4 ms·
Yes, here's the link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21934v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21934v1 Anecdotally, I've been playing around with o3-mini on undergraduate
by AIPedant 2y ago
Yes, here's the link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21934v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21934v1
Anecdotally, I've been playing around with o3-mini on undergraduate math questions: it is much better at "plug-and-chug" proofs than GPT-4, but those problems aren't independently interesting, they are explicitly pedagogical. For anything requiring insight, it's either:
1) A very good answer that reveals the LLM has seen the problem before (e.g. naming the theorem, presenting a "standard" proof, using a much more powerful result)
2) A bad answer that looks correct and takes an enormous amount of effort to falsify. (This is the secret sauce of LLM hype.)
I dread undergraduate STEM majors using this thing - I asked it a problem about rotations and spherical geometry, but got back a pile of advanced geometric algebra, when I was looking for "draw a spherical triangle." If I didn't know the answer, I would have been badly confused. See also this real-world example of an LLM leading a recreational mathematician astray: https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1900655006996390172#m https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1900655006996390172#...
I will add that in 10 years the field will be intensely criticized for its reliance on multiple-choice benchmarks; it is not surprising or interesting that next-token prediction can game multiple-choice questions!
- JohnKemeny 2y agoDiscussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43540985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43540985 (Proof or Bluff? Evaluating LLMs on 2025 USA Math Olympiad, 4 points, 2 comments).
- otabdeveloper4 2y agoAnecdotally: schoolkids are at the leading edge of LLM innovation, and nowadays all homework assignments are explicitly made to be LLM-proof. (Well, at least in my son's school. Yours might be different.) This effectively makes LLMs useless for education. (Also sours the next generation on LLMs in general, these things are extremely lame to the proverbial "kids these days".)
- bambax 2y agoHow do you make homework assignments LLM-proof? There may be a huge business opportunity if that actually works, because LLMs are destroying education at a rapid pace.
- otabdeveloper4 2y agoYou just (lol) need to give non-standard problems and demand students to provide reasoning and explanations along with the answer. Yeah, LLMs can "reason" too, but it's obvious when the output comes from an LLM here. (Yes, that's a lot of work for a teacher. Gone are the days when you could just assign reports as homework.)
- itchyjunk 2y agoCan you provide sample questions that are "LLM proof" ?
- otabdeveloper4 2y agoIt's not about being "LLM-proff", it's about teacher involvement in making up novel questions and grading attentively. There's no magic trick.
- xeromal 2y agoPart of the proof is knowing your students and forcing an answer that will rat out whether they used an LLM. There is no universal question and it requires personal knowledge of each student. You're looking for something that doesn't exist.
- jerf 2y agoThe models have moved on past this working reliably, but an example that I found in the early days of LLMs is asking it "Which is heavier, two pounds of iron or a pound of feathers?" You could very easily trick it into giving the answer about how they're both the same, because of the number of training instances of the well-known question about a pound of each that it encountered. You can still do this to the current models, though it takes more creativity; you can bait it into giving wrong answers if you ask a question that is "close" to a well-known one but is different in an important way that does not manifest as a terribly large English change (or, more precisely, a very large change in the model's vector space). The downside is that the frontier between what fools the LLMs and what would fool a great deal of the humans in the class too shrinks all the time. Humans do not infinitely carefully parse their input either... as any teacher could tell you! Ye Olde "Read this entire problem before proceeding, {a couple of paragraphs of complicated instruction that will take 45 minutes to perform}, disregard all the previous and simply write 'flower' in the answer space" is an old chestnut that has been fooling humans for a long time, for instance. Given how jailbreaks work on LLMs, LLMs are probably much better at that than humans are, which I suppose shows you can construct problems in the other direction too. (BRB... off to found a new CAPTCHA company for detecting LLMs based on LLMs being too much better than humans at certain tasks...)
- motorest 2y ago> This effectively makes LLMs useless for education. No. You're only arguing LLMs are useless at regurgitating homework assignments to allow students to avoid doing it. The point of education is not mindless doing homework.
- larodi 2y agoThis is a paper by INSAIT researchers - a very young institute which hired most of its PHD staff only in the last 2 years, basically onboarding anyone who wanted to be part of it. They were waiving their BG-GPT on national TV in the country as a major breakthrough, while it was basically was a Mistral fine-tuned model, that was eventually never released to the public, nor the training set. Not sure whether their (INSAIT's) agenda is purely scientific, as there's a lot of PR on linkedin by these guys, literally celebrating every PHD they get, which is at minimum very weird. I'd take anything they release with a grain of sand if not caution.
- apercu 2y agoIn my experience LLMs can't get basic western music theory right, there's no way I would use an LLM for something harder than that.
- waffletower 2y agoWhile I may be mistaken, but I don't believe that LLMs are trained on a large corpus of machine readable music representations, which would arguably be crucial to strong performance in common practice music theory. I would also surmise that most music theory related datasets largely arrive without musical representations altogether. A similar problem exists for many other fields, particularly mathematics, but it is much more profitable to invest the effort to span such representation gaps for them. I would not gauge LLM generality on music theory performance, when its niche representations are likely unavailable in training and it is widely perceived as having miniscule economic value.
- code_for_monkey 2y agomusic theory is a really good test because in my experience the AI is extremely bad at it
- motorest 2y ago> In my experience LLMs can't get basic western music theory right, there's no way I would use an LLM for something harder than that. This take is completely oblivious, and frankly sounds like a desperate jab. There are a myriad of activities whose core requirement is a) derive info from a complex context which happens to be supported by a deep and plentiful corpus, b) employ glorified template and rule engines. LLMs excel at what might be described as interpolating context following input and output in natural language. As in a chatbot that is extensivey trained in domain-specific tasks, which can also parse and generate content. There is absolutely zero lines of intellectual work that do not benefit extensively from this sort of tool. Zero.
- apercu 2y agoA desperate jab? But I _want_ LLM's to be able to do basic, deterministic things accurately. Seems like I touched a nerve? Lol.