Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

epoch.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 744 posts

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

#91

Post by slopinthebag »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #69
slopinthebag wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. Uh, because up until and including now, we are...?

Every living thing on Earth is unique. Every rock is unique in virtually infinite ways from the next otherwise identical rock. There are also a tremendous number of similarities between all living things and between rocks (and between rocks and living things). Most ways in which things are unique are arguably uninteresting. The default mode, the null hypothesis should be to assume that human intelligence isn't intere…

I doubt you can even define intelligence sufficiently to argue this point. Since that's an ongoing debate without a resolution thus far.

But you claimed that humans aren't unique. I think it's pretty obvious we are on many dimensions including what you might classify as "intelligence". You don't even necessarily have to believe in a "soul" or something like that, although many people do. The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date, and much more efficiently as well. That we are able to brute-force a simulacrum of intelligence in a few narrow domains is incredible, but we should not denigrate humans when celebrating this.

> There's still this seeming belief in magic and human exceptionalism, deeply held, even in communities that otherwise tend to revolve around the sciences and the empirical.

Do you ever wonder why that is? I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.

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

#92

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

Validark wrote: post #33

I have long said I am an AI doubter until AI could print out the answers to hard problems or ones requiring tons of innovation. Assuming this is verified to be correct (not by AI) then I just became a believer. I would like to see a few more AI inventions to know for sure, but wow, it really is a new and exciting world. I really hope we use this intelligence resource to make the world better.

> born-again AI believer

sigh

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

#93

Post by razorbeamz »

qq66 wrote: post #85
storus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is a remixer; it remixes all known ideas together. It won't come up with new ideas though; the LLMs just predict the most likely next token based on the context. That means the group of characters it outputs must have been quite common in the past. It won't add a new group of characters it has never seen before on its own.

I entered the prompt: > Write me a stanza in the style of "The Raven" about Dick Cheney on a first date with Queen Elizabeth I facilitated by a Time Travel Machine invented by Lin-Manuel Miranda It outputted a group of characters that I can virtually guarantee you it has never seen before on its own

Yes, but it has seen The Raven, it has seen texts about Dick Cheney, first dates, Queen Elizabeth, time machines and Lin Manuel Miranda.

All of its output is based on those things it has seen.

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

#94

Post by razorbeamz »

storus wrote: post #55
Validark wrote: post #33

I have long said I am an AI doubter until AI could print out the answers to hard problems or ones requiring tons of innovation. Assuming this is verified to be correct (not by AI) then I just became a believer. I would like to see a few more AI inventions to know for sure, but wow, it really is a new and exciting world. I really hope we use this intelligence resource to make the world better.

AI is a remixer; it remixes all known ideas together. It won't come up with new ideas though; the LLMs just predict the most likely next token based on the context. That means the group of characters it outputs must have been quite common in the past. It won't add a new group of characters it has never seen before on its own.

Yes, ChatGPT and friends are essentially the same thing as the predictive text keyboard on your phone, but scaled up and trained on more data.

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

#95

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

snemvalts wrote: post #65
Validark wrote: post #33

I have long said I am an AI doubter until AI could print out the answers to hard problems or ones requiring tons of innovation. Assuming this is verified to be correct (not by AI) then I just became a believer. I would like to see a few more AI inventions to know for sure, but wow, it really is a new and exciting world. I really hope we use this intelligence resource to make the world better.

Math and coding competition problems are easier to train because of strict rules and cheap verification. But once you go beyond that to less defined things such as code quality, where even humans have hard time putting down concrete axioms, they start to hallucinate more and become less useful. We are missing the value function that allowed AlphaGo to go from mid range player trained on human moves to superhuman by p…

LLMs can often guess the final answer, but the intermediate proof steps are always total bunk.

When doing math you only ever care about the proof, not the answer itself.

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

#96

Post by chromacity »

johnfn wrote: post #13

I like to imagine that the number of consumed tokens before a solution is found is a proxy for how difficult a problem is, and it looks like Opus 4.6 consumed around 250k tokens. That means that a tricky React refactor I did earlier today at work was about half as hard as an open problem in mathematics! :)

You're kidding, but it could be true? Many areas of mathematics are, first and foremost, incredibly esoteric and inaccessible (even to other mathematicians). For this one, the author stated that there might be 5-10 people who have ever made any effort to solve it. Further, the author believed it's a solvable problem if you're qualified and grind for a bit.

In software engineering, if only 5-10 people in the world have ever toyed with an idea for a specific program, it wouldn't be surprising that the implementation doesn't exist, almost independent of complexity. There's a lot of software I haven't finished simply because I wasn't all that motivated and got distracted by something else.

Of course, it's still miraculous that we have a system that can crank out code / solve math in this way.

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

#97

Post by mo7061 »

Validark wrote: post #33

I have long said I am an AI doubter until AI could print out the answers to hard problems or ones requiring tons of innovation. Assuming this is verified to be correct (not by AI) then I just became a believer. I would like to see a few more AI inventions to know for sure, but wow, it really is a new and exciting world. I really hope we use this intelligence resource to make the world better.

It 100% will not be used to make the world better and we all know it will be weaponised first to kill humans like all preceding tech

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

#98

Post by zozbot234 »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #77
qnleigh wrote: post #74

Their 'Open Problems page' linked below gives some interesting context. They list 15 open problems in total, categorized as 'moderately interesting,' 'solid result,' 'major advance,' or 'breakthrough.' The solved problem is listed as 'moderately interesting,' which is presumably the easiest category. But it's notable that the problem was selected and posted here before it was solved. I wonder how long until the other…

I’d hope this isn’t a goal post move - an open math problem of any sort being solved by a language model is absolute science fiction.

That's been achieved already with a few Erdös problems, though those tended to be ambiguously stated in a way that made them less obviously compelling to humans. This problem is obscure, even the linked writeup admits that perhaps ~10 mathematicians worldwide are genuinely familiar with it. But it's not unfeasibly hard for a few weeks' or months' work by a human mathematician.

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

#99

Post by conz »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #56

I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. It's this pervasive belief that underlies so much discussion around what it means to be intelligent. The null hypothesis goes out the window. People constantly make comments like "well it's just trying a bunch of stuff until something works" and it seems that they do not pause for a moment to consider whethe…

Re: "I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique."

Perhaps this might better help you understand why this assumption still holds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

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

#100

Post by TheLNL »

razorbeamz wrote: post #93
qq66 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I entered the prompt: > Write me a stanza in the style of "The Raven" about Dick Cheney on a first date with Queen Elizabeth I facilitated by a Time Travel Machine invented by Lin-Manuel Miranda It outputted a group of characters that I can virtually guarantee you it has never seen before on its own

Yes, but it has seen The Raven, it has seen texts about Dick Cheney, first dates, Queen Elizabeth, time machines and Lin Manuel Miranda. All of its output is based on those things it has seen.

What are you trying to point out here ? Is there any question you can ask today that is not dependent on some existing knowledge that an AI would have seen ?
Post reply on HN