Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This jives with what I've experienced Just as an fyi, the word you are looking for is jibes. Jive is something else entirely.
I'm with you!
Oh look it's jibe's account!
A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
461–470 of 558 posts
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#462It's a very long post with a mix of technical (math) and philosophical sections. Here are the most striking points to reflect upon IMHO. > It seems to me that training beginning PhD students to do research [...] has just got harder, since one obvious way to help somebody get started is to give them a problem that looks as though it might be a relatively gentle one. If LLMs are at the point where they can solve “gentl…
> Training must start from the basics though. Of course everybody's training in math starts with summing small integers, which calculators have been doing without any mistake since a long time.
Yeah, it's the same way with learning programming. LLMs can handle basic programming (and increasingly advanced programming) but I think it's necessary to write code by hand. As a beginner, of course, and arguably to maintain skill later too.
The alternative would be like, just asking ChatGPT to do your math homework and then "verifying" it by looking at it and saying "yeah, that looks okay." What are you going to learn?
We do stuff by hand for a reason.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#463> "Even though I can motivate it in retrospect, ChatGPT’s idea to use h^2-dissociated sets to control relations of order at most h feels quite ingenious. As far as I can tell, this idea is completely original." The question that keep bothering me is can an LLM generate an idea that is truly novel? How would/could that actually happen? But then that leads to the question - what are we actually doing when we think? Per…
For my paper about ME/CFS, I let an LLM integrate lots of findings of other scientific papers. Then I ask the LLM to "creatively brainstorm", given all we know of ME/CFS and the newly integrated paper, to generate new hypotheses, treatment ideas or any other kind of insight it can think of. This works really well. Now, it's clear that I have no idea how much of this is something we would consider new and original, an…
Would you mind posting the outcome of this? A person I love dearly is struggling with Long Covid/CFS. I’ve been doing something similar to what you describe, but I’m always looking for more angles that could help.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know the example, but as a counter-argument: often more expensive boots are not more durable. It’s about spending time to learn to spot the quality. Of course if you are really poor, then you have to take expensive shortcuts, but for most people that shouldn’t be the case. Learning to do more with less money isn’t as bad as many people think. It’s also good for the brain to be a bit more creative.
> Learning to do more with less money isn’t as bad as many people think. We are wading into philosophy here, but I believe this analogy doesn't track in this case -- my suspicion from this blog post and others is that already today, the Pro level thinking models are a positive multiplier to your research output similar to how the models one level lower are a multiplier to one's programming output. Maybe one can somed…
> the Pro level thinking models are a positive multiplier to your research output
I have left academia after my PhD and can tell you the analogy still works. I’m much happier now I left the academia rat race
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#465A very interesting comment from Baez, I'll just quote part of it. > Where does the value of thinking and having deep ideas come from? We need to think about this now. If it comes primarily from their scarcity – the fact that having certain ideas is hard – then indeed this value may drop precipitously when the manufacture of ideas can be automated. But if the value comes from the utility of the ideas – the benefit tha…
This is generally true across the economy. It is known as the diamond-water paradox. Diamonds are (for everyday life) useless, so then why are they so much more valued than water, which you need to live?
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it matters much what kind of problem it is. If it is challenging enough to benefit from assistance and you end up playing a minor role in the solution, it seems like you are putting yourself in the worst position possible. You lose your edge for functioning within the problem space and it raises the question why you are even in the loop at all. If its job security you want, transforming your role into L…
Ok let's make math illegal and burn down the data centers I guess. Idk what to tell you, but we will adapt and new roles will be created. Just like every single tool and piece of tech that came before. LLM manager? Fine.
> new roles will be created.
In the past, one such "new role" was that of slave. In fact, we expect slavery is <10,000 years old! Yes, new roles will be created. But there's nothing to say that they'll be pleasant for us to take on.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#467This jives with what I've experienced in the brief time I had access to 5.5 Pro. It's the very first LLM that I feel like I can wrangle into solving tedious, but straightforward, problems correctly. It still makes a ton of mistakes and needs to be very rigidly guided, but it does a pretty good job of tracing its own reasoning and correcting itself in a way that the other models do not. The downside (not noted in the…
> This jives with what I've experienced Just as an fyi, the word you are looking for is jibes. Jive is something else entirely.
Blame The Bee Gees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jive_Talkin'
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only "statistically generated" in the same way that your brain is just "neurons firing." That's the low-level description of what's happening, but on a higher level, it's correct to say that it's being smug.
> it's correct to say that it's being smug. It's not correct to say that it's being smug, because when people are being smug, we do it for a purpose - e.g. to signal higher social status or superior knowledge. A machine has no such imperative, so what you call 'being smug' is statistical mimicry.
I suppose the model was trained in such a way, the smugness is a facsimile of reality. Other models offer concise, direct answers without these idiotic qualifiers.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they don't? Mythos is a 10T model. Opus is a 5T model. That's not an exponentially growing amount of compute but it is achieving exponential improvements (eg from Mozilla: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer... )
where the heck did you get those parameter numbers from?
Sonnet and Opus are from Elon Musk (given the people he's hired it seems likely it is approximately true). Mythos is quite widely spoken about.
Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
I replied to a comment about AI in sports and I build on that. We praise car drivers despite most of the performance in their sport comes from the car. The driver makes the difference when two cars are close in performance. Brilliances or mistakes. Horse riders too. In the case of math, the human can lead the LLM on the right track, point it to a problem or to another one. So it deserves some praise. Then the team th…
Could you win an F1 race with the latest winning car against F1 drivers?
I’m not sure what your point is. I could certainly not, and I could certainly not write a breakthrough paper in mathematics even with the most advanced AI. I wouldn’t even know what to ask of it.
Perhaps I could set up an elaborate master agent to consider all possible new problems in mathematics and ask sub agents to work on the most promising ones. But then I could probably also program a self driving car system which could win an F1 race as well.