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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

#371

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

stavros wrote: post #348
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fundamentally misunderstand how AI works Who does fundamentally understand how LLMs work? Many claims flying around these days, all backed by some of the largest investments ever collectively made by humans. Lots of money to be lost because of fundamental misunderstandings. Personally, I find that AI influencers conveniently brush away any evidence (like inability to perform basic arithmetic) about how LLMs fundame…

You're not doing yourself a favor when you point out "but they can't do arithmetic!" as if anyone says otherwise. Yes, we all know they can't do arithmetic, and that's just how they work. I feel like I'm saying "this hammer is so cool, it's made driving nails a breeze" and people go "but it can't screw screws in! Why won't anyone talk about that! Hammers really aren't all they're cracked up to be".

Because know one owns a $300 billion dollar hammer that literally runs on fancy calculators.

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

#372

Post by stabbles »

johnfn wrote: post #13

I like to imagine that the number of consumed tokens before a solution is found is a proxy for how difficult a problem is, and it looks like Opus 4.6 consumed around 250k tokens. That means that a tricky React refactor I did earlier today at work was about half as hard as an open problem in mathematics! :)

You're glancing over the fact that mathematics uses only one token per variable `x = ...`, whereas software engineering best practices demand an excessive number of tokens per variable for clarity.

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

#373

Post by LatencyKills »

skc wrote: post #355
LatencyKills wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on a utility that lets me "see through" app windows on macOS [1] (I was a dev on Apple's Xcode team and have a strong understanding of how to do this efficiently using private APIs). I wondered how Claude Code would approach the problem. I fully expected it to do something most human engineers would do: brute-force with ScreenCaptureKit. It almost instantly figured out that it didn't have to "see th…

That's actually pretty cool. What made you think of doing this in the first place?

Thanks! I've been doing a lot of work on a laptop screen (I normally work on an ultrawide) and got tired of constantly switching between windows to find the information I need.

I've also added the ability to create a picture-in-picture section of any application window, so you can move a window to the background while still seeing its important content.

I'll probably do a Show HN at some point.

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

#374

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

stavros wrote: post #348
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fundamentally misunderstand how AI works Who does fundamentally understand how LLMs work? Many claims flying around these days, all backed by some of the largest investments ever collectively made by humans. Lots of money to be lost because of fundamental misunderstandings. Personally, I find that AI influencers conveniently brush away any evidence (like inability to perform basic arithmetic) about how LLMs fundame…

You're not doing yourself a favor when you point out "but they can't do arithmetic!" as if anyone says otherwise. Yes, we all know they can't do arithmetic, and that's just how they work. I feel like I'm saying "this hammer is so cool, it's made driving nails a breeze" and people go "but it can't screw screws in! Why won't anyone talk about that! Hammers really aren't all they're cracked up to be".

Maybe because society has invested $trillions into this hammer and influencers are trying to convince CEOs to fire everyone and buy a bunch of hammers instead.

My comment even said “LLMs have utility”. I gave an inch, and now the mile must be taken.

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

#375

Post by stavros »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #374
stavros wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not doing yourself a favor when you point out "but they can't do arithmetic!" as if anyone says otherwise. Yes, we all know they can't do arithmetic, and that's just how they work. I feel like I'm saying "this hammer is so cool, it's made driving nails a breeze" and people go "but it can't screw screws in! Why won't anyone talk about that! Hammers really aren't all they're cracked up to be".

Maybe because society has invested $trillions into this hammer and influencers are trying to convince CEOs to fire everyone and buy a bunch of hammers instead. My comment even said “LLMs have utility”. I gave an inch, and now the mile must be taken.

Saying that the fundamental limitations are things like counting the number of rs in strawberry is boring, though. That's how tokens work and it's trivial to work around.

Talking about how they find it hard to say they aren't sure of something is a much more interesting limitation to talk about, for example.

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

#376

Post by timschmidt »

qsera wrote: post #322
timschmidt wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's demonstrably very little difference at all between human and AI outputs, and that's exactly what freaks people out about it. Else they wouldn't be so obsessed with trying to find and define what makes it different. The Thesis of Everything is a Remix is that there is no difference in how any culture is produced. Different models will have a different flavor to their output in the same way as different…

> demonstrably very little difference at all between human and AI outputs Is there "demonstrably" a lot of difference between Shakespeare and an HN comment? The point is exactly that there is no such difference. And that it enables slop to be sold as art. And that exactly is the danger. But another point is we had the even before LLMs. And LLMs just make it more explicit and makes it possible at scale.

Conrad Gessner had the very same complaint in the 16th century, noting the overabundance of printed books, fretting about shoddy, trivial, or error-filled works ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/26560192 )

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

#377

Post by staticassertion »

stavros wrote: post #362
staticassertion wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. Because, empirically, we have numerous unique and differentiable qualities, obviously. Plenty of time goes into understanding this, we have a young but rigorous field of neuroscience and cognitive science. Unless you mean "fundamentally unique" in some way that would persist - like "nothing could ever do w…

No, but it does mean that you should know we don't understand what intelligence is, and that maybe LLMs are actually intelligent and humans have the appearance of intelligence, for all we know.

You're just defining intelligence as "undefined", which okay, now anything is anything. What is the point of that?

Indeed, there's quite a lot of work that's been done on what these terms mean. The fields of neuroscience and cognitive science have contributed a lot to the area, and obviously there are major areas of philosophy that discuss how we should frame the conversation or seek to answer questions.

We have more than enough, trivially, to say that human intelligence is distinct, so long as we take on basic assertions like "intelligence is related to brain structures" since we know a lot about brain structures.

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

#378

Post by GaggiX »

veltas wrote: post #350
qnleigh wrote: post #288

I am kind of amazed at how many commenters respond to this result by confidently asserting that LLMs will never generate 'truly novel' ideas or problem solutions. > AI is a remixer; it remixes all known ideas together. It won't come up with new ideas > it's not because the model is figuring out something new > LLMs will NEVER be able to do that, because it doesn't exist It's not enough to say 'it will never be able t…

Do we know for a fact that LLMs aren't now configured to pass simple arithmetic like this in a simpler calculator, to add illusion of actual insight?

You can train a LLM on just multiplication and test it on ones it has never seen before, it's nothing particularly magical.

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

#379

Post by qsera »

timschmidt wrote: post #376
qsera wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> demonstrably very little difference at all between human and AI outputs Is there "demonstrably" a lot of difference between Shakespeare and an HN comment? The point is exactly that there is no such difference. And that it enables slop to be sold as art. And that exactly is the danger. But another point is we had the even before LLMs. And LLMs just make it more explicit and makes it possible at scale.

Conrad Gessner had the very same complaint in the 16th century, noting the overabundance of printed books, fretting about shoddy, trivial, or error-filled works ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/26560192 )

So....what is your point?

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

#380

Post by tovej »

keeda wrote: post #282
tovej wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It generated a proof that was close enough to something in its training data to be generated.

That may be, and we can debate the level of novelty, but it is novel, because this exact proof didn't exist before, something which many claim was not possible with AI. In fact, just a few years ago, based on some dabbling in NLP a decade ago, I myself would not have believed any of this was remotely possible within the next 3 - 5 decades at least. I'm curious though, how many novel Math proofs are not close enough t…

Well, for one the proof would have to use actual proof techniques.

What really happened here was that the LLM produced a python script that generated examples of hypergraphs that served as proof by example.

And the only thing that has been verified are these examples. The LLM also produced a lot of mathematical text that has not been analyzed.

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