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A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

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Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#281

Post by layer8 »

vthallam wrote: post #45
NotOscarWilde wrote: post #11

As a TCS assistant professor from Eastern Europe, I always am a little jealous of the biggest names in math having such an easy access to the expensive, long thinking models. Paying for Pro from any of my current academic budgets is completely ouf of the field of reality here -- all budgets tend to have restricted uses and software payments fit into very few categories. Effectively, I'd have to ask for a brand new gr…

@NotOscarWilde drop your email here, I will reach out and happy to get you a pro account for a few months so you can try 5.5 pro.(work at OAI)

And what should he do after the few months?

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#282

Post by le-mark »

bdangubic wrote: post #263
le-mark wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nausea aside, what evidence does anyone have that “super intelligence” of the sort your argument alludes to is even possible? Because that’s what we’re really talking about; greater than human intelligence on this sort of academic task. For example; When llms start contributing meaningfully to their own development, that would be a convincing indicator imo.

> When llms start contributing meaningfully to their own development, that would be a convincing indicator imo. This has been the case for awhile now already… https://kersai.com/the-48-hours-that-changed-ai-forever-clau...

> The model essentially served as an on-call teammate across MLOps and DevOps tasks, compressing feedback cycles that typically consume expert time

I personally would not characterize automating training processes as “meaningfully”.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#283

Post by kobe_bryant »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #159
bambax wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by solving hard problems you get an insight into the problem-solving process itself, at least in your area of expertise, in a way that you simply don’t if all you do is read other people’s solutions. One consequence of this is that people who have themselves solved difficult problems are likely to be significantly better at using solving problems with the help of AI, just as very good coders are better at vibe codi…

Are you a cutting edge research scientist or something? Everyone I know works in the same domain every day. The problems are the same. People aren't solving brand new problems to humanity every day. We make budgets and look at ticket counts. Roll out patches. Replace hardware. Upgrade software packages. Make a new dashboard to track a project. I guess if every day is a completely novel thing for you, ok. I feel like…

so how would an LLM being able to do your job help you afford a place to live

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#284

Post by vessenes »

010101010101 wrote: post #220
vessenes wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are advancements that do not follow s curves - consider for instance total data transmitted over all networks, or financial derivatives volumes. I think a better question for AI is “is it more like a network effect, liquidity effect, or a biological/physical effect”?

Those are measuring the utility of a technological advancement by looking at usage, not the pace of advancement of said technology.

Yes. But quantity has a quality all its own, as they say — derivatives have gone through at least a few step functions where they have become more important and more useful as their usage grows. I’d call that advancement.

Maybe just to be clear I think that kneejerk “I hate this AI trend, and prefer to believe this will end soon, all exponential growth ends eventually” is intellectually lazy, and dangerous for younger engineers/hackers, a group I hope can benefit from being on HN.

Bitcoin mining went through something like 13 10x growth periods, last I ran the numbers a few years ago. There are physical processes that do have very extended periods of doubling, and there are digital and financial processes that don’t show any signs of doing anything but continuing to keep growing over their multidecade lives. So, like I said, it’s worth thinking carefully, and risk mitigation for things like mental health, career decisions and investment decisions indicates we should be cautious assessing new dynamics.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#285

Post by kranke155 »

MinimalAction wrote: post #12

As a graduate student, this piece made me sad. I always believed that my work speaks for itself and transcends beyond my limited time on this cosmic experience. This notion of immortality was just a small intangible bonus I hoped for when I jumped into grad school. AI is making me feel less worthy.

try meditation.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#287

Post by layer8 »

kang wrote: post #189

> The lower bound for contributing to mathematics will now be to prove something that LLMs can’t prove, rather than simply to prove something that nobody has proved up to now and that at least somebody finds interesting. 5.5pro is amazing but this implication might not be true & is the core argument of this piece. AI will prove all sort of things - interesting, boring & incorrect. To sort it will be the task of the P…

The task of a proof verifier is much simpler than the task of a proof finder (it’s basically equivalent to P vs. NP), and hence the bar for the required skills is lower. Merely verifying proofs isn’t research, and doesn’t impart research skills.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#288

Post by vessenes »

few wrote: post #7

>So if your aim in doing mathematics is to achieve some kind of immortality, so to speak, then you should understand that that won’t necessarily be possible for much longer — not just for you, but for anybody. This made me a little sad

This was the most interesting line in the essay to me as well — I flashed back to quitting an academic math career instantly; the way I thought about it at 19 or 20 was that I didn’t think I could be world class at it. (Rightly). The next thought I had was “what am I good at?” And implied in that was at the very least “What could I be world class at?” Or at least very good at.

I don’t think I ever thought I was good enough to try and get (math) immortality by finding and naming some result that would live beyond me, but if I had, perhaps this bad news would have had a similar impact on me.

That said, I think I disagree with the premise at the margin, at least. I don’t care how many proof assistants or cluster compute is used - the team or person that proves the Riemann Hypothesis will be famous, or at least math famous.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#289

Post by CuriouslyC »

FrojoS wrote: post #141
nopinsight wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're using the "regular" Pro version of Gemini 3.1 for the above, rather than the Deep Think mode, which is more comparable to GPT-5.5 Pro. To my knowledge, regular 3.1 Pro is a tier below and often makes mistakes. Moreover, there's no reason to believe the progress of LLMs, which couldn't reliably solve high-school math problems just 3–4 years ago, will stop anytime soon. You might want to track the progr…

> there's no reason to believe the progress of LLMs [...] will stop anytime soon Wrong. Every advancement has followed a s curve. Where we are on that curve is anyones guess. Or maybe "this time its different".

What people miss is that AI isn't one S curve, each capability we try to bake into a model has its own S curve. Model progress might not impact some capabilities at all, but other capabilities might get totally overhauled.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#290

Post by aspenmartin »

doginasuit wrote: post #265
aspenmartin wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each their own. I mean compilers didn’t produce trillions of dollars of investment, and produce serious and profound philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness but you’re right, thank god we have C

Compilers just made it all possible, but they are not new and shiny. LLMs did not produce the philosophical questions, but they do raise them. It's worth noting that computers have been changing the way we think about consciousness long before LLMs, largely thanks to compilers.

Yea there’s no logical stopping point when you use that logic. Why not say electricity or the element silicon?
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