7 ms·

Pretty cool. The impact of AI is getting undeniable, there aren’t many positions left to move the goalposts to at this stage, next they’ll have to be outside th

Pretty cool. The impact of AI is getting undeniable, there aren’t many positions left to move the goalposts to at this stage, next they’ll have to be outside the stadium entirely. The sooner people can be broken out of their denial about all this the better, and we can start actually taking it seriously.

datakan 2mo ago
[flagged]
- Chance-Device 2mo ago
  I can deal with apathy, that’s the norm. What bothers me are all the people who think they can suppress AI by talking it down. That’s what’s counterproductive, just pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Tell other people it doesn’t exist either. I get it, it’s threatening socially, economically, maybe existentially. It’s also not going away.
  - ryan_n 2mo ago
    So you think it’s a potentially existential threat but are bothered by people who maybe want to suppress it… Hopefully you acknowledge there is a bit of lack of self awareness here eh?
    - Chance-Device 2mo ago
      You seem to have misunderstood my point.
- FranzFerdiNaN 2mo ago
  It’s not apathy. It’s the fact that almost nobody can really understand what these results mean. I’m not a mathematician so I have zero clue what “ New upper bounds on sphere-packing density down to the Cohn–Elkies thresholds” means.
danparsonson 2mo ago
Never understood all this talk about moving goalposts - you understand that's how science works, right? We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. If we never "moved the goalposts", we'd be stuck scoring the same goals over and over.
- NitpickLawyer 2mo ago
  > We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And again. That's what "moving the goalposts" means. It's also very much not a new phenomenon. It's been happening since the 1980s. As you can see from this quote from GEB by Hofstadter: > There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
  - Chance-Device 2mo ago
    Yes, this is exactly what is meant by “moving the goalposts”. And it’s a fairly well known expression applying wherever people retroactively change their requirements in reaction to those requirements having been met.
    - danparsonson 2mo ago
      It's almost like I disagree with your use of the phrase in this context, rather than that I don't know the meaning of it.
      - monktastic1 2mo ago
slashdave 2mo ago
> The sooner people can be broken out of their denial There is irony here
ck2 2mo ago
"AI" has limits in that it cannot invent knowledge, it can only distill and search for patterns in existing knowledge not sure how many will get this reference but "AI" for science and math is like super-shoes for runners at first we are blown away by the impossible improvements including sub-2-hour realworld marathon and every other PR/CR/WR is dialed down but then the improvements slow and reach a stall point because of the limit of technology and the source of the achievement ie. sub-2-hour marathon yes, sub-1-hour never happening (rollerblade inline-skate record is 1-hour marathon)
- pama 2mo ago
  Not sure what your first sentence means, or why you are quoting AI. Many of these problems individually were math at a level approaching the highest possible for expert human mathematicians. These are not simple combinations of existing ideas, or following of human intuitions, or implementing something following specific human instructions. Then again maybe you mean that math is not knowledge and that all math is simply extending the basic axioms using known patterns, to which I would not agree.
- fixedpointsnake 2mo ago
  I agree. The most likely scenario is that this is just a "new normal" lift that is percolating through human endeavors and will saturate at some point. For example, the whole cyber-security bruhaha should ultimately resolve into higher standards for code published -- we can now cheaply find and fix a whole slew of minor bugs that weren't worth our time before. The fact we see a lift is not the same as evidence that the lift is unbounded. The lift being finite is supported by the fact improvements have come at the edges: improvements from human feedback, improvements in harnesses, improvements on model compatibility with harnesses, improvements in inference efficiency with new architectures, etc. If we were just training better models from scratch that would be one thing, but we are just making better use of a tool we've developed.
- IncreasePosts 2mo ago
  How do humans "invent knowledge"? Is your argument that the answer to these questions already existed in the training set? Why didn't any human recognize that before?
c7b 2mo ago
And what does taking it seriously entail?
- kypro 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ghjkghjkghj 2mo ago
    There are some genuinely insane takes in this thread on both sides but this takes the cake.
    - iwontberude 2mo ago
      That's because its satire, the tell was "not excluding targeted military strikes"
      - ghjkghjkghj 2mo ago
        Gonna say the edit they made removes the satire possibility.
        kypro 2mo ago
        Not satire, but as you can see one is engaging in good faith and everyone is either engaging in character attacks or low-effort counters. It's fine, and I'm very used to this, but if you want to have a dialogue I'd be very happy to. I'm a very reasonable and sane person outside of apparently holding some controversial views on AI risk =) I'd love to know why you think what I said was insane?
    - cubefox 2mo ago
      A few years ago the majority of Hacker News dismissed LLMs as not much more than stochastic parrots who were decades away from doing any serious work, autonomously escaping containment and hacking Hugging Face, or outperforming most professional mathematicians at proving theorems. These things were labeled "insane" and "science fiction" despite the rapid progress we had already seen. Now you are again postulating that there would be no more extreme progress in the near future. That's actually more "insane".
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
Sorry to hear you've been impacted by this AI math. I heard that Gary Kasparov was impacted by AI chess, but at least he still seems to have a job, so don't give up.
- zahlman 2mo ago
  Making insulting assumptions about the hidden motivations of others is not the level of discourse I come to HN for.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
    FWIW I was responding to the sarcastically expressed overt message that AI-math is a clear sign that AGI is here and anyone who disagrees is in denial. My point being that AI math is a narrow skill just like AI chess and implies nothing about generality (AGI). Sarcasm begats sarcasm.
