Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI has sitzfleisch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#:~:text=...
We Americans call it grit.
The connotation of grit to me feels different. Grit is pushing through adversity, rather than just tedium.
AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
241–250 of 545 posts
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may have missed the present tense. I didn't say it's over, but that it will be. Please pay attention and don't make straw men. Again, do you believe that there are documents, of any value, that humans don't understand? Maybe an LLM could help you notice what I was saying, since it's clearly beyond at least one human's comprehension!
Again, do you believe that there are documents, of any value, that humans don't understand? There is no value in an undeciphered document until understanding is achieved, just as a lode of gold ore in some asteroid orbiting a distant star has no value until we can fly there and extract it. If an LLM can help us understanding something then it was not incomprehensible, by definition.
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Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#243I 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!
Somewhat tangential, but this reminds me of when I took a certain Microbiology midterm in college. I hadn't put much effort into that class leading up to it, as I had some tough CS classes that consumed my focus that semester (also was admittedly not a great student in general). So when I finally went to take the midterm, after cramming like mad before the exam, I quickly realized I basically didn't know the answer to most of the questions, even what I crammed was only a small portion of the material.
The exam was huge, at least over 10 pages, and even when we technically ran out of time, the professor was kind enough to move the remaining exam takers to the neighboring lecture hall to continue taking it. I recall I spent a total of 2 hours on that exam.
Now mind you it was mostly short answer or multiple choice questions. The multiple choice questions were pretty sharp too, lots of traps and false but sounds right answers mixed in. But if it had been purely essay questions, I would have been screwed.
However with such a huge corpus of information in front of me, I ended up basically learning all the material on the spot. I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding.
In the end I got B+ in the exam (which was curved to an A), and walked out understanding the material better than I did walking in.
Reflecting in the experience years later, I've wondered if a hypothetical LLM which was ignorant of microbiology could do the same thing if fed that exam. In some respects the traps they placed in the multiple choice questions actually were what helped me refine my understanding the most. Made me appreciate information theory more.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't see that at all. Nowhere did this person evoke placing AI above people or even remotely evoke religious imagery. You imagined that yourself, and that creeps me out.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#245It'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.
Counterpoint: something has happened in frontier models, and yes they now get discouraged and will sometimes prefer to not continue working on a problem unless you tell them to anyway.
I don't know how or why this would be trained on behavior, but no, it isn't true anymore that models don't say things like, "Ugh," or "this is going to take hours and maybe we should stop here."
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
As opposed to having built a career complaining about string theory on youtube?
And that's the reason she's wrong?
You were the one introducing the argument "they are getting advantages out of it so we should be careful to not take what they say as an impartial view". Same can be told of Hossenfelder (personally, I would say that Hossenfelder has shown more clues that indeed she is not very reliable and would prefer caricatural sensationalistic descriptions, which is not what the typical string theory physicist does).
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#247That's exactly what the strength of AI is, no? Reading all the world's knowledge and recalling it in an instant and seeing where it applies. Precisely perfect for replacing lawyers, if nothing else..
For instance, Opus 5 yesterday critiqued my resume and mentioned a ridiculous little detail-- my phone number area code didn't match the state in which I currently work (I know, I should anonymize but I couldn't be bothered). It failed to notice that I both worked in (previously) and studied in the state of my area code. This was just two pages of text, set to highest effort.
Why would you want to replace your lawyer with a set of tensors that does not actually think and makes mistakes like this? Lawyers tend to get hired in high stakes situations. Why wouldn't you instead say that this would be a great tool for lawyers to use judiciously in researching precedents, etc?
I don't understand what people are doing with models that makes them assign agency or intelligence to them. When I manage to forget the financial fuckery of the AI buildout and its implications, when I manage to forget scaremongering by loathsome CEOs, I still have the same fascination and excitement at the idea of LLMs as I did when I was playing with the GPT API prior to the release of ChatGPT.
LLMs are, to me, truly amazing tech. It's so fascinating to me that they now DO have emergent properties that look at face value like reasoning and intelligence. But every day that I work with them, I am repeatedly clobbered over the head with the fact that they do NOT reason and are NOT intelligent.
Why can't we be fascinated by emergent properties of intelligence without immediately jumping 10 steps into the future and, like a limit in calculus, assume that "this is it-- we're on the cusp of AGI"? To me, the fact that LLMs can combine existing ideas that people hadn't thought of combining in solving a novel problem is extremely cool. But my first thought is-- this is an amazing new tool for mathematicians and researchers. Instead, most everyone seems to jump the gun to the "humans are obsolete next year" conclusion.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A smart kid can be anything from not eating rocks anymore to multiplying numbers at an early age. Most of us turn out like the rescued exotic bird which turns out to be a seagull covered in curry.
Sometimes I wish there was a Hacker News comment hall of fame.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If humans have nothing to contribute then shared understanding is a pointless endeavor. I agree, but as a software engineer this gives me pause because I keep trying to insist on coding standards but I’m unable to come up with a compelling reason why it matters. Ostensibly the reason we cared about things like DRY and code quality was so that it would be easy to understand and easy to maintain and easy to make chan…
It used to be the same with assembly. Programmers complained the one generated by compilers was not pretty, but now in 99.999% of the cases, it does not matter because nobody look at it.
I beg to differ because a compiler is deterministic.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#250I 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…
I feel like you can make the same analogy with products as well.