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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

openai.com

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Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#421

Post by lacy_tinpot »

Chance-Device wrote: post #183
antirez wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not at the top as it is actively flagged by people that can't psychologically cope with the advances of AI. Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.

> people that can't psychologically cope with the advances of AI Yes. And there are many of them. I wonder what would help them come to terms with it. Seriously, people are going to be grieving over this. Loss of identity, loss of social standing, ideas of entire future lives that will now never happen. The greatest crime people may hold AI guilty of is taking away their dreams.

It's given many more an opportunity to fulfill their dreams.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#422

Post by claytongulick »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #198
danparsonson wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never understood all this talk about moving goalposts - you understand that's how science works, right? We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. If we never "moved the goalposts", we'd be stuck scoring the same goals over and over.

> We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And ag…

> And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And again. That's what "moving the goalposts" means.

The fundamental argument that I've personally made since the early days of this is that LLMs are not reasoning, in the way that word is commonly understood.

There are lots of reasons why that argument needs to evolve that could certainly appear to be "moving the goalposts", but let's take an example.

A lot of AIs were tripped up by the question "Should I walk or drive 50m to the carwash?" Several folks liked to use that as an example that illustrates that LLMs aren't reasoning, but as the models have been trained on that specific example, it's of course less useful. An AI can mostly nail it now.

So a different example is needed. A new demonstration of how these things fail at basic reasoning a child can do.

Did I move the goalposts? I don't think so. The fundamental argument stays the same. It's not hard to find lots of examples that trip up LLMs, because they are what they are: statistical inference machines. Nothing more and nothing less.

Useful, sure. But also commonly misapplied to areas for which they are inappropriate solutions.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#423

Post by logicchains »

c7b wrote: post #372
Chance-Device wrote: post #105

Pretty cool. The impact of AI is getting undeniable, there aren’t many positions left to move the goalposts to at this stage, next they’ll have to be outside the stadium entirely. The sooner people can be broken out of their denial about all this the better, and we can start actually taking it seriously.

And what does taking it seriously entail?

Realistically it means trying to start a small business of some sort, because AI is hugely advantageous to business owners and disadvantageous to workers. And it's something AIs can't do unless they get legal personhood, which may well not happen any time soon.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#424

Post by striking »

Chance-Device wrote: post #404
c7b wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what does taking it seriously entail?

In the near term handling the transition. Jobs will be lost, careers ended, people won’t be able to reskill quickly enough. At the same time AI is an enormous opportunity to uplift living standards, but nobody has the logistics of this figured out. We need to figure out how to restructure the global economy. How does UBI work internationally, if the AI companies are taking revenue in the US? What’s the tax base for i…

I think this too is a kind of denial. As in, while some are in denial about the usefulness of AI, others are in denial about whose living standards are actually going to be uplifted.

And it's sad, really, because I think these two groups would make a great pairing if they could stop arguing against one another for a moment. They'll both be impacted about as much and probably have the same ultimate goals (to lead dignified lives).

But it seems these days everyone is more interested in Kayfabe and feeling like they're in the right than working together, so maybe I should just keep quiet rather than attract the ire of both groups...

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#425

Post by twister2920 »

c7b wrote: post #372
Chance-Device wrote: post #105

Pretty cool. The impact of AI is getting undeniable, there aren’t many positions left to move the goalposts to at this stage, next they’ll have to be outside the stadium entirely. The sooner people can be broken out of their denial about all this the better, and we can start actually taking it seriously.

And what does taking it seriously entail?

[dead]

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#426

Post by jrflo »

bryan0 wrote: post #412

I think there's another interesting story here about how this was apparently moderately flagged and triggered the flame-war detector which kept the story off the front page of HN 2 days ago[0]. I think people are having a hard time processing this information rationally(?) What can we do to make conversations around these incredibly exciting and important topics more constructive? HN is where I expect to read expert…

I think that HN is particularly negative towards AI because the vast majority of users here will have their prestigious CS careers disrupted by AI advances. So, there's an inherent negative bias towards this news.

I for one am really fascinated by AI's advances in science and math and would like to talk about it somewhere without the constant flamewars...

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#427

Post by derbOac »

simonw wrote: post #274

The GitHub repo with the Lean formalizations just came out a couple of hours ago: https://github.com/openai/ten-proofs It also links to a paper written by an LLM where the model "reconstructs how the proof came together" based on the unpublished reasoning traces: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/reasoning-walkthroughs.pdf I wish they'd publish the prompts though!

I like the Lean formalizations — I hadn't thought seriously of asking for that before but might try it with some stuff I've been working on.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#428

Post by WarmWash »

c7b wrote: post #372
Chance-Device wrote: post #105

Pretty cool. The impact of AI is getting undeniable, there aren’t many positions left to move the goalposts to at this stage, next they’ll have to be outside the stadium entirely. The sooner people can be broken out of their denial about all this the better, and we can start actually taking it seriously.

And what does taking it seriously entail?

The human zoo where the top ~250,000k humans live in a "human utopia" and the AI provides while mostly focusing on whatever it decides it's own goals are.

Humanity survives (but we reading this probably don't), the AI treats the living humans like the Emperor's favorite pets (probably a pretty good life), and then the AI does whatever else it deems important.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#429

Post by evenhash »

amazingamazing wrote: post #137

Can’t wait for this stuff to have quality of life increases for the average person. So far all I see is that AI has made owning a computer more expensive, made some jobs redundant, increased spam and distrust with questionable authenticity of content and of course made some Americans very rich.

Not everyone works for Evil Corp. I work in the public sector and my work supports public health and safety initiatives. AI has allowed my team to get much more done than we would have otherwise which improves the quality of life of the people in my community.

So I would like to counter your cynicism with a “YMMV” depending on who you work for.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#430

Post by GPerson »

logicchains wrote: post #423
c7b wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what does taking it seriously entail?

Realistically it means trying to start a small business of some sort, because AI is hugely advantageous to business owners and disadvantageous to workers. And it's something AIs can't do unless they get legal personhood, which may well not happen any time soon.

Hopefully doesn’t ever happen, since that’s one of the more plausible omnicide scenarios. I human like AI is almost certainly achievable without much research effort at this point, but we shouldn’t do it.
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