arenaninja 2mo ago
It's indeed very exciting. I'm looking forward to new advancements/predictions in physics. Preferably as beautifully explained as E = M*c^2
- amelius 2mo ago
  A formula like e^(i*pi)+1=0 is probably closer. But it's not clear if LLMs will produce abstractions that humans would find elegant.
overgard 2mo ago
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-amazing-but-vastly-oversold?r=8tdk6&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-amazing-but-vastly... https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-critical-updates-re-astra-and?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb4376bf6-f1ba-4471-88b5-4307e2581a40_1213x1027.png&open=false https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-critical-updates-re-as... As always, PR hype. Goalposts have not moved. Guys, please use critical thinking. The haters don't hate by default, we hate because we're gaslit about this stuff every day and it's annoying. Extraordinary claims require proof, and they're not giving us information that would be essential to knowing if this is actually significant or not.
- efavdb 2mo ago
  best point in that first link: openai doesn't tell us if they only tried to solve these 10 and each was solved (amazing) or if they asked it to solve a million problems and it got these 10. Either is great, one is more so.
- Trasmatta 2mo ago
  Society at large is getting worse at critical thinking, because we are increasingly offloading that thinking to AI
- afro88 2mo ago
  Gary doesn't argue it's hype though. He argues 2 things: other people are getting carried away with the result, and we don't know enough about how it was reached to know where it falls on the impressive scale. He literally says it's an impressive feat in the second article.
  - overgard 2mo ago
    > other people are getting carried away with the result That is the intended purpose of hype. He's polite, but he's basically saying there's potentially a lot of smoke and mirrors. I agree.
- bluerooibos 2mo ago
hansmayer 2mo ago
[dead]
applicative 2mo ago
It is a fact of experience, and indeed effectively a theorem, that the better they get at coding and math, the dumber they are. These are the wages of RLVR etc
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  completely false
fhfncjcc 2mo ago
[flagged]
- Legend2440 2mo ago
  Proof? In my experience modern models are better at all tasks than models from two years ago, especially complex multi-step tasks.
  - alightsoul 2mo ago
    you are working on coding. they are working on things like "creative writing" remember that gpt 4o was popular among those who had ai as a romantic partnet?
    - Legend2440 2mo ago
      Well that's on purpose lol. OpenAI does not want you falling in love with their chatbot and have been deliberately training it to be less romantic.
      - vablings 2mo ago
        There have been several cases of suicide and self-harm related to 4o, AI psychosis is a real risk and will probably be in the DSM
      - desterothx 2mo ago
        sure they do if it makes them money, probably just not worth the controversy right now
    - michaelmrose 2mo ago
      sycophancy It wasn't "better" it was better at kissing your ass which matches what a lot of people want in a partner.
    - Marha01 2mo ago
      > remember that gpt 4o was popular among those who had ai as a romantic partner I suspect GPT 5.6 would be even better at it, if given the same sycophantic system prompt and lack of guardrails.
matsemann 2mo ago
Which straw man are you arguing against?
- Dig1t 2mo ago
  I don't think this is a straw man, a huge number of people in my life (non CS people) think AI is a dead-end, that it's just a stochastic parrot, that it'll never be able to do many things that humans can do. I have had many arguments with people who told me that "AI will never be able to do X", and then 6 months later AI is able to do X. Then they will move the goal posts and say "well AI will definitely never be able to do Y".
whimsicalism 2mo ago
it is very hard for people to eat crow, as the replies will show
- dominotw 2mo ago
  Really? has anyone ever claimed that ai will never be able to prove theorems and conjectures ?
  - whimsicalism 2mo ago
    yes, in fact I recall many people on this exact forum saying that AI will not be able to novel work at all. i can link you likely dozens of comments from people wrong about this replying to me over the last 5 years
  - reducesuffering 2mo ago
    Hundreds of comments with 100% confidence AI/LLMs only regurgitate existing knowledge and can not produce anything novel
gste 2mo ago
People will be broken out of their denial by actual economic growth. That's what this is all meant to be for... I think we might start seeing some surprising numbers.
- 2001zhaozhao 2mo ago
  Would something like "services deflation" even show up in the numbers? That's what I'd expect to happen first
  - whimsicalism 2mo ago
    deflation will just be inflated away, always
- mekael 2mo ago
  But who benefits from that economic growth? If it's only the capital owning class, and the rest of us are left in the dust, then the growth is irrelevant. I ,for one, have read enough history to know that it's never the proles who end up benefiting.
  - hibikir 2mo ago
    I suspect that you have not read enough them. Ask someone in China (which yes, still has a capita owning class) if the proles were better off 50 years ago or now. The only real probes we have now in the west is that we have failed at housing, precisely because instead of growth, we have made many choices to increase returns for old people, and insufficient taxes for real estate.
    - nightsd01 2mo ago
      I was a bit triggered by your China comment, if only given the fact that there is a very specific institution that drove many formerly prosperous cities and communities into abject poverty (the CCP in Mao's era) and then tries to claim all the credit for the market driving how many people they've lifted out of poverty. And nowadays with Hong Kong (and probably soon Taiwan) they are proving they are perfectly happy to destroy economic growth as long as it benefits The Party
dwroberts 2mo ago
Can someone explain why we’re not using it to solve the obvious big conjectures/problems though? If this stuff is solved, why isn’t Riemann the first thing to go? Even if it means a fund of several hundred $k to let it churn on it.
slashdave 2mo ago
Those that claim their opponents are in denial are most likely in denial themselves
- reducesuffering 2mo ago
  How's that going for climate change and its denialists?

