plaidfuji wrote: post #853
GPerson wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, after seein the Jacobian conjecture go, the Riemann hypothesis only has about a year left. I’m not sure if people just aren’t as aware, but the Jacobian conjecture practically was on par with those other great problems.

I would be genuinely very impressed - but still not scared - if the Riemann hypothesis were solved. I suspect that we may require “new math” to make progress on that. If a new operator / symbol is required, is that fundamentally not doable by an LLM because it’s outside of current tokenization space?

Obviously not, there's no need to create a new character for a new operation. You can just define it as @ or or any other symbol you want.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#947

Post by citrin_ru »

Chance-Device wrote: post #546
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…

UBI probably is the positive outcome, though it may not seem like it to begin with. Initially it will likely be stigmatised and under-resourced, but as a larger proportion of people move out of work and onto UBI that stigma will drop and the resources should grow. Eventually UBI will be the norm, and if the living standards of a person on UBI is as good as yours or mine today, that will be an enormous win for everyon…

We don't see a progress towards UBI even inside individual countries and with AI we will need it on international. What people in Europe or Africa will do when all jobs there will be replaced by American or Chinese AI companies, where they will get money for UBI?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#948

Post by fckgw »

nightsd01 wrote: post #798
fckgw wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I directly benefit from this supposed "growth"? Seems like its just making things worse for most people.

Plenty of people are making money from AI? And I am not sure I've seen it "making things worse for most people" yet, do you have a source behind this? If your source is AI layoffs, there were plenty of layoffs with the invention of the horseless carriage, but that doesn't mean it made humans worse off overall. There are reasons to be skeptical about progress and AI and all that but the 'making things worse for most p…

If your answer to "How does AI benefit me?" is "Well a lot of people made money" then I'm afraid you've lost the plot.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#949

Post by wat10000 »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #928
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

I literally don’t understand, and have a deep distrust of people who say we haven’t seen deceleration. The diminishing returns are colossal. GPT 4 is more than 3 years old now, and while Sol is definitely better, it’s better at a tremendous cost. And 3 years of development. And it still fails in nearly all the same places as 4.0. I’m not some “zero AI” person, I don’t think this industry will collapse into nothing an…

I'm the other way around. For doing real, useful work, these things were barely more than toys even just a year ago. Now they're very capable when used well, and still getting better at a fast pace.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#950

Post by rayiner »

birdsongs wrote: post #941
rayiner wrote: post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those are single issues, and the political fault lines are in the sub-issues. For example, while most Americans support "gun control," only 20% of Americans support a ban on handguns : https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx . That figure has been trending steadily downward--from 38% in 1999 to 20% in 2024. That makes it much easier for Republicans to hold the line on that issue: portray all gun control e…

> Apart from that, republicans are ridiculously inept. They're not. They're really not. They're incredibly capable and are currently executing long term plans successfully, one after another. This goes all the way back to Regan and the disenfranchisement of education. They know exactly what they're doing to erode democracy. Calling them inept is dangerously stupid at best, and at worst is just right wing propaganda t…

There's no "long term plans." It just seems that way because republicans are relatively ideologically homogenous, so it seems like there's much more top-down and long-term planning than there is.

Democrats, by contrast, have much more permanent political infrastructure. At the top law schools, for example, there's probably 10x as many liberal organizations as conservative ones. Democrats enjoy politics, so they are always out there organizing and engaging. Meanwhile, Republicans dislike the institutions through which politics is done, and so they gear up once every four years and then go back to their day jobs. Among the sort of more educated people who actually run the parties and serve as line staffers, republicans also self-select into private sector jobs, and out of public sector or political work.

Most importantly, putatively neutral institutions are de-facto aligned with democrats (because the professional class that runs these institutions is overwhelmingly democrats). Conservatives might have Fed Soc, but liberals own the ABA. Virtually every legal organization that isn’t expressly conservative or highly niche is de facto liberal and participates in support of democratic policies.

Post reply on HN