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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

#961

Post by overgard »

energy123 wrote: post #454
neta1337 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? His predictions were accurate so far

No they were not. These were his 5 predictions in 2022: """ 1. By 2029, AI will still be unable to watch a movie and accurately explain the characters, events, conflicts, and motivations. 2. By 2029, AI will still be unable to read a novel and reliably answer questions about its plot, characters, conflicts, and motivations beyond what is stated literally. 3. By 2029, AI will still be unable to work as a competent coo…

I think his predictions for 2025 were pretty accurate:

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/six-or-seven-predictions-f...

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#962

Post by variadix »

andai wrote: post #805
chatmasta wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect we can squeeze a lot more exponential out of LLMs because they’ve basically shown that human “consciousness,” insofar as it’s composed of knowledge and rules for synthesizing that knowledge, can be represented mathematically in a very high dimensional space. Why does this “just work?” Nobody really knows, but it clearly does. However, I also expect this squeeze will come at an increasingly expensive price —…

The transformer is Turing complete. It might be a tarpit though? I don't know. I think a nice example is using them for arithmetic. It's a specialized deterministic process, so it's extremely wasteful to do it that way. But they're good at finding solutions to things we don't know how to specialize yet. So, to use metaphor, maybe the transformer-based models are like the FPGA, and then when we figure out the patterns…

I think this is one approach to AI safety and interpretability that could work, but would require labs to slow down to figure out how to extract circuits/algorithms out of trained LLMs rather than deploying the opaque artifact.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#963

Post by attila-lendvai »

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.

> If you think that the American Left is anything like communism

no, you completely missed my point. why would i talk about communism if in the same comment i'm saying that the left/right divide is a fake distraction... a red herring?

what i said is that what matters is the authoritarianism/freedom scale.

i just mentioned my past to emphasize that ideologies like communism are not to be identified by announcing themselves as 'communism'... but by recognizing their actual shape and actions. and i have a little first hand experience in that.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#964

Post by olelele »

Levitz wrote: post #794
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.

The "left" as in the party, sure, not that much of an authoritarian leaning. The "left" as in the pervasive group that crawled out of Tumblr, took hold of Twitter back in the day, and has a stronghold on Reddit now? Those do care about what you can say, think, watch and read, and the more they can control, the better. The US right can only dream to have half as much control as the left has had in the last three decad…

This take makes me profoundly sad. Too much culture war and to little empathy.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#965

Post by w4yai »

overgard wrote: post #956
w4yai wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI already have an impact, and yes this is PR hype because this is a product. Yet both can be true at the same time. We're not blindly eating what's OpenAI is serving us as gold truth, we're just admitting it's doing remarkable progress. Remember October 2024 Pelicans [1] ? It's been only less than 2 years. We don't know what will come in the next 2 years. But the progress doesn't seem to stop for now. [1] https://si…

Nobody is saying it doesn't have an impact. What we're saying is the near-religious fervor isn't warranted. AI boosters always speak in the future tense, which is extremely telling because we have right now is basically "ok" not earth shattering.

If you think it's "ok", then you're probably not using it the right way.

I've been analyzing thousands of x86 traces and the AI made sense of them at a scale no previous human or algorithm could do before - I've been reading assembly everyday for half of my life. I'm doing prototypes in minutes what would take hours or days before. AI is answering questions in such a precise way in so many domains, learning something has never been easier.

This is "just ok" for you ? What do you need exactly ? god omniscience ? come on, can't we just appreciate for what it is and be excited about the future ?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#966

Post by nostrebored »

heaney-555 wrote: post #953
nostrebored wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For customer support I don't think models have gotten better since gpt-4.1. The class of small models, with limited to no reasoning, that need to handle a complex issue with a touch of empathy, has not improved much. I think most are actually worth, as agentic harnesses seem to optimize for solving poorly described problems rather than following complex procedures as written. In other words, instruction following max…

>The class of small models, with limited to no reasoning What? GPT-4.1 was not a small model! And why wouldn't you use reasoning? You're of course going to see poor results when you restrict yourself to small non-reasoning models, but why would you?

"Small" was a poor choice of words here, "low compute budget" is more what I'm getting at.

In voice interactions, ttfat is actually relatively important. If you look at models with a <1s ttfat you eliminate almost every reasoning model, less some of the diffusion models and more obscure ddtree/dflash like speculative decoding implementations.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#967

Post by naasking »

applicative wrote: post #916
Peaches4Rent wrote: post #902

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think that it matters if it was effective. There's a reason attempted murder is a crime even if it was unsuccessful

It isn't so clear there is a reason for the crime of 'attempt', or what or how good the reason is. The Star Chamber, which cooked it up, is universally condemned as oppressive. You might say they anticipated science fiction tyranny, when they invented the world's first thought-crime: they were able to make a crime of 'conspiracy' because they imagined that the speech of the conspirators was an 'outward act'; inevitab…

It's interesting to claim that it would be difficult to explain why we punish successful crime more. A successful murder creates more suffering (victim's friends and family), and ostensibly the loss of a productive member of society. These all seem like fairly common justifications for punishing murderers under the banner of retributive justice.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#968

Post by annzabelle »

synarchefriend wrote: post #880
annzabelle wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are confusing Scott Alexander with Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Scott Alexander is a follower of Yudkowski and comes out of that general LessWrong space.

This is the plural they, not the singular they.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#969

Post by heaney-555 »

nostrebored wrote: post #966
heaney-555 wrote: post #953

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The class of small models, with limited to no reasoning What? GPT-4.1 was not a small model! And why wouldn't you use reasoning? You're of course going to see poor results when you restrict yourself to small non-reasoning models, but why would you?

"Small" was a poor choice of words here, "low compute budget" is more what I'm getting at. In voice interactions, ttfat is actually relatively important. If you look at models with a <1s ttfat you eliminate almost every reasoning model, less some of the diffusion models and more obscure ddtree/dflash like speculative decoding implementations.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live/

GPT-Live, which is coming to the API soon, responds instantly while reasoning in the background. So it can say "Hold on, I'll look that up for you" and continue to respond to the user conversationally while running an asynchronous reasoning task in the background.

It's not in the API yet, but it should be in the coming weeks. You'll see an enormous improvement compared to GPT-4.1.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#970

Post by azan_ »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #919
azan_ wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poverty and inequality keeps declining all the time thanks to economic growth.

In some countries, especially less developed ones, poverty levels are declining, but in the US the trend seems to be the opposite. The middle class is being gutted and descending into survival mode if not poverty, while the top few percent become obscenely rich at their expense. In any case historical trends are really irrelevant to the discussion, which is about the impact of AI, which threatens to take away almost…

> In some countries, especially less developed ones, poverty levels are declining, but in the US the trend seems to be the opposite.

This *seems* does a lot of heavy lifting here. That's not what data shows.

> The middle class is being gutted and descending into survival mode if not poverty, while the top few percent become obscenely rich at their expense.

The middle class is getting smaller because people are getting richer and start to qualify to higher class, which is opposite of what you just said.

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