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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

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651–660 of 1001 posts

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think it is so clear. Programming has verifiable and non-verifiable aspects. Competitive programming, passing tests, and performance can all be verified. But translating English requirements into actual software, software architecture, taste, or UI design cannot. And yet over the last couple years we’ve seen huge lifts in all of these areas, not just the verifiable ones. Verifiable areas I think are clearly…

> we’ve seen huge lifts in all of these areas, not just the verifiable ones. most gains are still coming from data. isnt that supposed to 'run out' though?

Labs spend billions hiring experts to generate new data, and better models can better filter existing training data and generate new synthetic data. There’s no reason for that to run out, it’s just expensive.

You could view this as just continually patching a leaky ship. But it seems to work.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#652
post #571

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.

People will be broken out of their denial by actual economic growth. That's what this is all meant to be for... I think we might start seeing some surprising numbers.

But who benefits from that economic growth? If it's only the capital owning class, and the rest of us are left in the dust, then the growth is irrelevant.

I ,for one, have read enough history to know that it's never the proles who end up benefiting.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems more a fantasy than a considered likely outcome. He basically admits that humans will eventually mostly all be out of a job, replaced by AI, but then says (Gemini's summary) that there will be: "Massive Economic Abundance: Because AI will exponentially grow the total economic pie, overall resource scarcity will diminish. The fundamental challenge shifts from producing wealth to distributing wealth." So how…

> What is step 3? "Massive Economic Abundance" implies massive increase in produced goods. This implies massive deflation, ceteris paribus. So step 3 could be simply printing money to pay for UBI. Deflation from AI productivity increase and inflation from UBI money printing will cancel out.

This doesn't make any sense.

For money to work it has to represent some real value, something that has some scarcity to it such as potatoes or hours of human labor. Ultimately it is just a decoupler in a barter system, a universally recognized IOU.

Why would someone give me a car in exchange for UBI-scrip when that UBI-scrip has no inherent scarcity or value and can be produced in infinite supply by the government ?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually UBI will be the norm I see comments like this tossed around a lot, but what makes you say this? Don't you think its more likely that most people end up in poverty?

No, I think people will demand to not live in poverty. Capitalism allows people to escape poverty by personal effort. An AI future won’t allow it by any means other than collective effort, so that’s what we’ll do.

That will entail an immense amount of violence to be undertaken by the working class against those in power, unless you think they'll gladly give up all of their ill gotten gains out of the goodness of their black little hearts.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#655
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "matrices"

Saying that AI is "matrices" is like saying human cognition is "neurons." Maybe true at some level, but it's a low-level implementation detail. The important part of a language model is the function that maps tokens to contextual embeddings. You could compute this function using analog computing, biological neurons, or any other substrate.

It isn't an implementation for neurons, unless you believe in a designing god.

Matrices are an implementation detail in reconstructing the surface of human knowledge. It's a complex surface, but it's a regurgitation.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#657

Wow, here are solutions to 10 problems that we spent millions of dollars on out of the 100s/1000s of other problems that we tried and failed to solve.

I understand the frustration with the constant PR-hype these AI labs keep spewing out, but on other hand I just can't understand this sentiment at all. These are real problems mathematicians and computer scientists have been working on and were unable to make progress on. Now they have been given a new tool and using that tool have solved those problems. And its not just one or two problems, its many very difficult problems. The mathematicians I know are saying that the latest crop of models is changing the way people do research math, I think that's a pretty big deal.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#658
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the stance of moral superiority is kind of funny. And pure math and art enthusiasts don't think they are closer to being a "god" from understanding/"discovering" math? Stop coping and deluding yourself mate. To begin with, whether AI is the one doing the discovering or not makes no difference. Any "pure math" person would aim to understand regardless - and would be quite glad that they have a longer paved path…

> Stop coping Isn't coping a good and useful mechanism?

Exactly what I think every time someone uses the word 'cope' these days. It's like some kind of virus.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#659

People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps delivering more and more impressive results. The most interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be undergoing, and what won’t. Writing has been quite stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let…

Sigmoidal, not exponential. It would be insane to assume an exponential curve

[deleted]

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#660

People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps delivering more and more impressive results. The most interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be undergoing, and what won’t. Writing has been quite stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let…

Sigmoidal, not exponential. It would be insane to assume an exponential curve

this gets more nuanced because "the sigmoids won't save you": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you
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