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Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

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Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#161

Post by parasubvert »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #82
Validark wrote: post #33

I have long said I am an AI doubter until AI could print out the answers to hard problems or ones requiring tons of innovation. Assuming this is verified to be correct (not by AI) then I just became a believer. I would like to see a few more AI inventions to know for sure, but wow, it really is a new and exciting world. I really hope we use this intelligence resource to make the world better.

The problem is that the AI industry has been caught lying about their accomplishments and cheating on tests so much that I can't actually trust them when they say they achieved a result. They have burned all credibility in their pursuit of hype.

I'm all for skeptical inquiry, but "burning all credibility" is an overreaction. We are definitely seeing very unexpected levels of performance in frontier models.

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#162

Post by slopinthebag »

famouswaffles wrote: post #151
slopinthebag wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you can even define intelligence sufficiently to argue this point. Since that's an ongoing debate without a resolution thus far. But you claimed that humans aren't unique. I think it's pretty obvious we are on many dimensions including what you might classify as "intelligence". You don't even necessarily have to believe in a "soul" or something like that, although many people do. The capabilities of a human f…

>The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date What does this mean ? Are you saying every human could have achieved this result ? Or this ? https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/ because well, you'd be wrong. >, and much more efficiently as well. That we are able to brute-force a simulacrum of intelligence in a few narrow domains is incredible, but we should not denigrate humans wh…

> The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date

Meaning however you (reasonably) define intelligence, if you compare humans to any AI system humans are overwhelmingly more capable. Defining "intelligence" as "solving a math equation" is not a reasonable definition of intelligence. Or else we'd be talking about how my calculator is intelligent. Of course computers can compute faster than we can, that's aside the point.

> Human intelligence was brute forced.

No, I don't mean how the intelligence evolved or was created. But if you want to make that argument you're essentially asserting we have a creator, because to "brute force" something means it was intentional. Evolution is not an intentional process, unless you believe in God or a creator of sorts, which is totally fair but probably not what you were intending.

But my point is that LLM's essentially arrive at answers by brute force through search. Go look at what a reasoning model does to count the letters in a sentence, or the amount of energy it takes to do things humans can do with orders of magnitude less (our brain runs on %20 of a lightbulb!).

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#163

Post by qsera »

raincole wrote: post #41
himata4113 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less of solving a problem, but trying every single solution until one works. Exhaustive search pretty much. It's pretty much how all the hard problems are solved by AI from my experience.

In other words, it's solving a problem.

A random sentence can also generate correct solution to a problem once in a long while...does not mean that it "solved" anything..

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#164

Post by parasubvert »

slg wrote: post #60
raincole wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, it's solving a problem.

Yes, but is it "intelligence" is a valid question. We have known for a long time that computers are a lot faster than humans. Get a dumb person who works fast enough and eventually they'll spit out enough good work to surpass a smart person of average speed. It remains to be seen whether this is genuinely intelligence or an infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters situation. And I'm not sure why this specific example…

Someone actually mathed out infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters, and it turns out, it is a great example of how misleading probabilities are when dealing with infinity:

"Even if every proton in the observable universe (which is estimated at roughly 1080) were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons might no longer exist), they would still need a far greater amount of time – more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer – to have even a 1 in 10500 chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10^360,641 observable universes made of protonic monkeys."

Often infinite things that are probability 1 in theory, are in practice, safe to assume to be 0.

So no. LLMs are not brute force dummies. We are seeing increasingly emergent behavior in frontier models.

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#166

Post by fenomas »

razorbeamz wrote: post #124
trick-or-treat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all LLM output is based on likelihood of one word coming after the next word based on the prompt. Right but it has to reason about what that next word should be. It has to model the problem and then consider ways to approach it.

No, it does not reason anything. LLM "reasoning" is just an illusion. When an LLM is "reasoning" it's just feeding its own output back into itself and giving it another go.

This is like saying chess engines don't actually "play" chess, even though they trounce grandmasters. It's a meaningless distinction, about words (think, reason, ..) that have no firm definitions.

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#167

Post by NitpickLawyer »

snemvalts wrote: post #65
Validark wrote: post #33

I have long said I am an AI doubter until AI could print out the answers to hard problems or ones requiring tons of innovation. Assuming this is verified to be correct (not by AI) then I just became a believer. I would like to see a few more AI inventions to know for sure, but wow, it really is a new and exciting world. I really hope we use this intelligence resource to make the world better.

Math and coding competition problems are easier to train because of strict rules and cheap verification. But once you go beyond that to less defined things such as code quality, where even humans have hard time putting down concrete axioms, they start to hallucinate more and become less useful. We are missing the value function that allowed AlphaGo to go from mid range player trained on human moves to superhuman by p…

> I don't see this getting better.

We went from 2 + 7 = 11 to "solved a frontier math problem" in 3 years, yet people don't think this will improve?

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#168

Post by OhioMan2943 »

konart wrote: post #143
qnleigh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But human researchers are also remixers. Copying something I commented below: > Speaking as a researcher, the line between new ideas and existing knowledge is very blurry and maybe doesn't even exist. The vast majority of research papers get new results by combining existing ideas in novel ways. This process can lead to genuinely new ideas, because the results of a good project teach you unexpected things.

>But human researchers are also remixers. Some human researchers are also remixers to Some degree. Can you imagine AI coming up with refraction & separation lie Newton did?

Or even gravity to explain an apple falling from a tree- when almost all of the knowledge until then realistically suggested nothing about gravity?

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#169

Post by typs »

snemvalts wrote: post #65
Validark wrote: post #33

I have long said I am an AI doubter until AI could print out the answers to hard problems or ones requiring tons of innovation. Assuming this is verified to be correct (not by AI) then I just became a believer. I would like to see a few more AI inventions to know for sure, but wow, it really is a new and exciting world. I really hope we use this intelligence resource to make the world better.

Math and coding competition problems are easier to train because of strict rules and cheap verification. But once you go beyond that to less defined things such as code quality, where even humans have hard time putting down concrete axioms, they start to hallucinate more and become less useful. We are missing the value function that allowed AlphaGo to go from mid range player trained on human moves to superhuman by p…

I mean, this is why everyone is making bank selling RL environments in different domains to frontier labs.

Re: Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem

#170

Post by eptcyka »

snemvalts wrote: post #65
Validark wrote: post #33

I have long said I am an AI doubter until AI could print out the answers to hard problems or ones requiring tons of innovation. Assuming this is verified to be correct (not by AI) then I just became a believer. I would like to see a few more AI inventions to know for sure, but wow, it really is a new and exciting world. I really hope we use this intelligence resource to make the world better.

Math and coding competition problems are easier to train because of strict rules and cheap verification. But once you go beyond that to less defined things such as code quality, where even humans have hard time putting down concrete axioms, they start to hallucinate more and become less useful. We are missing the value function that allowed AlphaGo to go from mid range player trained on human moves to superhuman by p…

Do we need all that if we can apply AI to solve practical problems today?
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