Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you mimic intelligence?
You just did.
Boooom! Headshot!
AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
211–220 of 545 posts
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#212Does 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.
We don’t trillions of dollars in LLM investment to build things mathematicians don’t understand. We already have plenty of those, even from ancient times. As to your second point, Terry Tao already has an answer [1]: the proof isn’t the contribution, shared understanding is. This issue was already raised back when the four-colour theorem was proved. Machine proving and machine proof checking are useful tools but they…
The idea about the goal of mathematics being shared understanding seems to come at a convenient time.
Mathematicians have never been known to communicate their ideas very clearly.
Regardless, even that target llms will likely win - an llm will likely be more efficient at teaching me string theory than a professor in a room with 463 other students.
The llm is the shared understanding.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
His examples work fine but you aren't accepting them because they don't confine to your paradox. Every writing must be comprehensible to at least the author, regardless of whether it has commercial value or not. If I hit the keyboard a few times, I've created writing, but it doesn't mean anything. It is just gibberish and without meaning, so there is nothing to try to comprehend. So if there is something to be compre…
That's because his examples are obvious and not at all interesting, since we've already seen them.
His original claim amounts to creating an AI that takes its place above humans as some kind of electronic God, delivering edicts to humanity that we cannot comprehend, but which somehow have value to us. It's unskeptical, pseudo-religious nonsense.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok Sabina, everyone is string theory is all just a bunch of egotistical morons.
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.
I don't think it's a good argument. String theory is just "one application" of advanced mathematical physics. It's like saying that software developers specialised in ReactJS would lose their career if ReactJS is suddenly abandoned.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#215Aka - it’s a stochastic parrot with a good memory, for anyone still struggling to understand this. It should be obvious, imo, but some people seem to have trouble with the concept.
I don’t understand why this is such big news. OpenAI has essentially made a bunch of marketing copy by gussying up an algorithm being given a near unlimited budget to stochastically permute through its lossy memory. I think the real scandal is that we are almost 3-4 years into this (I think the release of GPT 3.5 is a good marker of when this public frenzy started) and all we’ve seen is OpenAI and the other major AI…
It's crazy, you see someone spin up 50 instances of chatGPT or gemini or whatever to tackle a math problem, it succeeds by brute forcing through a ton of existing theories to find one that extends the problem, and the takeaway is that this technology is magic and going to solve all of our problems.
Whereas I see that and say - if we properly funded the sciences we could have had a bunch of grad students tackling that problem and found this application 20-30 years ago. Sure it's 'nice' that LLMs can fill in for people in brute force work like that but people are perfectly capable of doing that work and if we focused on properly staffing our research institutions we would achieve a lot more a lot faster. Instead this is obviously going to be used to replace staff and further reduce headcounts.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing about discussing or explaining constraints, is that it rarely is useful or productive if the other side does not accept (or understand) the reality of them. Turing completeness is not exactly a high bar, and it's genuinely confusing as to why you bring it up. Your C++ precompiler is exactly as intelligent as whatever is your favorite agentic workflow with whatever harness you're referring to. Both might be…
Yes, so there is not reason to believe that you can do computations that the precompiler can not do. There is no reason to believe that that you can not fully simulate intelligence in a C++ precompiler. The precompiler can be simulated by human intelligence, and human intelligence can simulate a c++ precompiler. Again, you are the one who arrogantly say they llms can not be intelligent without supplying any argument…
> Again, you are the one who arrogantly say they llms can not be intelligent without supplying any argument for such.
Not really. You've provided the arguments yourself, just now. But, you don't understand them. Which, brings me back to the initial remark, as to why this engagement is bound to be unproductive. I'm off to bed. Have a good one.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#217True, but as it pieces together new mathematical truths from the pieces we have discovered ourselves, it then has more truths upon which to build new solutions. And so on, so while it is just remembering things we have forgotten, the amount of progression an LLM can make may still be several steps ahead and touch areas we have not yet been able to consider or make any progress on ourselves. It's a bit like a pyramid though, eventually it will have tiued together all teh things we know, found all the things we could have known, and then .. perhaps, be unable to actually come up with something genuinely new.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're just going to slowly deconstruct every element that could be a factor of intelligence. It's not out-thinking, it's just out-remembering It's not out-thinking, it's just out-working It's not out-thinking, it's just able to consider more things simultaneously It's not creative, it's just randomly generating things and then selecting viable ones
But the difference really does matter and is not just a case of "whittling down" what intelligence really is. We have known for a very long time that computers and machines are much faster than humans, more accurate, are scalable in certain ways that humans aren't, and they don't tire. I think most people who are not in the "AI cult" would agree that LLMs and modern generative AI are really just an extension of those…
Nobody knows what true "understanding" really entails, or what are "truly novel and unique things that are not just a rejiggering/recombination of training data". For the latter, you'd at least have to find an example in history of someone who came up with some idea that has been widely considered "truly novel" by experts, who didn't have any education or training, so no "rejiggering/recombination".
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#219IMO, That's the case for all subject areas. It is also one area where AI excels at, and it could be of real use if we can find a way to stop hallucinations. The sum of all knowledge being at our finger tips would allow everyone to focus on the hard stuff.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#220I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…
People have told me I was smart since I was a kid, but I can't remember for shit. I had a thought when I was fairly young that the only reason I was (maybe, sometimes) outperforming others intellectually is that I was habitually compensating for my poor memory by working things out on the fly, while others could rely more on rote memorization. Anyway, takes all kinds I guess!
We sort kids into the smart and non-smart labels when they are young, and those labels tend to stick, even when what we're measuring isn't raw intelligence but just variance in childhood development that wash out in the long term. I don't think either group is well served by this.