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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

#431

Post by Windchaser »

utopiah wrote: post #124
utopiah wrote: post #30

[flagged]

To clarify a bit due to the downvotes : this is not a research paper from a startup or a public frontier lab, it is just PR from a corporation, thus yes an advertisement. Downvote all you like it's still of no value.

> this is not a research paper from a startup or a public frontier lab, it is just PR from a corporation

If they're publishing the solutions to these 10 problems, then this is, essentially, the announcement of 10 research papers.

Yes, it's partly for reputation (as are many research papers), but that doesn't mean it's of no value. The best way to advertise is to show that you're providing value.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#432

Post by tomhow »

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…

The main issue was that it was submitted late Friday night SF time, meaning it was overnight or Saturday everywhere in the world when the post had its chance on the front page. The flagging was minimal relative to the vote count and had no effect, and the flamewar detector would have been turned off sooner if moderators saw it sooner (it wasn't really a flamewar, just a lot of comments). It still spent 10 hours on the front page.

None of this is anything out of the ordinary; this kind of thing has always happened. The only real story here is that moderators sleep sometimes.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#433

Post by arenaninja »

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.

It's indeed very exciting. I'm looking forward to new advancements/predictions in physics. Preferably as beautifully explained as E = M*c^2

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#434

Post by GPerson »

cubefox wrote: post #402
ghjkghjkghj wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some genuinely insane takes in this thread on both sides but this takes the cake.

A few years ago the majority of Hacker News dismissed LLMs as not much more than stochastic parrots who were decades away from doing any serious work, autonomously escaping containment and hacking Hugging Face, or outperforming most professional mathematicians at proving theorems. These things were labeled "insane" and "science fiction" despite the rapid progress we had already seen. Now you are again postulating tha…

Being right about the thing that’s genocides all culture and likely worse isn’t such a great thing to brag about, but go ahead.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#435

Post by joshmarlow »

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 don't understand why this got downvotes - simply extrapolating current trends leads to the need to answer all of these questions.

My own $0.02 on the economics piece - every country should have a sovereign wealth fund. Governments should block market access from automated[0] companies until those companies provide equity contributions to the wealth fund for that country. This aligns regulator and corporate interests. Dividends flow into the sovereign wealth funds and then can be allocated locally from there - UBI, job programs, etc. Let different jurisdictions explore different ways to structure a post-labor society.

On the broader social front - I think a lot of lack of meaning discussion boils down to the overemphasis we have on your job as your self-worth. We need to realign our societal expectations - and people need to spend more time with their families.

[0] for this to work, I think we would need well accepted metrics for 'how automated' a company is - and that probably needs a 3rd party auditing industry.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#436

Post by esafak »

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…

Isn't it obvious if AI automates your job away, the AI company is going to reap the economic value, which is going to be less than what you cost, while giving you a pittance as UBI? If you received its full value there wouldn't be any point in anybody replacing you with AI.

The only way to win is to wield the AI.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#437

Post by an0malous »

gpm wrote: post #325

Henry Yuen's (whose work problem 6 builds on) comments on this are worth reading IMO: https://bsky.app/profile/henryyuen.bsky.social/post/3ms2jpch...

It sounds like he hasn't verified the results of a problem that he has personally worked on, so how many of these problems have actually been verified?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#438

Post by GPerson »

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…

Why do you think the AI companies are going to let it be a “we” kind of decision, and since it’s obviously not going to be a “we” kind of decision, as getting to this point certainly has not been thanks to people like you, what makes you think living standards are going to be broadly uplifted?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#439

Post by overgard »

Gary Marcus' has a good take on this:

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-amazing-but-vastly...

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-critical-updates-re-as...

Not that there isn't something interesting in here, but lets be clear that we don't have enough information to evaluate this properly. And as always with these labs, BS takes a lot more energy to refute than it does to spread.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#440

Post by GPerson »

ultimatefan1 wrote: post #118

one of the early premises of how ai takeoff would go was that a system that could solve open problems in advanced mathematics would also discover novel advances in math and computer science that directly unlock drastically better software performance. we are seeing frontier level math breakthroughs (ie performance that would put it in the top 100 or 1000 mathematicians in the world if it were a human, meaning top .00…

I don’t really like AI but let’s stop kidding ourselves, no human mathematician could make progress on a dozen major open problems in a week or two. If you’re measuring it against humans then it is by far the best mathematician to ever live.
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