Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

mathstodon.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 367 posts

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#291

Post by porridgeraisin »

unified101 wrote: post #279
porridgeraisin wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the problem has almost no value unto itself. The clay statement of navier stokes is not relevant to how CFD is done in practice. It's about what is non verifiable versus verifiable. The same way it produces "slop" code (which, if you give it test cases, will be 100% correct), it also produces "slop" math. Code that serves a business function, it's ok if its slop. Math that serves directly a business function…

> Code that serves a business function might as well be slop. Math that serves directly a business function also can be slop. Both of these are simply incorrect - serving a business function means it's valuable to that function.

I phrased it badly just out of bed.

I meant what you're saying. That it's OK if it's slop if it serves a business function.

Edited

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#292

Post by marsten »

layman51 wrote: post #91
_alternator_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and they will. But what's happening here is that the system that cultivates mathematics (and mathematicians) is recieving likely the biggest shock of its history. How do you reward merit and identify talen when people can't absorb the number of proofs being generated, much less understand them? Perleman's proof of the Poincare conjecture took several years for the mathematical community to digest; the proof of N…

This reminds me of the time an AI was taught how to play a racing sim game (Gran Turismo if I remember correctly). The AI was able to race its car very well, but it took a lot of risks that a human player probably would not. A human player might be able to copy the approach the AI took, but they would probably crash. Going back to chess, I think the situation is similar where you can’t expect an amateur player to get…

> The AI was able to race its car very well, but it took a lot of risks that a human player probably would not.

There is a parallel with autonomous vehicles in real life. On northbound 1 in SF going through GG Park, the left turn lane onto Crossover Drive is always backed up. Waymos often do a very late merge into that turn lane in order to jump the queue and save time. With 360 degree sensing they can do this safely in real time but it feels too risky for most humans to attempt.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#293

Post by conz »

ironman1478 wrote: post #242
orangecat wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is not "theft" according to current legal precedent, and also common sense.

It is theft under common sense.

Only in the sense that you reading a book from the library also constitutes theft of knowledge. Does it?

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#296

Post by matt3210 »

orangecat wrote: post #182
_alternator_ wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. GP was referring to the use of copyrighted material to train LLMs.

Which is not "theft" according to current legal precedent, and also common sense.

Hunting an animal would be considered ok by most, but scaling it to the point of damage is not ok according to most.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#297

Post by nullbio »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #254
silver92bullet wrote: post #238

I think this highlights one of the fundamental differences between humans and our current AI systems. They can still only try to solve problems in the given well defined parameters they are given (with some exceptions). The human is able in the effort to solve problems to intuit where there may be new interesting problems adjacent to the current problem.

I don't think we can confidently say, yet, that LLMs can't discover those connections. We just haven't explored them yet, because 99.99% of the prestige is locked up in proving hard results, which also happen to be easier to assess objectively (thanks to automated proof checkers), and so that's where all the effort has thus far been exerted.

LLMs can discover anything. It is just a matter of creating the right goal function and teaching it the right heuristics. Right now, humans are required because humans know what humans want, and LLMs are not good at predicting what humans want to the point where they can safely and autonomously run off on their own to solve problems we didn't know we had, or to define the problems we have that we're not good at defining ourselves.

Once that is cracked, you throw more compute at it and practically every industry will collapse on a long enough horizon - with digital industries going first. Anything that requires physical hardware will require time for the machines to bootstrap, but that'll get there too.

Although, there are a few human-centric industries that will survive, for example: prostitution. Maintaining it's edge as the world's oldest and most enduring profession.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#298

Post by matt3210 »

thymine_dimer wrote: post #80

Doesn't this just suggest that the next frontier for powerful AI models is to ask challenging questions, not simply solve them? Terry even says this: "In fact, it is now the identification of a promising problem which is the scarce and precious resource." The creativity and insight needed to ask a question that Terry gets excited about is the next step. Perhaps OpenAI should create a set of challenging questions and…

> ask challenging questions

As far as I can tell, it's still not possible for an agent to reliably determine if a question is a good question. That means the test part of the loop cant be fulfilled.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#299

Post by palmotea »

ahepp wrote: post #278
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this seem to be where all domains are headed? I get kinda freaked out when I feel like all the AI "utopianists" haven't taken the next logical step of thinking about what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain (and you may argue this won't happen, though I'm becoming more and more a believer that it will, but my point is the utopianists believe that this absolutely will happen, and that it'…

Doesn't the premise that there's something inferior about these AI solutions, imply that there is something superior about human intelligence and that there will continue to be some kind of useful work for humans to do?

> Doesn't the premise that there's something inferior about these AI solutions, imply that there is something superior about human intelligence and that there will continue to be some kind of useful work for humans to do?

Not necessarily. The "something superior about human intelligence" may have dependencies that "these AI solutions" are able to eliminate, such as the motivation to refine intellectual talent to a high level. Basically, AI could kick the ladder out from under human intelligence but be incapable of actually surpassing it in important ways, enabling a burst of advancement that's also a dead end. Sort of like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor....

So the AI could be inferior but there's still no useful work for humans, because the environment doesn't allow them to work up to that level anymore.

This is kinda feeling a bit like SBF's coin flip bet: https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-coin-flip-.... Achieve human-superior AGI this generation or humanity stagnates.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#300

Post by sh4zb0t »

p1esk wrote: post #277
segmondy wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss the point. Humans don't mind competing with others. I love competition, but I don't want to compete with you and your machine. I love to play chess, I don't care if you are grand master, whoop my ass. But not if you are going to pair up with stockfish. I don't even care if you are a newbie that started playing yesterday with an ELO rating of 900. If I wanted to play the damn computer I'll do it myself. Likew…

Could you tell the difference between a grandmaster and stockfish if playing them online? If not, why would you care which one you are playing against?

because we value competence
Post reply on HN