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AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

davidepiffer.com

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Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#81

Post by ralusek »

ComplexSystems wrote: post #9

It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.

We're just going to slowly deconstruct every element that could be a factor of intelligence.

It's not out-thinking, it's just out-remembering

It's not out-thinking, it's just out-working

It's not out-thinking, it's just able to consider more things simultaneously

It's not creative, it's just randomly generating things and then selecting viable ones

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#82

Post by tengbretson »

grebc wrote: post #27
ComplexSystems wrote: post #9

It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.

Ever heard of string theory. People go whole lives without being able to make it pan out.

String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#83

Post by impendia »

smokel wrote: post #46
orphereus wrote: post #16

C'mon AI companies, pivot to lawyers or doctors already. Trying to convince us that mathematics and software engineering are "solved" is getting very tiring. The pushback would probably be too much for the soon-to-be IPO-ed companies.

Mathematics is typically concerned with "proofs" [1], which similarly to code, often allow for strict validation. Thanks to reinforcement learning techniques, it is now possible to train LLMs to perform very well on code generation, and mathematical proof generation. Law and medicine are fundamentally harder fields to obtain decent training data for, and LLM results are therefore expected to be less powerful. Also, m…

Mathematician here. There is a lot of recent work on the Lean project -- when a proof can be translated into Lean code, then it can be strictly and formally validated.

https://lean-lang.org/

But otherwise, mathematical proofs are read and written by humans, and at the end of the day the relevant standard of proof is what other mathematicians will accept.

Occasionally, mathematicians don't agree. For a prominent example, you can read about Shinichi Mochizuki's claimed proof of the so-called ABC Conjecture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture#Claimed_proofs

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#84

Post by runarberg »

ComplexSystems wrote: post #9

It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.

In other words: Thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231974

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#85

Post by mattnewton »

RRRA wrote: post #63

Exactly, it's making connection across vast set, not bringing the magic intuition. Has anyone tried feeding all of human knowledge to an LLM prior to Einstein's work and tried to have it reinvent physics?

Where would you get enough pre internet tokens to train a near-frontier model?

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#86

Post by mrob »

bewareofscams wrote: post #6

"It's not X, it's Y" hot take AI slop.

I don't have to open the article to be confident it's not worth reading. Anybody knowledgeable in the field should be familiar with AI writing tells and the message they send. It only takes a few seconds thought to transform the title into something like "AI beats mathematicians by out-remembering, not out-thinking." Regardless of whether the article is slop or not, I expect any competent writer to avoid slop phrasing in their titles. To do otherwise signals laziness.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#87

Post by ianm218 »

orphereus wrote: post #34
ianm218 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's something AI companies would really want you to believe. Why would I care what they want me to believe? Intuitively it would make sense that you can put math ability on a chart with a value for “general public” “smart high schooler” “smart undergrad” “smart PhD/ professional”. And you could place frontier AI somewhere on that chart over time from GPT 2 to now and see the trend. Then you’d have to consider th…

> Why would I care what they want me to believe? How would you not care? Are you a robot? They can say random stuff with the goal of increasing their shareholder value. Things they spit out do not have to be true. It is not easy to verify things they say, therefore, everything they say should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Consider Enron and Amazon at the turn of the millennium. They were both telling you what the future would look like. The right action would’ve been to just ignore what they are saying and try and get data and reason about the world. It didn’t really matter that both Bezos and Jeff Skilling wanted you to believe various things - one was right and one was a scammer.

So that’s what I’m doing here. For what it’s worth I find a lot of the AI people’s worldview very consistent. They believed AI would be the most important technology of our life times and committed their work to it. Some of these same people are total liars so yeah I won’t really hang onto their every word.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#88

Post by orphereus »

esafak wrote: post #70
orphereus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I care what they want me to believe? How would you not care? Are you a robot? They can say random stuff with the goal of increasing their shareholder value. Things they spit out do not have to be true. It is not easy to verify things they say, therefore, everything they say should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

He's saying he can connect the dots without their help.

Yeah, my bad.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#89

Post by hilariously »

tengbretson wrote: post #82
grebc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of string theory. People go whole lives without being able to make it pan out.

String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.

Ok Sabina, everyone is string theory is all just a bunch of egotistical morons.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#90

Post by chongli »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #67
chongli wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved here?

Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it? How's your understanding of Schroedingers "An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules"? You seem to be using the results of it as applied to semiconductor engineering just fine. And, I promise you, most semiconductor engineers haven't read it in…

You've moved the goalposts. The original claim was about producing mathematics that are in principle impossible for any human to understand.

All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value.

Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value?

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