Live data from Hacker News

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

davidepiffer.com

131–140 of 545 posts

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being embodied is not the important barrier to running experiments. It's having access to a body of resources (i.e. funding and infrastructure).

For some research funding is mostly the salaries of the people doing the research.

What research works that way?

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

#132
I love the term "Out-Remembering"! I have been trying to find a way to communicate that "intelligence", "creativity" and so on might be misleading about the true nature of LLMs, and they would better be described as genious "reproducers" as in, they are very capable at reproducing what they have already seen - and they are a bit less capable, but for many use cases still good enough, at reproducing a mix of concepts seen previously.

This also nudges into how to use it best: By knowing where the "piles" of if training data are (i.e. when it comes to a CLI in rust, I just briefly describe the use cases, and I have a very high confidence the code will work exactly as intended by me since there will be a multitude of examples in the training data), one can predict where the LLM is likely to go wrong an prompt/guard accordingly. This skill grows with domain expertise, and is one of the many reasons LLMs can be (and probably should be) used to outsource busy work, but never understanding and learning. ("never" is a not meant literaly of course - I for one am glad that I do not have to wrap my head around CSS and other frontend topics and go straight to the topics that interest me most)

"Out-Remembering" captures that perfectly, I feel. Also goes nice along with "asking it leading questions" as we know how to do in real live; if you want a person (LLM) to confess (produce output tokens) something, sometimes you do that by leading the interogation (chat, context) to where you think the truth lies.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now.

As opposed to having built a career complaining about string theory on youtube?

And that's the reason she's wrong?

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.

When people make these comments about string theory, are they at the forefront of quantum physics theory and have spent years on modern string theory? Or did they just watch a YouTube video and then keep parroting this?

You could reductio ad-absurdum this logic quite broadly. We all form beliefs about the world and its aspects, and almost always through fallible sources. Should one be confident about ones of questionable provenance? I say no. But forming beliefs from the information we have is a useful skill.

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

loaned from German, where it's originally a way to say buttocks, literally "sitting flesh". If you have more Sitzfleisch you can sit for longer. Both in the literal sense (a bigger butt makes sitting more comfortable) and in the figurative sense (having the mental ability to sit for longer, get more desk work done)

Fascinating crossover from literal to figurative that you find so often when you trace language back far enough.

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

#137
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've moved the goalposts. The original claim was about producing mathematics that are in principle impossible for any human to understand . All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value. Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value?

You asked for examples, for a technology that we're still building. Maybe you can see the issue with that? Anyways, people benefitted greatly from Newton's laws of gravity, even though we still don't have a quantum-compatible set of laws for it. The laws of gravity are still incomprehensible for people, but the approximation that we've observed is still immensely valuable.

No, I gave you a lot more leeway than that. Take any utterly incomprehensible piece of writing from the entire history of civilization and demonstrate its value.

You keep falling back on "incomprehensible for some people" but that wasn't the claim. It was about a text which is incomprehensible in principle; that is, utterly impossible for any human to ever understand.

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

#139

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 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.

That sentiment makes me cringe. If you understand how LLMs work, you'd know it'll never be possible without a fundamental change in how these work.

We're also supposed to be reaching that point, somehow, without the LLMs ever being intelligent (in the dictionary definition sense, not the "high reasoning model" marketing sense).

Based on observations, the ones who are fooled by the supposed emergent properties, are just that, fools. Any sufficiently unintelligent agent will perceive transformer based LLM text predictors as possessing high intelligence.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.

Ok Sabina, everyone is string theory is all just a bunch of egotistical morons.

Spending your life's work on a theory that is widely agreed to be untestable is certainly a form of ego, or at least is more philosophy than science.
Post reply on HN