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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

#581

Post by tovej »

mikkupikku wrote: post #495
tovej wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? I certainly have.

Truly novel? All art is derivative.

If all art is derivative then the earlier statement is a tautology.

People still call things other people do novel. There's clear social proof that humans do things that other humans consider novel. Otherwise the word would probably not exist.

Just today I wrote a python program that did not resemble anything I'd written before, nor had I seen anything similar. I had to reason it out myself. That passes thr test that the original comment set.

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

#582

Post by kelseyfrog »

getnormality wrote: post #492
eru wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Truly novel" is fast becoming a True Scotsman.

No True Novelty, No True Understanding, etc. The problem with these bromides is not that they're wrong, it's that they're not even wrong. They're predictive nulls. What observable differences can we expect between an entity with True Understanding and an entity without True Understanding? It's a theological question, not a scientific one. I'm not an AI booster by any means, but I do strongly prefer we address the que…

We've tested this in the small with AI art. When people believe they're viewing human-made art which is later revealed to be AI art, they feel disappointed. The actual content is incidental, the story that supports it is more important than the thing itself.

It's the same mechanism behind artisanal food, artist struggles, and luxury goods. It is the metaphysical properties we attach to objects or the frames we use to interpret strips of events. We author all of these and then promptly forget we've done so, instead believing they are simply reality.

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

#583

Post by jacquesm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #541
LatencyKills wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe my brief overview of the problem will help Claude identify the specific undocumented functions required for my solution? Is that how you think data gets fed back into models during training?

Yes. I don't think you appreciate just how much information your comments provide. You just told us (and Claude) what the interesting problems are, and confirmed both the existence of relevant undocumented functions, and that they are the right solution to those problems. What you didn't flag as interesting, and possible challenges you did not mention (such as these APIs being flaky, or restricted to Apple first-part…

I wonder how many 'ideas guys' will now think that with LLMs they can keep their precious to themselves while at the same bragging about them in online fora. Before they needed those pesky programmers negotiating for a slice of the pie, but this time it will be different.

Next up: copyright protection and/or patents on prompts. Mark my words.

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

#584

Post by himata4113 »

coderenegade wrote: post #174
himata4113 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always, humans are a lot better at poofing a solution into existence without even trying or testing. It's why we have the scientific method: we come up with a process and verify it, but more often than not we already know that it will work. Compared to AI, it thinks of every possible scientific method and tries them all. Not saying that humans never do this as well, but it's mostly reserved for when we just throw…

That's just not true at all. There are entire fields that rest pretty heavily on brute force search. Entire theses in biomedical and materials science have been written to the effect of "I ran these tests on this compound, and these are the results", without necessarily any underlying theory more than a hope that it'll yield something useful. As for advances where there is a hypothesis, it rests on the shoulders of t…

Well, we know that mixing lead into copper won't make for a strong material. There's a lot of human ingenuity involved.

I failed to make my point clear: Humans make the search area way smaller compared to current day AI.

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

#585

Post by keeda »

jacquesm wrote: post #583
TeMPOraL wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I don't think you appreciate just how much information your comments provide. You just told us (and Claude) what the interesting problems are, and confirmed both the existence of relevant undocumented functions, and that they are the right solution to those problems. What you didn't flag as interesting, and possible challenges you did not mention (such as these APIs being flaky, or restricted to Apple first-part…

I wonder how many 'ideas guys' will now think that with LLMs they can keep their precious to themselves while at the same bragging about them in online fora. Before they needed those pesky programmers negotiating for a slice of the pie, but this time it will be different. Next up: copyright protection and/or patents on prompts. Mark my words.

I'm pretty sure a large fraction of the vibecoded stuff out there is from the "ideas guys." This time will be different because they'll find out very quickly whether their ideas are worth anything. The term "slop" substantially applies to the ideas themselves.

I don't think there will be copyright or patents on prompts per se, but I do think patents will become a lot more popular. With AI rewriting entire projects and products from scratch, copyright for software is meaningless, so patents are one of the very few moats left. Probably the only moat for the little guys.

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

#586

Post by ChrisGreenHeur »

bilekas wrote: post #337
ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not possible to know something without believing it to be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief#/media/File:Classical_d...

This is objectively wrong. If that was the case every scientist performing a test would have always had their expectations and beliefs proven true. If you're trying to disprove something also because you believe it to be wrong you would never be proven wrong.

re-read your post - it's just a bunch of nonsense, no actual reasoning in there

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

#587

Post by mikkupikku »

graemep wrote: post #576
mikkupikku wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't know if his assumption is false until time passes and moves future speculation into the empirical present.

A possibility is not a fact. Assuming a possibility will happen is not justified. Therefore it is false as an assumption, even if it is true it is a possiblity.

I genuinely have no idea what you're on about. One guy expressed his belief about how the future will play out, and another disagreed. Time will be the judge of it, not either of us.

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

#588

Post by mikkupikku »

tovej wrote: post #581
mikkupikku wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly novel? All art is derivative.

If all art is derivative then the earlier statement is a tautology. People still call things other people do novel. There's clear social proof that humans do things that other humans consider novel. Otherwise the word would probably not exist. Just today I wrote a python program that did not resemble anything I'd written before, nor had I seen anything similar. I had to reason it out myself. That passes thr test that…

Your threshold for "resemble" is obviously quite high, which is fair, but assuming that you're an encultured programmer your python code represents other people's python code. It might be doing something novel, but that thing it's doing is interacting or in response to, or otherwise relative to existing concepts you learned or saw elsewhere. All art is derivative, we can do things other people haven't done before but all of it derives from the works of others in some way.

Anyway, I've coded all kinds of wacky shit with claude that I guarantee nobody has implemented before, if only because they're stupid and tedious ideas. They can't all be winners, but they were novel, and yet claude code implemented them as confidently as if they were yet another note taking app. They have no problem handling novel ideas, and although the novel ideas in this case were my own, its easy to see how finding new ideas could be automated by exploring the combinatorial space of existing ideas.

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

#589

Post by hodgehog11 »

pks016 wrote: post #578
hodgehog11 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funding a few PhDs for a year costs orders of magnitude more than it did to solve this problem in inference costs. Also, this has been active research for some time. Or I guess the people working on it are just not as good as a random bunch of students? It's amazing the lengths that people go to maintain their worldview, even if it means belittling hardworking people. I take it you're not a mathematician. This is an…

> Funding a few PhDs for a year costs orders of magnitude more than it did to solve this problem in inference costs. I don't think PhD students are sitting around and solving one problem for a year. Also PhD students are way cheaper

How many math PhD students do you have? If you set the problem right, something like this per year on average is a good pace.

How are they cheaper? Your average grant where I am can pay for a couple of PhD students. I could afford to pay for inference costs out of my own salary, no grant needed. Completely different economic scales here. I like students better of course, but funding is drying up these days.

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