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GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

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Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#231

Post by awaythrow9191 »

karahime wrote: post #47
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #33

[flagged]

It's interesting to see the old "Why would we go to space when there are still uncured diseases" show up in a place like this. Science and discovery are singular, all discovery aids all discovery.

The demographics of HN have changed drastically over the past 10-15 years. I don't want to be the "back in my day", but back in my day, there were a lot more technical people here, and politics was much smaller. Now there's a ton more people, ton more politics, and a lot less "hey here's something really cool I built, it's like rsync but nice"

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#232

Post by skekke »

Levitz wrote: post #134
mw67 wrote: post #14

Crazy how intelligence is cheap, efficient and commonplace now. We humans better refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant

Intelligence on its own is not very useful though. We put it on a pedestal because it creates huge potential when paired with other things, wisdom, discipline, empathy, but on its own?

It’s no diff to an educated human.

Stored potential.

But will that potential be converted that contributes to the economy..? That requires other traits.

Might be focus, might be discipline, might be the need to get revenge lmao.

This is what the llm-boosters miss. Progress is willed into existence.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#233

Post by Shorel »

raincole wrote: post #199
sashank_1509 wrote: post #116

This is all a depressing and bleak future that I don’t look forward to. One solution is to ban LLM’s, to artificially create a demand for human thought, that just feels like living in an artificially constructed zoo. Another solution is humans don’t do anything that AI can do better , / doesn’t need the human touch. So I suppose we will all become artists, sportsmen or politicians, the only jobs that will remain exce…

It genuinely scares me that some people's first reaction to this news is banning LLM.

Why? No one will be able to effectively ban AI. Pandora's box is open, and we can only witness the consequences.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#235

Post by Shorel »

tripleee wrote: post #151
slashdave wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more to human life than programming and math proofs.

unfortunately many won't get to experience it much because we'll be stressed and struggling to make a living

This is already the case with most human activities, even reading a book for leisure is a luxury many can't afford.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#236

Post by nicf »

vatsachak wrote: post #167
nicf wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent some time working both as a math researcher and as a software engineer, and I think this comment actually underrates the similarity between the two fields as they're actually practiced. Some math research does involve grabbing a single, fully specified conjecture off the shelf and hunting for a proof of it, and it's true that if you manage to solve a long-standing open problem, other mathematicians will be…

I think that your take is quite optimistic. Having published in top tier journals my only experience is that mathematicians care about what other mathematicians worked on and failed to solve. Theory building papers are dime a dozen and don't get published in high tier journals unless they solve a problem. Math is such that most theories are built after solving a problem and actually don't solve a larger class of prob…

If your complaint is about the type of work that gets you published in a fancy math journal, then I'll happily join you on the barricades. Sure, getting a paper into Annals of Mathematics or whatever is more game than art in the sense I think you mean here.

But "what mathematicians care about" is much, much broader than what gets you published in a fancy journal. Mathematics as a human activity is millennia old, much older than the concept of journals or even universities, and that activity is, to me, very beautiful, worth preserving, and more of an art than a game. The incentive structure of academia for the past few decades has done a pretty bad job at preserving that art form, but that doesn't mean mathematicians as actual human beings don't care about it --- if they didn't, they probably would have chosen a different career.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#237

Post by pfdietz »

skekke wrote: post #226
pfdietz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sometimes start improving again. In the context of your comment, look how the cost/kg to LEO has suddenly dropped radically. This was mostly due to institutional change that allowed previous non-technological barriers to improvement to be bypassed.

[flagged]

Wow. That literally has nothing to do with what I wrote.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#238

Post by tripleee »

Shorel wrote: post #235
tripleee wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately many won't get to experience it much because we'll be stressed and struggling to make a living

This is already the case with most human activities, even reading a book for leisure is a luxury many can't afford.

It's available to most, though.

Outside of really bad luck I've never seen a case where someone was in a situation of working hard + making reasonably okay decisions + struggling, and that's purely due to there being avenues available where you can be rewarded well for your effort if you're of average+ intelligence.

AI is threatening to take that opportunity away.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#239

Post by nicf »

rocqua wrote: post #227
nicf wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent some time working both as a math researcher and as a software engineer, and I think this comment actually underrates the similarity between the two fields as they're actually practiced. Some math research does involve grabbing a single, fully specified conjecture off the shelf and hunting for a proof of it, and it's true that if you manage to solve a long-standing open problem, other mathematicians will be…

It seems to me you hooked onto the wrong part of proofs vs software compared to what OP meant. The difference OP cares about isn’t how much one cares about style. Instead the important difference lies in validation. A proof can be validated as either correct or wrong. That type of hard feedback really helps combat the optimism and desire for shortcuts of modern models. Now, that still doesn’t help an LLM distinguish…

No, what I'm saying is that I don't agree that taste in mathematics is more uniform than taste in coding! Mathematicians argue about taste all the time. Just as you might look at a piece of code and agree that it compiles and doesn't have any fatal bugs but still think it's badly written, hard to follow, hard to modify, or whatever else, mathematicians judge mathematical work using very similar criteria.

Re: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

#240

Post by kevincox »

tripleee wrote: post #230
kevincox wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that we are gaining more knowledge and better technology. The problem is that we are allowing the rich to use the technology to subjugate the majority. If AI improves human productivity so much that millions of people no longer need to work that should be an incredible thing. But the flawed structure of our society punishes those people rather than freeing them to persue endeavors that interest then…

Only solution I can think of is higher taxes for the rich used to provide universal income. I'm not sure how the realities of that would play out, though. Anything based on a free market just ends up in.. this.

I'm strongly in favour of this. I think income tax should approach 100%. So your second billion you still make more. But not twice as much. The exact decay function is up to date. But I really don't think your post-tax take home should scale linearly with your income once you hit the max bracket.

We can also remove all of the loopholes that result in the biggest companies paying basically no taxes. I also think it may make sense to have a dramatically different tax structure for businesses than effectively income tax.

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