Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you updated your priors after this announcement? If not, why not?
Yes let me calculate the exact change it’s 0.004748394 probability now based on my own made up statistical vibes that I feel
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An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
961–970 of 1001 posts
Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
#962[flagged]
Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
#963Earlier quoted context omitted.
> manage a McDonald's Dystopia vibes from the fictional "Manna" management system [0] used at a hamburger franchise, which involved a lot of "reverse centaur" automation. > At any given moment Manna had a list of things that it needed to do. There were orders coming in from the cash registers, so Manna directed employees to prepare those meals. There were also toilets to be scrubbed on a regular basis, floors to mop,…
Amazing bit of trivia that the founder of HowStuffWorks.com was named Marshall Brain.
Seeing how it's hard to identify sarcasm on the internet, I'll just clarify that it of course is the same person - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain
And I'll also link to the HN thread following his death a couple of years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228759
Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
#964Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are marveling at what AI can discover purely out of time and chance. AI will undoubtedly find awesome things because there's very few things we've thrown this much money at. For every awesome thing AI finds, there's a million mistakes, fake leads, hallucinations, etc. Amaze away but let's not forget this is an exception much more than the norm.
I'm sorry. But whats the point of this critique? That a raw LLM hallucinates? That we never see all the mistakes and dead ends a complex system using AI hits? Does it even matter if its accuracy rate across all its experiments is We don't see many of the failed attempts of Human Researchers. Why? Because it doesn't matter. What amazing here is that it shows our society can make discoveries faster in the post LLM worl…
Kind of seems to me, the heart of the critique is that 1. unthinkable amounts of financial and social and political credit have been thrown at this which necessarily has deducted it from other fields we could have invested in, instead. 2. Thus, with such wealth you would expect at least a couple of discoveries.
Not my post, but I think point 1 is stronger than 2.
Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
#965Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be strict, Math is not Science. But AI is supercharging Math like there is no tomorrow.
LLM's? I doubt it. Systems with Prolog, Common Lisp and the like with proof solvers? For sure. LLM's are doomed to fail. By design. You can't fix them. It's how do they work.
Care to be more specific here or do you prefer to be vague and wrong
Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
#966Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's no one person that knows everything about (say) modern food production True, but it is possible to assemble a team of people that does, with backup for each person. There's also teachers and written knowledge to educate new team members. That's what makes it resilient. I think that's a very different situation from what's decribed.
People still do grow their own food for self sufficiency. I am sure there will be luddites who live in self-sufficient communes like the Amish.
People lump them together because of an anti-technology reputation, but I don't think most Amish would have trucked with Luddites. Amish tend to avoid actively participating in popular social movements, and oppose violence and property destruction.
Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
#967Earlier quoted context omitted.
They said that their specific version of model had has this ability one year ago.
I can't open all of the links in the article because of some Cloudflare issue (perhaps related to me being on a plane) but is the version and sub iteration of the model they actually used for this the same as the one they announced the capability on a year ago? If so, did they comment why didn't they just show this a year ago (they seem to have been publishing successively better results slowly instead).
In my memory, it was OpenAI o1. OpenAI o1 was released in September 2024. It seems the difference came from the difference between benchmark performance and propagation.
Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
#968Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to hear James Burke of Connections [1] and his writer team to have a free wheeling discussion for a few hours on what they see will happen with LLM’s making these connections with more conscious intent a lot easier. The awesome compression of knowledge aspect of LLM’s is a far undersold aspect of the technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
I don't think you can look at the current AI landscape and say any aspect of it is undersold .
I totally disagree. AI is overhyped, but the demos that have impressed me most are things/elements that very few people are touching and that no one seems to be talking about.
the hype is where the money is, as is always -- marketing & porn. Both touched heavily by AI already.
Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
#969Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I'm not sure what your point is - can you expand?
I am also an AI skeptic, but I would rather have used the 1000 monkeys with a 1000 typewriters will eventually write the whole works of Shakespeare analogy.
When you consider the amount of computation which went into this discovery it is less impressive. Like if you spend a lot of fuel you can travel really fast, much faster then a bicyclist. Similarly Go-engines can beat the best humans at go, but they spend several orders of magnitude more energy to do so.
Mathematicians prove or disprove conjectures all the time and use orders of less energy to do so. Using LLMs is kind of just throwing money at the problem and hoping it works. In this case it did. But this is not the most efficient way to do this, and it won‘t scale.
Re: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
#970Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every day, it grows harder and harder to contain a mental map of recent relevant progress by simple virtue of the amount being produced. And by opening the door to LLM-generated results, you'll see greater and greater amounts without any hope of ever navigating this field again without machine help. It's a little like a software project which more and more gets extended by a AI agents with less and less review by h…
I'm no mathematician but it seems like if this happens, we get to a quite intriguing place as a species. Say we achieve interstellar travel, but nobody actually knows how it works. Or we cure cancer, but the "cure" requires a microrobotic implant, and it runs as a blackbox AI, and only the other AIs can make one, and there's no guarantee they will know how to make one tomorrow. Or we solve global warming but it requi…
This is like in Hyperion where AIs invented the farcaster wormhole portals and no human or team of experts ever came close to understanding how they worked.