Probably true for the dedicated problem solvers (of which Tao is one IMO). But I doubt there's ever been a better time to be a theory builder (more like Peter Scholze, or Grothendieck).
Some up with an idea and leave the system to check it 15 different ways, and see whether you can simplify an existing body of theory. It'd be like having an army of lightning-fast grad students.
This is coming next. There's nothing particularly special about theory building. Successful theory building is always oriented towards solving a problem, because otherwise even humans can easily spam out a bunch of nonsense. This is a real problem that the math community has experienced on multiple occasions pre-AI. I'd go further and say that theory building is irrelevant if it doesn't help solve problems people care about.
I'd even say Scholze is not a great example here. Most of the work he's known for is progression towards the Langlands program - which is very much a problem to be solved, and one I would imagine he'd not be thrilled for an AI to one-shot. I agree that it is somewhat 'up the chain', in the same way that software engineering has not immediately disappeared now that performing coding tasks is largely automatable.
But I also take issue with 'never been a better time' - e.g. is this really the greatest time to be a software engineer? Everyone has AI psychosis and feels like they're a couple of breakthroughs away from being unemployable. The same is even more true in math - we've gone from failing IMO problem 6 last year, to solving NS. The rate of change is formidable, it feels like there may not be many places to hide in a few years.
The blog post says that the statement "AI really did solve a problem in mathematics." is wrong. But a formal proof showing that Navier-Stokes equations can blow up is certainly such a solution, by AI. There is not much in this world that is more objective than a formal proof, so any disagreement on this is based on how we see the world. Michael Harris will agree with the statement being wrong, Jacob Tsimerman will not.
Another example, Hilbert famously battled Brouwer's view of mathematics. From my point of view, Hilbert was right: intuitionistic logic is certainly interesting; but I like to study it using "normal" (= classical) mathematics.
Finally, my personal frustrations are about how hard it is to publish my work on abstraction logic. I would never have thought it is that difficult, mathematics being objective and all. It seems essential to take out as much motivation out of your paper as possible, because it might offend your reviewers and their belief system. By now my papers come with full Isabelle/HOL formalisations, let's see if that helps.
Was it a marketing win though? My takeaway is: if you're doing groundbreaking work with openAI's models and they find out, at best they'll outspend you and scoop you. At worst they'll steal your chat history.
That's a completely different matter. And does it matter to my point if they were successful or not? That's ex-post analysis. It seems clear that ex-ante, they wanted this to be a marketing win. The original poster complained that they wanted a marketing win.
My point is: why shouldn't they want a marketing win from this. What obligation does a non-academic institution have to follow the traditions of academia? Its result doesn't belong to academia. And if academia wants to subject OpenAI to their own internal processes and give them marching orders, it just isn't going to work and maybe - who knows - it'll even further erode their own legitimacy. Does anyone actually believe that NS would have been resolved in the 2020's if we lived in a parallel world where LLM's were never invented? Would Buckmaster have gotten as far as he did without LLM's doing a lot of the work for him? We can complain about AI companies contributing to mathematics, but are we complaining about Terence Tao using AI in his research? When Tao publishes something are we all going to go to war against him because maybe other mathematicians' prompts went into training the AI that Tao used?
Yeah - I think he’s worried that we have a tool that’s almost an oracle that can just get straight to the heart of a given problem.
The problems aren’t always that interesting in their own right. But the quest to solve them is often what drives the invention of new techniques.
We ultimately got the Langlands program and a large amount of algebraic number theory out of attempts to solve fermat’s last theorem. A “clever” approach using techniques from the 1800s wouldn’t have been anywhere near as fruitful for mathematics as a discipline.
AFAIK, the “large” qualifier came when transformers allowed to scale the size of language models compared to the recurrent models that where in fashion before. And although BERT isn't large by today's standard, it was large enough for the time.
idk the definition is fuzzy. thats why people use the "modern" qualifier to talk about decoder-only style and this is also not clean since you now have reasoning models which are separate
To that point, given a corpus of writing from person A and another from person B, I have no doubt it’s easy to train a classifier to determine who wrote what. In fact I believe law enforcement agencies already have these classifiers.
The only difference here is that Anthropic is actively trying to make the watermark undetectable.
They're not trying to make the watermark undetectable, that would defeat the point of a watermark. They're making it detectable, but not make the text obviously watermarked
Out of interest, do Musk's politics impact your decision on whether or not to use Grok? I'd be interested to know where folks lie on the (Agree / Disagree) and (Use / Don't use) axes.
It does. I believe he is one of the worst people and contributed to misery of humanity. I had nothing against him until he dismantled USAID. The richest man in the world did not go to a party on weekend to make sure that poorest men on the world have less help. He was basically on the side of HIV.
So i never use his products.
Beside don't read too much in to benchmarks. They are alrrady ruined by Goldhart principle. Tgese models have already seen most of the data.
