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Why we stopped using the mathematics that works

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Re: Why we stopped using the mathematics that works

#41

Post by furyofantares »

andai wrote: post #11
furyofantares wrote: post #6

LLM-garbage article, ironically.

What makes you say that? Which LLM does it sound like to you?

Excessive headings for short sections is the easiest thing to spot first as you can raise a red flag just by scrolling. I recommend scrolling any AI-adjacent article and see how many headings it has, and how often they start with the word "The".

You'll then find lots of "Blah blah blah: blah blah blah." Ten of the sentences in this article are of that form.

Then there's of course "it's not x but y". It avoids that exact construction, but is still plentiful in the article.

> What happened next was not a reasoned evaluation of competing paradigms. It was a gold rush.

> Not because the methods it displaced had stopped working, but because the money, the talent, and the prestige had moved elsewhere.

Re: Why we stopped using the mathematics that works

#42

Post by zihotki »

I think it's just the time for full acoption of CodeAct in one form or another has not yet arrived. Math should be done using math tools. Just give the tools to model in an easily accessible way to work with data without loss on tokenization and datatext conversions. That's basically what Anthropic did with their [programmatic tool calling]( https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us... )

Re: Why we stopped using the mathematics that works

#43

Post by jebarker »

ontouchstart wrote: post #40
jebarker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not convinced that useful mathematical foundations will be found anytime soon. Neural nets exist because we want to make decisions in a world that is so noisy, complex and chaotic that we can’t satisfy the requirements of more rigorous analytical frameworks. It seems to me that the irreducible complexity is in the real world, not the neural networks.

Never underestimate the power of mathematics. On the other hand, a lot of mathematical breakthroughs in the history are not found by people doing mathematics but in physics and engineering. Calculus, statistics, information theory, etc. Even for computer science, take a look at Turing Award from 1966 [0], we will see how short sighted we are if we only follow the trend. Time will tell and smart people will find new p…

I have a background in mathematics, I believe in mathematics, but I don't believe in blind faith. Physics gave us statistical mechanics precisely because it's impossible to measure, model and predict the behavior of every individual particle in real-world systems. My gut feeling is that a mathematical theory of LLMs is more likely to look like statistical mechanics than something that tames chaos. That certainly doesn't mean that theory wont't open new doors though that we haven't currently thought of.

Re: Why we stopped using the mathematics that works

#44

Post by ontouchstart »

jebarker wrote: post #43
ontouchstart wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never underestimate the power of mathematics. On the other hand, a lot of mathematical breakthroughs in the history are not found by people doing mathematics but in physics and engineering. Calculus, statistics, information theory, etc. Even for computer science, take a look at Turing Award from 1966 [0], we will see how short sighted we are if we only follow the trend. Time will tell and smart people will find new p…

I have a background in mathematics, I believe in mathematics, but I don't believe in blind faith. Physics gave us statistical mechanics precisely because it's impossible to measure, model and predict the behavior of every individual particle in real-world systems. My gut feeling is that a mathematical theory of LLMs is more likely to look like statistical mechanics than something that tames chaos. That certainly does…

My point is that new mathematics will eventually come out of this mess. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/2Op3QLzMgSY?t=75

Re: Why we stopped using the mathematics that works

#45

Post by WorldMaker »

ontouchstart wrote: post #5

We are at the age of alchemy, wait for the age of chemistry and physics. New mathematical foundations are yet to be found.

I believe some of the argument in this article is that we may have had something closer to the start of a real foundation for a chemistry and money shifted back towards the direction of alchemy for the time being simply because alchemy's practitioners are better at making it seem shinier and more exciting.

I don't know if I entirely agree with the article, but it has some food for thought.

Re: Why we stopped using the mathematics that works

#46

Post by rstuart4133 »

andai wrote: post #11
furyofantares wrote: post #6

LLM-garbage article, ironically.

What makes you say that? Which LLM does it sound like to you?

I swear it's the modern version of "beowulf cluster" comment on slashdot.

They also got very tiresome long before fading away.

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