Earlier quoted context omitted.
We will get much better at manipulation and better at people “writing” things to justify their own feelings. What’s new about LLMs is that you can scalably manipulate people individually. It used to be that you could either have scale (speeches, tweets, interviews, website, etc.) or individual engagement (replying to mail/tweets/town hall questions.) Now you can pull the history and preferences of an individual, then…
Not new about LLMs. Targeted ads / big data is this. Another degree of capability, yes. But we have been trending here for a long time.
Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
751–760 of 1001 posts
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#752People 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…
Another interesting question is why the frontier labs are piling on pure maths, which has little direct economic value compared to something like law or improving the efficiency of their own models? How much OpenAI and Anthropic are paying to serve these models for ordinary users is the elephant in the room. A cynical take is that the frontier labs are trying their best to pump up their pre-IPO valuation through flas…
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#753Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#754Interesting how HN promoted this post to the front page again with a fake submission time. There are comments two days old, seems weird why they'd want this post specifically to get more traffic.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the sigmoid is incorrect it's certainly more correct than the exponential. > https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you The conclusion of this article seems to be "you should give ai the benefit of the doubt against all reason". Barf
The author of that post is a prominent Bay Area "rationalist," who have had a quasi-theistic relationship with the concept of all-powerful AIs for a couple decades now.
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
> remember that gpt 4o was popular among those who had ai as a romantic partner I suspect GPT 5.6 would be even better at it, if given the same sycophantic system prompt and lack of guardrails.
Dude it's not a system prompt, it's the training.
If you want creative writings, use the API and play with the sliders.
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry to hear you've been impacted by this AI math. I heard that Gary Kasparov was impacted by AI chess, but at least he still seems to have a job, so don't give up.
Making insulting assumptions about the hidden motivations of others is not the level of discourse I come to HN for.
My point being that AI math is a narrow skill just like AI chess and implies nothing about generality (AGI).
Sarcasm begats sarcasm.
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#758While these advances are genuinely impressive, I'm curious when we will see practical implications for this work. For example, will we see advances in material science, medical cures, etc? Would love to read about some examples of practical impact.
The big example predates LLMs as a unified tech and it's protein folding, from Google DeepMind. OpenAI and Anthropic are too greedy for cash to do anything of the sort. I don't expect this current economic cycle to bring anything else that will directly greatly improve the life of the average person on the planet, more than it hurts it.
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#759Earlier 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.
What about other countries in the world where people... live in poverty?
> Capitalism allows people to escape poverty by personal effort
Isn't it possible that there is a future where AI makes the average value of human labor (or, "personal effort") plummet? Perhaps capitalism will lose some of its edge against a technology like this.
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#760Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume you're talking about No. 5, the arithmetic circuit complexity bound? The existence of a lower bound than state-of-the-art is certainly a significant result and worth publishing. But the wording of the result makes it sound like we don't know what the lowest possible complexity bound might be. So, prior to this result did we think there couldn't be a lower possible bound? Or did the arithmetic circuit communi…
Circuit complexity lower bounds (and lower bounds in general) are notoriously difficult to come across. For example, despite our best efforts, the state of the art lower bounds on time complexity of algorithms for solving 3SAT is O(n). In contrast, our best algorithms for the task run in time roughly O(2^n). That’s an exponential gap. This is despite decades of trying to find lower bounds.
Wow, that’s pretty stark.
“What’s the minimum time it would take to solve this problem?”
“Well, at the very least you’d have to read the input the whole way through”