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If all checks out this is a huge milestone. AI has now solved one of the most famous open problems in graph theory, using an off the shelf model, in one hour.
by WhitneyLand 3mo ago
If all checks out this is a huge milestone. AI has now solved one of the most famous open problems in graph theory, using an off the shelf model, in one hour.
It might be a better mathematician than most humans at this point. Kind of like when chess software started beating everyone except grandmasters.
What’s left? Proposing and building out entirely new theories and frameworks? Then better than any human? Then alien math results we struggle to comprehend?
- npinsker 3mo agoYou say those things like they're a short step away, but that might not be how it works out. For example, AI has made zero progress in the last few years in surpassing professionals at art or writing. Its prompt-following skill is much better, and sure, it can render hands and text now, but its artistic sensibility is completely stagnant.
- in-silico 3mo agoThe difference is that artistic sensibility is largely subjective. This means that: 1. It's hard to measure (and people can disagree about it) 2. It can't really be improved using RL without a human in the loop (which is how math is being trained)
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- Miraste 3mo agoAt a certain level, yes, but AI is still so bad at writing that its failures are objective and easily measurable
- dash2 3mo agoI agree that AI writing is bloody awful, and that it's bad at creativity more generally, but are there actual objective measures of this?
- ToValueFunfetti 3mo agoI think, and I may be totally off base, that the labs are specifically avoiding art and (non-technical) writing as an endpoint. It's bad PR for them- it calls attention to the copyright question and threatens the 'human flourishing' kind of jobs- and there's no money in it because people prefer art to be human made and there's hardly any money in that anyway.
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- fooker 3mo agoAI is no match for rapidly shifting goalposts ;)
- pixel_popping 3mo agoWhat are you even talking about? The last few years, AI has made an insanely big jump in capabilities, performance, accuracy. It destroyed the carrier of a ton of writers and can generate images that are good enough to bamboozle people into thinking it's human made, that sounds like an insanely big leap to me, and yes it can be very creative and in music as well, I would bet it beats already 90% of musicians (most musicians are not that competent).
- phatfish 3mo agoArt is so entwined with the human condition that generative AI which conjures output from a statistical pass over background noise is bound to be stagnant. Obviously it can impersonate art, but where creativity and the human story matter artists need not worry.
- orangecat 3mo agoAI-written stories have won several awards, e.g. https://lithub.com/a-prize-winning-story-published-in-granta-was-very-likely-written-by-ai/ https://lithub.com/a-prize-winning-story-published-in-granta...
- esafak 3mo ago> What's left? I think humans will be left to propose new conjectures while machines fill out the proofs. I don't know if there are enough interesting conjectures to go round to build new careers, though.
- sandspar 3mo agoSurely the machines will have superior conjectures soon.
- esafak 3mo agoI think so. Mathematics is the least of my worries. I worry about what the machines will want to do.
- IsTom 3mo agoTo be able to propose interesting conjectures you need to walk the walk of trying to prove things yourself. That's not great for future generations.
- StefanBatory 3mo agoIt's hard for me not to think what's the point. I am a very average, even below average person in times of intelligence. What is even my value or reason to be if I know anything I can do, LLMs can do better? What is even my value both on job market and as a human?
- munksbeer 3mo agoSorry to be nihilist, but you never had any objective value if you're thinking in these terms. As far as we know, the universe "just is". There is no universal objective value of human beings, at all, any one of us. You have to make or find your own value in the universe. I try not to think too hard about the nihilist side and try to appreciate that for some unfathomable reason, I seem to have what I call consciousness - the ability to observe the present and have it superimposed on the past, and what may be the future, leading me to "experience" things. I don't understand it, no-one does (some people suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect think they do, but they don't), and yet, here we are. So it doesn't matter to me if machines perform better than I do, because already lots of other people do. Just try to find your own joy or meaning, somehow.
