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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

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Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#921

Post by BoggleOhYeah »

galleywest200 wrote: post #467
evenhash wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone works for Evil Corp. I work in the public sector and my work supports public health and safety initiatives. AI has allowed my team to get much more done than we would have otherwise which improves the quality of life of the people in my community. So I would like to counter your cynicism with a “YMMV” depending on who you work for.

Examples?

HN doesn’t like when you ask for those.

Remember, this is the propaganda arm of a VC. Proof is a hindrance to the hype that drives value.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#922

Post by applicative »

lettergram wrote: post #762
tyre wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In US politics, the right is far, far better at winning elections than the left. This isn’t about personal preference. It’s objective political science. Look at the most contentious issues in the US: abortion, climate change, taxing the wealthy, gun control, Affordable Healthcare Act. The Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one. Every one of those issues has >60% support with voters an…

Objectively? > Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one. It depends on the pollster and where you're polling. I guarantee you rural Tennessee will not agree with downtown Washington DC on any of these issues. In contrast, rural California will likely agree with rural Tennessee. It's not as cut and dry as a homogeneous national poll of 2500 people. Every state, city, county are different…

I don't know what distance has to do with it. I would probably be voted out of existence by my town, if the same constitution hadn't convinced them that they have no right. Independence Hall is remote in space and the events still more in time.

The pretense of Dobbs is that laws against abortion are like laws prohibiting medical marijuana or setting speed limits. This contradicts the purpose of laws against abortion and the actual language of most of them. It was obviously a desperate decision, irrespective of the truth about abortion

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#923

Post by danparsonson »

Windchaser wrote: post #374
danparsonson wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it seems like I don't understand the meaning of that very well-known phrase, then clearly I have failed to make my point. I'll try again. And please note that I will use some generalizations to make my point more clearly, rather than because I don't understand nuance; kindly grant me a charitable reading. In recent years, I have commonly seen the phrase "you're moving the goalposts" deployed by the "it might be se…

> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not. To me, the goalposts were already defined by the person you were responding to. "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon". Note that this does not depend on things…

Take your point, although

> "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".

those are not goalposts - that's an incredible vague 'goal'. What are we moving here exactly?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#924

Post by sdenton4 »

pama wrote: post #816
sdenton4 wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Five (maybe six?) of the results are improvements on bounds. These kinds of problems tend to have some initial advances, and then stall out as the complexity of the bound skyrockets... until some grad student is bored enough to push the boundary. The big-O complexity of matrix multiplication is a good example of how this works: yeah, it's a useful problem, but the solutions are galactic algorithms, and increasingly c…

Your inverted logic does not hold. The fact that such useless problems for bounds exist does not mean that improving bounds is useless. 9 fields medals in the last twenty years, including the one to Terrence Tao, were for improvements on bounds. 3 of the 4 medals in 2022 were for bounds; 2 of these medals were in combinatorics.

I stated that boring bounds improvement problems exist, not that all bounds problems are boring... Sigh.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#925

Post by danparsonson »

strbean wrote: post #550
danparsonson wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it seems like I don't understand the meaning of that very well-known phrase, then clearly I have failed to make my point. I'll try again. And please note that I will use some generalizations to make my point more clearly, rather than because I don't understand nuance; kindly grant me a charitable reading. In recent years, I have commonly seen the phrase "you're moving the goalposts" deployed by the "it might be se…

> When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change? It's in how they change, not the fact that they change. The skeptics seem to have secret definitions for intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, etc. that amounts to "a thing only humans have". Often that thing is equivalent to a soul. When yesterday's challenge (LLMs don't hav…

OK, I see, thanks. That applies to some skeptics, though - I'm in the AI skeptic camp but only in the sense that I believe we should make sober assessments of what these things are actually capable of.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#926

Post by Lord-Jobo »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #902
scarmig wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything has limits, of course. But if you've not yet seen a deceleration, it's reasonable to expect that at the least you're in the middle of the sigmoid, not the top.

> But if you've not yet seen a deceleration We have though. The velocity remains high but the acceleration is decreasing. The improvement between gpt 2-4 where staggering. to 5, 5.6? Much less so. The results improve of course, but the difference is no longer mind blowing. Most of the improvement now has come from agentic harnessing, which is unrelated to the acceleration of the model but the tooling around the use o…

I literally don’t understand, and have a deep distrust of people who say we haven’t seen deceleration.

The diminishing returns are colossal. GPT 4 is more than 3 years old now, and while Sol is definitely better, it’s better at a tremendous cost. And 3 years of development. And it still fails in nearly all the same places as 4.0.

I’m not some “zero AI” person, I don’t think this industry will collapse into nothing and we will go back to a no LLM world.

But to look at this industry, which basically began in November 2022, almost 4 years and a trillion+ dollars later and say “oh yeah, definitely riding that exponential growth still” is some of the wildest shit I’ve ever seen, and it’s so common.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#927

Post by dominotw »

sothatsit wrote: post #651
dominotw wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Labs spend billions hiring experts to generate new data

I thought this is mostly RL data. In my previous comment i was referring to pertaining data.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#928

Post by munksbeer »

naasking wrote: post #886
whilenot-dev wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cambridge Analytica gathered data to build targeted profiles and used these profiles for political advertising without informed consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

Yes, but there is little evidence this had a meaningful effect on votes.

I don't think the outcome is what makes things like this potentially illegal.

You're not allowed to bribe public officials. You're not going to escape the law by arguing that the bribe didn't get you the result you wanted.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#929

Post by camdenreslink »

azan_ wrote: post #835
bamboozled wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, it's hard to know how significant these results are without more transparency around the methods used to obtain them.

Not really. Why would that be the case?

If the prompt was crafted by an expert mathematician with pages of context and insights provided to the LLM to put it on the right path, that is a lot less impressive than a prompt that just says "find a counterexample to this conjecture".

Similarly, if they are spending millions of dollars in inference just churning on thousands of problems and these are the 10 solutions they came up with, that would be less impressive than if they chose these 10 problems specifically and were able to come up with solutions.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#930

Post by andai »

alberto-m wrote: post #901
DiscourseFan wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this?

Not OP, but my interpretation is this. Quantum waveform collapse has been proposed as explanation for consciousness, allowing to explain how an entity can have free will and yet obey rigid physical laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse I think OP is suggesting a similar thing happened in the LLM, implying it gained consciousness despite following a well-defined compute process.

No I just meant WFC as an algorithm for solving problems.

https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

I guess I've been pronouncing it wrong though. It's wave function collapse, not waveform.

I haven't studied it properly yet but it kind of looks like how sudokus work. You have a bunch of plausible options, and the various possible worlds overlap with each other but not completely and then you eliminate the things that are not possible until the actual possibility remains.

I think thinking works similarly, and I wouldn't be surprised if artificial thinking also worked similarly.

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