4 ms·

Until this year, you would have been right, but in May, the Erdős unit-distance conjecture was disproven by an AI. This required novel thought and reasoning, no

by My_Name 3mo ago

Until this year, you would have been right, but in May, the Erdős unit-distance conjecture was disproven by an AI. This required novel thought and reasoning, not just recombining already known facts. The view that they are only statistical prediction machines is becoming increasingly disconnected from their current abilities. I probably should have put the word 'easily' before readable. After all, if it is valid code, it can be read.

overgard 3mo ago
None of that changes that it's a statistical prediction machine. This isn't me speculating, it's just literally what it is. You can buy a book on how to implement one (I have one!) The fact that it solved a math problem doesn't change that, it just means it was trained on enough math to be able to apply a known technique. These things aren't magic. Also, I'm really suspicious of any result that comes from OpenAI. AFAIK frontier labs hire people to solve problems for the AI to train the AI, not to mention it scraping the internet. I think it's easily possible that a human might have already provided a 90% of the solution and AI filled in the gaps. I don't know that for sure, but I do not trust these companies published results at all. I'm only interested in 3rd party independent results.
- My_Name 3mo ago
  You said "they reproduce what they're trained on" The problem was unsolved, it solved it when it was not possible for it to be trained on the solution, therefore your other claim that "they're always going to produce the most "average" code" does not hold up, they can come up with better code than they were trained on precisely because they can apply known techniques to write better code than existed in their training data. The book you have is out of date and does not apply to recent improvements in the field. The unit distance problem had no known answer and no roadmap. The model identified the problem, chose its own approach, and produced the proof. I am not convinced by either your logic or your argument from incredulity. Neither prove your position.

by My_Name 3mo ago

overgard 3mo ago

None of that changes that it's a statistical prediction machine. This isn't me speculating, it's just literally what it is. You can buy a book on how to implement one (I have one!) The fact that it solved a math problem doesn't change that, it just means it was trained on enough math to be able to apply a known technique. These things aren't magic. Also, I'm really suspicious of any result that comes from OpenAI. AFAIK frontier labs hire people to solve problems for the AI to train the AI, not to mention it scraping the internet. I think it's easily possible that a human might have already provided a 90% of the solution and AI filled in the gaps. I don't know that for sure, but I do not trust these companies published results at all. I'm only interested in 3rd party independent results.

My_Name 3mo ago
You said "they reproduce what they're trained on" The problem was unsolved, it solved it when it was not possible for it to be trained on the solution, therefore your other claim that "they're always going to produce the most "average" code" does not hold up, they can come up with better code than they were trained on precisely because they can apply known techniques to write better code than existed in their training data. The book you have is out of date and does not apply to recent improvements in the field. The unit distance problem had no known answer and no roadmap. The model identified the problem, chose its own approach, and produced the proof. I am not convinced by either your logic or your argument from incredulity. Neither prove your position.