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AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

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Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#71

Post by Jtarii »

fsmv wrote: post #47
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #5

Does it matter? It's going to produce proofs far more intricate than humans can understand, outdoing humans and opening new frontiers. The age of humans comprehending things is coming to an end: our brains just won't have the capacity to make meaningful contributions to science, math, or technology.

The entire point of writing proofs is for advancing human understanding. A giant dump of symbols that passes the lean compiler is meaningless besides human beings understanding it.

An AI may still be able to apply the results without humans understanding the proof.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#73

Post by AustinDev »

EA-3167 wrote: post #59
putlake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only going to be "connection maker". If and when robotics advance to a point where the LLMs are embodied, they can run experiments in the physical world and find new knowledge.

Robots in labs already exist, but mercifully they're not hooked up to anything as unpredictable as an LLM. Robots tend to work best as specialists doing high-throughput, extremely repetitive tasks which nonetheless require a degree of precision. Giving a robot a "human" body makes very little sense if we're talking about the needs and productivity of a non-human; humanoid robots are marketing for humans.

Humanoid robots are obviously more than marketing. The entirety of human civilization is human shaped. Making robots that are human shaped is easier and more efficient than redesigning and rebuilding everything that exists.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#74

Post by lowbloodsugar »

chongli wrote: post #64
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? We build cranes to hoist weights construction workers can't lift. We build electron microscopes to measure things physicists can't see. Why is it so hard to imagine we can build tools to think thoughts we can't comprehend? If there's commercial value, I think it's inevitable. We don't fund mathematicians because it's cute when they understand a problem, but because their work tends to have applications with…

Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved here?

I know right? And there’s only a market for maybe 5 computers in the whole world.

Paul Krugman (1998): predicted the internet’s economic impact would be no greater than the fax machine’s.

The 1876 Western Union memo dismissing the telephone as having too many shortcomings, and the banker telling Horace Rackham not to invest in Ford because the automobile was a novelty.

We are in good company!

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#75

Post by bluefirebrand »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #67
chongli wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved here?

Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it? How's your understanding of Schroedingers "An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules"? You seem to be using the results of it as applied to semiconductor engineering just fine. And, I promise you, most semiconductor engineers haven't read it in…

> how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full?

"Not many people understand some things fully" is so massively different from "the human mind is incapable of understanding some things that AI will understand for us"

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#76

Post by Jtarii »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #49
tene80i wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible, but there’s a difference between vastness and difficulty. Humans can’t compete with AIs on vastness of material they are familiar with, or the depth of effort they are willing and able to throw at a problem. But scale isn’t the only aspect of difficult scientific endeavours. There’s also theory. And advancements sometimes come through hard graft of knotting together many things. And sometimes they come…

I don't think that's true. Human intelligence is limited, and our brains are inefficient machines. The tools we built to replace muscles have mostly obsoleted raw strength for tasks like excavating earth. There's no reason to think we can't do the same for brains. And then we'll never need to think for a living again. Some people may want to do it as a commercially insignificant hobby, of course, the way people lift…

>our brains are inefficient machines

The human brain is exceptionally efficient.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#77

Post by password4321 »

bze12 wrote: post #57
ComplexSystems wrote: post #9

It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.

AI has sitzfleisch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#:~:text=...

My browser doesn't do the fancy URL text selection...

sitzfleisch: the ability to endure or carry on with an activity

Something Oppenheimer did not have, apparently.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#78

Post by bananaflag »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #13
ComplexSystems wrote: post #9

It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.

> If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. Your timelines are a bit unambitious. There's nobody expecting to make significant progress with a week of work.

> There's nobody expecting to make significant progress with a week of work.

You underestimate my ADHD.

Source: I am mathematician.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#79

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #75
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it? How's your understanding of Schroedingers "An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules"? You seem to be using the results of it as applied to semiconductor engineering just fine. And, I promise you, most semiconductor engineers haven't read it in…

> how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? "Not many people understand some things fully" is so massively different from "the human mind is incapable of understanding some things that AI will understand for us"

Yeah. We're only starting the journey of building tools better at thinking than the human mind, so expecting me to have examples of things it produces is a little hard, don't you think?

The best I can do is things that are incomprehensible to nearly everyone, but still provide value. There's a small leap of imagination to consider an author that understands it and can show others how to leverage results without understanding be mechanical rather than biological.

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