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You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

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Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

#31

Post by wizzwizz4 »

jw1224 wrote: post #29
gjm11 wrote: post #12

I'm not a fan of the glib "everyone knows AI systems don't really think, they are just stochastic parrots, all they do is regurgitate ideas they've stolen" schtick, but this article is the reverse of that only worse. Today's AI systems are pretty impressive but they are absolutely not, not even slightly, the equivalent of Einstein + Hawking + Tao. The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite t…

> If we […] tried to use these systems to solve the kinds of problems we need Einsteins, Hawkings and Taos for, then we would be in for one miserable disappointment after another We can literally watch Terence Tao himself vibe coding formal proofs using Claude and o4. He doesn’t seem too disappointed. https://youtu.be/zZr54G7ec7A?si=GpRZK5W1LDvWyBBw

He's the only person I know of who can actually get good results out of these systems (though I know several people who claim they can). What he's doing is fundamentally not the same thing as what most "vibe coders" are doing: take the autocomplete away, and he's still a talented mathematician.

Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

#32

Post by aprilthird2021 »

personjerry wrote: post #25
gjm11 wrote: post #12

I'm not a fan of the glib "everyone knows AI systems don't really think, they are just stochastic parrots, all they do is regurgitate ideas they've stolen" schtick, but this article is the reverse of that only worse. Today's AI systems are pretty impressive but they are absolutely not, not even slightly, the equivalent of Einstein + Hawking + Tao. The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite t…

> The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite this so it sounds smarter" is that that's what they're best at. I disagree. The reason is that that's what aligns best with what most people are looking for help on. There is a disconnect between reality and the AI product consumer envisioned here. There is no magical enlightened user who's going to unleash their inner potential. How much physics…

Sorry, you can disagree, but LLMs are generative, meant to generate pleasing-to-humans text, specifically, and that is what they do best...

They are not going to come up with a theory of relativity

Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

#33

Post by cgriswald »

justonceokay wrote: post #15
gjm11 wrote: post #12

I'm not a fan of the glib "everyone knows AI systems don't really think, they are just stochastic parrots, all they do is regurgitate ideas they've stolen" schtick, but this article is the reverse of that only worse. Today's AI systems are pretty impressive but they are absolutely not, not even slightly, the equivalent of Einstein + Hawking + Tao. The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite t…

There’s a little nagging thought in my head when I hear that some people are helped immensely by AI and others are not. It’s that there is a threshold for intelligence that the AI either impresses you or it does not. I’m sure this threshold will continue to rise

I see that same threshold, but rather than intelligence, it is imagination, and the people below the threshold are unable to find ways to make AI useful to themselves. I think this threshold lowering is in agreement with your threshold rising: People will become more savvy.

Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

#34

Post by aprilthird2021 »

gjm11 wrote: post #12

I'm not a fan of the glib "everyone knows AI systems don't really think, they are just stochastic parrots, all they do is regurgitate ideas they've stolen" schtick, but this article is the reverse of that only worse. Today's AI systems are pretty impressive but they are absolutely not, not even slightly, the equivalent of Einstein + Hawking + Tao. The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite t…

I agree 100%. Additionally, this article ignores the existence of Google. Even the high level questions the person asked Einstein before he devolved to asking for email editing help were things you could have just googled.

The greatness of great minds was how they thought about problems and how they changed how we thought about things. An AI cannot do that. It's designed to tell you what people combined have already agreed upon. It's not designed to break the frontier of our knowledge

Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

#35

Post by aprilthird2021 »

Xeoncross wrote: post #21
justonceokay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a little nagging thought in my head when I hear that some people are helped immensely by AI and others are not. It’s that there is a threshold for intelligence that the AI either impresses you or it does not. I’m sure this threshold will continue to rise

It feels like the level of skill needed to remain above GenAI's ability to code, write, produce songs, or drawings keeps rising. All of us have strengths, things we do better than AI still (even basic companionship abilities), but I wonder how long that will be true.

If you have imagination, you will always be above this line.

Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

#36

Post by aprilthird2021 »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #24
verbify wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it isn't hallucinating? My experience of AI is that it can be very convincing and produce information that "looks right".

I mostly use it in fields where its claims are easily verifiable.

So then it's no different from reading a Wikipedia page about a topic? I mean, if you only use it to teach you stuff you can verify, then couldn't you skip one step in this process?

Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

#37

Post by raincole »

Such a weird article.

On r/AskPhysics you'll see people post AI-made crank theories every day. I assume there have been even more, as the mods constantly remove AI posts. So why would I let AI teach me physics?

AI is best at things you already know, or at least used to know. Like you know a foreign dish but you forget the exact name, or an idiom on the tip of your tongue.

Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

#38

Post by aeve890 »

>This is three geniuses for the price of a gym membership

Geniuses? Come on. Let's talk when a LLM is central to a new development in HEP or math. I mean central, like a paradigm shift kind of thing, directly from the AI. A quantum gravity theory, a brand new branch of math, a new approach to a unsolved conjecture, whatever. That's what geniuses do. Not repeating what you can already read in a book! This kind of thing says more about people's ignorance and how impressionable they are than the actual capabilities of the tech. If you think that AI text and image generation _creativity_ can be translated to hard things like math, oh boy.

Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

#39

Post by dkarl »

c22 wrote: post #19
dkarl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. Sure, a computer or an LLM isn't alive, but we have no idea if "being alive" is what is required for consc…

I think it's bizarre to take the default assumption that a bunch of atoms in a self-replicating configuration shouldn't experience anything since our own lived experience so saliently contradicts this. In fact, there's nothing in my understanding of the universe to convince me that other self-replicating configurations of atoms don't experience things the same way I do.

I agree — our scientific knowledge gives us no justification for believing that anything should be conscious, but our own experience shows that there's something we don't understand yet. In some ways, the next simplest thing to assume is panpsychism, but even that is just a starting place that tells us nothing about how to think about the consciousness of, say, a computer. We've barely scraped the surface even in the animal kingdom.
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