Metacommentary: how did this post get to #5 on the front page with 1 upvote within 2 minutes of submission?
Follow the money.
AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
31–40 of 545 posts
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#32C'mon AI companies, pivot to lawyers or doctors already. Trying to convince us that mathematics and software engineering are "solved" is getting very tiring. The pushback would probably be too much for the soon-to-be IPO-ed companies.
They can rely on compilers, solvers, theorem provers to validate the generated softwares and maths. That’s what makes it possible to iterate quickly in a loop and self correct. You cannot do that in soft industries like legal and medicine
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#33Yes. That's how LLMs do programming, mostly. It's also why LLMs don't need abstractions or parsimony as much as humans. They can work on something complicated without simplifying it first.
This has major implications that haven't been fully realized yet. On the math side, there are long machine generated proofs. On the code side, there are high volumes of code with similar code not being folded into functions.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The age of humans comprehending things is coming to an end" That's something AI companies would really want you to believe.
> That's something AI companies would really want you to believe. Why would I care what they want me to believe? Intuitively it would make sense that you can put math ability on a chart with a value for “general public” “smart high schooler” “smart undergrad” “smart PhD/ professional”. And you could place frontier AI somewhere on that chart over time from GPT 2 to now and see the trend. Then you’d have to consider th…
> Why would I care what they want me to believe?
How would you not care? Are you a robot?
They can say random stuff with the goal of increasing their shareholder value. Things they spit out do not have to be true. It is not easy to verify things they say, therefore, everything they say should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#35Does it matter? It's going to produce proofs far more intricate than humans can understand, outdoing humans and opening new frontiers. The age of humans comprehending things is coming to an end: our brains just won't have the capacity to make meaningful contributions to science, math, or technology.
If and only if that is actually true, then perhaps nothing matters. Until then, calling out shenanigans remains a noble art.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#36Most mathematicians are quite simple creatures. I can do basic math, some derivations, but my bright days of solving differential equations are far gone!
Computers are simply better at math now, like in chess or go!
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#37It is obvious that super intelligence comes from more working memory. It is the scary thing actually. Cause once AI makes arguments that require a working memory of hundred items, then we as humans will have no way of understanding the arguments… We can decompose and write things but only up to a point. when Ai can have a working memory that spans hundreds of books, we are necessarily going to have to trust the syste…
>Cause once AI makes arguments that require a working memory of hundred items, then we as humans will have no way of understanding the arguments…
That doesn't follow. We could still understand it just by studying it and committing it all to long-term memory, it just takes longer. And there's a hard cap on the working memory of LLMs, due to the quadratic scaling cost of the full attention layers that have proved unescapable for all SOTA LLMs.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#38Does it matter? It's going to produce proofs far more intricate than humans can understand, outdoing humans and opening new frontiers. The age of humans comprehending things is coming to an end: our brains just won't have the capacity to make meaningful contributions to science, math, or technology.
You’re prescribing elegance to a stochastic generator trained on the wealth of humanity, including 4chan. Let’s set our expectations a bit.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#39C'mon AI companies, pivot to lawyers or doctors already. Trying to convince us that mathematics and software engineering are "solved" is getting very tiring. The pushback would probably be too much for the soon-to-be IPO-ed companies.
They can rely on compilers, solvers, theorem provers to validate the generated softwares and maths. That’s what makes it possible to iterate quickly in a loop and self correct. You cannot do that in soft industries like legal and medicine
That is not the point I was making. I am not talking about validating software or maths. It can generate stuff that is valid, but bad and incomprehensible.
Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
#40C'mon AI companies, pivot to lawyers or doctors already. Trying to convince us that mathematics and software engineering are "solved" is getting very tiring. The pushback would probably be too much for the soon-to-be IPO-ed companies.
They try to sell AI as lawyer or doctor replacements as well. But because it’s HackerNews we are biased towards our domains to see them more often.