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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

#171

Post by nimchimpsky »

storus wrote: post #55
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.

AI is a remixer; it remixes all known ideas together. It won't come up with new ideas though; the LLMs just predict the most likely next token based on the context. That means the group of characters it outputs must have been quite common in the past. It won't add a new group of characters it has never seen before on its own.

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

#172

Post by nimchimpsky »

blackcatsec wrote: post #112
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.

This is a way too simplistic model of the things humans provide to the process. Imagination, Hypothesis, Testing, Intuition, and Proofing. An AI can probably do an 'okay' job at summarizing information for meta studies. But what it can't do is go "Hey that's a weird thing in the result that hints at some other vector for this thing we should look at." Especially if that "thing" has never been analyzed before and ther…

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

#173

Post by prmoustache »

eru wrote: post #103
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs can often guess the final answer, but the intermediate proof steps are always total bunk. When doing math you only ever care about the proof, not the answer itself.

Once you have a working proof, no matter how bad, you can work towards making it nicer. It's like refactoring in programming. If your proof is machine checkable, that's even easier.

That is also how humans work mostly. Once every full moon we may get an "intuition" but most of the time we lean on collective knowledge, biases and behavior patterns to take decisions, write and talk.

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

#174

Post by coderenegade »

himata4113 wrote: post #42
lsc4719 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also the only way how humans solve hard problems.

Not always, humans are a lot better at poofing a solution into existence without even trying or testing. It's why we have the scientific method: we come up with a process and verify it, but more often than not we already know that it will work. Compared to AI, it thinks of every possible scientific method and tries them all. Not saying that humans never do this as well, but it's mostly reserved for when we just throw…

That's just not true at all. There are entire fields that rest pretty heavily on brute force search. Entire theses in biomedical and materials science have been written to the effect of "I ran these tests on this compound, and these are the results", without necessarily any underlying theory more than a hope that it'll yield something useful.

As for advances where there is a hypothesis, it rests on the shoulders of those who've come before. You know from observations that putting carbon in iron makes it stronger, and then someone else comes along with a theory of atoms and molecules. You might apply that to figuring out why steel is stronger than iron, and your student takes that and invents a new superalloy with improvements to your model. Remixing is a fundamental part of innovation, because it often teaches you something new. We aren't just alchemying things out of nothing.

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

#175

Post by doctorpangloss »

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.

most issues at every scale of community and time are political, how do you imagine AI will make that better, not worse?

there's no math answer to whether a piece of land in your neighborhood should be apartments, a parking lot or a homeless shelter; whether home prices should go up or down; how much to pay for a new life saving treatment for a child; how much your country should compel fossil fuel emissions even when another country does not... okay, AI isn't going to change anything here, and i've just touched on a bunch of things that can and will affect you personally.

math isn't the right answer to everything, not even most questions. every time someone categorizes "problems" as "hard" and "easy" and talks about "problem solving," they are being co-opted into political apathy. it's cringe for a reason.

there are hardly any mathematicians who get elected, and it's not because voters are stupid! but math is a great way to make money in America, which is why we are talking about it and not because it solves problems.

if you are seeking a simple reason why so many of the "believers" seem to lack integrity, it is because the idea that math is the best solution to everything is an intellectually bankrupt, kind of stupid idea.

if you believe that math is the most dangerous thing because it is the best way to solve problems, you are liable to say something really stupid like this:

> Imagine, say, [a country of] 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist... this is a dangerous situation... Humanity needs to wake up

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol...

Dario Amodei has never won an election. What does he know about countries? (nothing). do you want him running anything? (no). or waking up humanity? In contrast, Barack Obama, who has won elections, thinks education is the best path to less violence and more prosperity.

What are you a believer in? ChatGPT has disrupted exactly ONE business: Chegg, because its main use case is cheating on homework. AI, today, only threatens one thing: education. Doesn't bode well for us.

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

#176

Post by sph »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #123
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.

Are the only two options AI doubter and AI believer?

All I hear about are AI believers and AI-doubters-just-turned-believers

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

#177

Post by eudoxus »

razorbeamz wrote: post #133
XenophileJKO wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a pretty bold assertion for a meatball of chemical and electrical potentials to make.

Do you know what "LLM" stands for? They are large language models, built on predicting language. They are not capable of mathematics because mathematics and language are fundamentally separated from each other. They can give you an answer that looks like a calculation, but they cannot perform a calculation. The most convincing of LLMs have even been programmed to recognize that they have been asked to perform a calcu…

This is a really poor take, to try and put a firewall between mathematics and language, implying something that only has conceptual understanding root in language is incapable of reasoning in mathematical terms.

You're also correlating "mathematics" and "calculation". Who cares about calculation, as you say, we have calculators to do that.

Mathematics is all just logical reasoning and exploration using language, just a very specific, dense, concise, and low level language. But you can always take any mathematical formula and express it as "language" it will just take far more "symbols"

This might be the worse take on this entire comment section. And I'm not even an overly hyped vibe coder, just someone who understands mathematics

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

#178

Post by wobfan »

Finbel wrote: post #132
blackcatsec wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a way too simplistic model of the things humans provide to the process. Imagination, Hypothesis, Testing, Intuition, and Proofing. An AI can probably do an 'okay' job at summarizing information for meta studies. But what it can't do is go "Hey that's a weird thing in the result that hints at some other vector for this thing we should look at." Especially if that "thing" has never been analyzed before and ther…

>Hey that's a weird thing in the result that hints at some other vector for this thing we should look at Kinda funny because that looked _very_ close to what my Opus 4.6 said yesterday when it was debugging compile errors for me. It did proceed to explore the other vector.

> Especially if that "thing" has never been analyzed before and there's no LLM-trained data on it.

This is the crucial part of the comment. LLMs are not able to solve stuff that hasn't been solve in that exact or a very similar way already, because they are prediction machines trained on existing data. It is very able to spot outliers where they have been found by humans before, though, which is important, and is what you've been seeing.

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

eru wrote: post #105
storus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is a remixer; it remixes all known ideas together. It won't come up with new ideas though; the LLMs just predict the most likely next token based on the context. That means the group of characters it outputs must have been quite common in the past. It won't add a new group of characters it has never seen before on its own.

No. That's wrong. LLMs don't output the highest probability taken: they do a random sampling.

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

#180

Post by trick-or-treat »

fenomas wrote: post #166
razorbeamz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This exactly. The proof is in the pudding. If AI pudding is as good as (or better than) human pudding, and you continue to complain about it anyway... You're just being biased and unreasonable.

And by the way, I don't think it's surprising that so many people are being unreasonable on this issue, there is a lot at stake and it's implications are transformative.

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