- adamtaylor_13 3mo ago> As far as we know, the universe "just is". I don't know this. In fact, billions of people around the world don't know this. In fact, all evidence points to the contrary. You have objective value being made in the image of a personal God. Denying that leads to a lot of pain, namely nihilistic suffering because it's on you to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" in any endeavor involving your own self-worth.
- Chu4eeno 3mo agoTo cite the famed Russian philosopher Norm Macdonald; "Scripture. Faith. Grace. Christ, Glory of God. Smart man says nothing is a miracle. I say everything is."
- honeycrispy 3mo ago
- soupspaces 3mo agoYou don't compete with a chainsaw at cutting trees. You decide what the tree is for. Then sell the rainforest for shareholder value. https://youtu.be/UrgpZ0fUixs https://youtu.be/UrgpZ0fUixs
- ranguna 3mo agoAnd now AIs can do all that
- YeGoblynQueenne 3mo ago>> What’s left? For example, there's all the problems that the same off-the-shelf model hasn't solved despite OpenAI running it for many hours on them. Don't forget you're only seeing the results of successful runs. We can estimate that those unsolved problems must number in the dozens, or even hundreds, given the amount of time that passed since the last announcement of a solution to an interesting problem by an OpenAI model: i.e. the unit distance problem which was announced solved in 20 May this year. That's a couple of months, yes? We can be fairly certain that OpenAI have been trying to solve other problems all this time, first because they are hell bent on demonstrating that their models can do maths and second because we just got another result, but it took that long. They were obviously not twiddling their thumbs all this time. So if OpenAI are running their model on a single proble for eight hours at a time (according to the prompt they released) they could be easily have run a few hundred instances of their model on the same number of open problems 156 times for each instance (53 days since 20 May, with a model running in three eight-hour sessions per 24 hour day). I mean the only restriction is the cost they're willing to pay for the inference. So yeah, there's a lot left to do still, don't worry.
- famouswaffles 3mo agoThe 2 most notable/interesting solutions have come from Open AI directly, but most of the 'LLM solves open problem' category didn't and has come from 3rd parties doing their own thing with publicly available models. I don't see why one would assume they're running models on hundreds of problems. Most likely they have a few problems they especially care about that they run on.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3mo agoWhat, Erdős problems? It's hard to see how anyone except mathematicians, and then again only a few communities of mathematicians, especially care about those. Remember back in the day when Deep Mind made AlphaGo? That made huge waves for two reasons: one, it was very well understood by AI researchers that beating expert humans at Go was very hard; and, two, that Go is a game of great cultural significance to literally billions of people outside of academia, albeit mainly in SE Asia. Now, Erdős? I'm a computer scientist and I had to look up the planar unit distance problem when I heard about it because I had no idea what that was. Because it never comes up in the literature I read. I'm not saying it's not interesting, but it does seem a bit... random? That they started with Erdős problems? I'd have gone for a Millennium Prize problem, first. P vs NP, Riemann, Navier Stokes, those are heavy-weight results that would establish AI as the de facto approach to mathematics for the foreseeable future. Even I would find it hard to raise an objection (imagine that). Erdős can take a number, compared to all that. I'm not saying they're choosing problems at random, mind. But it does seem like we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg, with respect to what the AI companies are doing internally. That shouldn't be a surprise. That's exactly how research works in general, both in academia and in industry. There is a clear survivorship bias and we only ever get to see the positive results, never the negative ones. >> The 2 most notable/interesting solutions have come from Open AI directly, but most of the 'LLM solves open problem' category didn't and has come from 3rd parties doing their own thing with publicly available models. I don't see why one would assume they're running models on hundreds of problems. Actually, that's a good point but it's in support of my contention. If there are random people in the community running LLMs on their own, favourite, maths problems, we should be seeing many more of those solved and much more often, provided LLMs were really as good at maths as OpenAI et al want them to be. There must be literally thousands of mathematicians trying to use LLMs to solve this or that problem that is famous in their community. Where are all those spectacular results? Or, to abuse Fermi's question, where is everybody?
- grantcas 3mo ago[dead]