Absolutely, if there is any somewhat reasonable alternative, I will always use a non Musk product. Its less about morals but more about self interest. I am from Europe and Musk supports far right extremists and a breakup of the EU. I will not support and enable someone who intends to do me harm.
I disagree with Musk's politics but it does not impact my decision to use Grok. That's because being serious about aligning my capital to my values doesn't leave much in the way of eligible products or services. I consequently decide not to worry about this as a moral axis for my life.
Interesting question. I suppose it comes down to how much you allocate his involvement or presence to a product? I’d imagine Grok is built by hundreds of engineers who are all unique individuals from various backgrounds. If Elon simply “leads” from a very surface level where he has no direct day to day involvement in Grok releases does that make it more palatable? Or is the question really about how involved he is? Or is simply being the leader (even if he was 100% absent and only had his name attached to a project/company) enough to boycott?
On a similar note, how much Elon hate is about his politics vs his trillionaire status vs what I like to call “watercooler hate” where folks simply parrot the loudest opinion in order to be accepted into the group?
On a final note, my son is in primary school and recently brought up in a dinner time discussion that “Elon is really bad” - this is a kid who has no social media (unlike some of his peers who are already on TikTok) and doesn’t watch traditional media.
The man did a nazi salute on live TV, not once but twice. And you know he meant it. What else is there to doubt? Do you think a white supremacist can be a good person?
> The man did a nazi salute on live TV, not once but twice. And you know he meant it.
He's also publicly and militantly supported quite a few far right political parties throughout Europe, particularly those who have a long track record on race-based topics.
its pretty on the record that musk takes a direct role in writing the system prompts, no? and is eager to make updates if whatever ml products arent sufficiently matching the specific politics and musk adoration that he wants it to?
I avoid Grok for meaningful token spend on purpose/boycotting. I do check in via openrouter occasionally to check it's chat performance which has seemed fine to me since 4. My total grok spend has been ~$2. I disagree with his politics to a huge degree.
My token spend at api rates is about $3000 usd a month recently.
i read an independent study that found other ai were all left of center (how ever one measures that, sentiment analysis normalized to a given population??). they said grok was evenly left/right split
but what's to validate any given population as centrist anyway
they suggested the ai opinion drift was caused by internet demographics not directly reflecting actual population i.e. California publishes more etc
Man, I got ready to debunk this but just questioned my life choices instead.
Why the fuck am I glued to my smartphone arguing with people posting shit like this instead of spending time with my daughters, creating new things or looking after my own body and soul.
Michael, please copy your comment verbatim into any LLM with search capabilities and ask for primary sources that confirm or deny your statements, and break down the beliefs by party.
Then, use your real flesh and meat brain to ponder where your (not other peoples' - your own) beliefs about this came from, and what their motivations for blasting them at you could be.
Goodbye HN, I think I'm done with this site for good.
Instead of feeding the whole thing to chatgpt let's pick one item.
We tend to accept young earth creationism because perceptively it has little to do with everyday life doesn't hurt anyone and people are quite open about it. It also means that your brain is literally broken, you have no critical thinking skills and you are just the right sort to be manipulated by evil and end up building or guarding the concentration camps.
According to Gallup 95% of Republicans believe this at a strong majority 58% believe that the earth was quite literally created as is less than 10k years.
While this is magnificently stupid in and of itself it's not the problem it's merely a symptom of their disease.
They largely believe that dead kids aren't a reason to reign in guns, they believe climate change is a hoax, a cycle, or inevitable and won't do anything about it or let anyone else. They believe that us aid to poor nations was 10-15% of our budget and we just can't afford to not let kids starve when it was one-half of 1%. They believe that it may be necessary to use violence against the rest of us to maintain the status quo. They believe that we need an stong authorian to lead us democracy be damned, they believed that COVID was a scam until the corpses piled up or even after!
Here's a hilarious one. It's a graph of the percentage of the population which understood that COVID was worse than seasonal flu a march through April 2020. For Dems it goes from 74 to 87%. For Republicans it goes from 42 to 40 it actually drops whilst body count goes up.
They are magnificently staggering wrong on average about everything. We could go point by point and I could find polls for every single one because I'm basing my understanding of their position by reading their own words and polls by reputable sources like pew and Gallup.
The right Wing collectively has departed so entirely from reality that educated con artists must carefully contort their words to avoid their insanities and prejudice whilst fools spout forth with abandon uncaring.
I certainly have some political disagreements with Musk, but more than that I would say the way he runs his companies makes me extremely anxious. The man is just always talking about stuff that never actually happens. In practice it does seem like cooler heads prevail and Grok et al. have trajectories pretty in line with other major providers...but because they're pretty in line why take the risk? Why build on foundations that ostensibly could be re-tasked to produce a "woke free" Odyssey?
Some up with an idea and leave the system to check it 15 different ways, and see whether you can simplify an existing body of theory. It'd be like having an army of lightning-fast grad students.
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