datakan 2mo ago

[flagged]

Chance-Device 2mo ago
I can deal with apathy, that’s the norm. What bothers me are all the people who think they can suppress AI by talking it down. That’s what’s counterproductive, just pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Tell other people it doesn’t exist either. I get it, it’s threatening socially, economically, maybe existentially. It’s also not going away.
- ryan_n 2mo ago
  So you think it’s a potentially existential threat but are bothered by people who maybe want to suppress it… Hopefully you acknowledge there is a bit of lack of self awareness here eh?
  - Chance-Device 2mo ago
    You seem to have misunderstood my point.
FranzFerdiNaN 2mo ago
It’s not apathy. It’s the fact that almost nobody can really understand what these results mean. I’m not a mathematician so I have zero clue what “ New upper bounds on sphere-packing density down to the Cohn–Elkies thresholds” means.

danparsonson 2mo ago

Never understood all this talk about moving goalposts - you understand that's how science works, right? We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. If we never "moved the goalposts", we'd be stuck scoring the same goals over and over.

NitpickLawyer 2mo ago
> We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And again. That's what "moving the goalposts" means. It's also very much not a new phenomenon. It's been happening since the 1980s. As you can see from this quote from GEB by Hofstadter: > There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
- Chance-Device 2mo ago
  Yes, this is exactly what is meant by “moving the goalposts”. And it’s a fairly well known expression applying wherever people retroactively change their requirements in reaction to those requirements having been met.
  - danparsonson 2mo ago
    It's almost like I disagree with your use of the phrase in this context, rather than that I don't know the meaning of it.
    - monktastic1 2mo ago

slashdave 2mo ago

> The sooner people can be broken out of their denial There is irony here

ck2 2mo ago

"AI" has limits in that it cannot invent knowledge, it can only distill and search for patterns in existing knowledge not sure how many will get this reference but "AI" for science and math is like super-shoes for runners at first we are blown away by the impossible improvements including sub-2-hour realworld marathon and every other PR/CR/WR is dialed down but then the improvements slow and reach a stall point because of the limit of technology and the source of the achievement ie. sub-2-hour marathon yes, sub-1-hour never happening (rollerblade inline-skate record is 1-hour marathon)

pama 2mo ago
Not sure what your first sentence means, or why you are quoting AI. Many of these problems individually were math at a level approaching the highest possible for expert human mathematicians. These are not simple combinations of existing ideas, or following of human intuitions, or implementing something following specific human instructions. Then again maybe you mean that math is not knowledge and that all math is simply extending the basic axioms using known patterns, to which I would not agree.
fixedpointsnake 2mo ago
I agree. The most likely scenario is that this is just a "new normal" lift that is percolating through human endeavors and will saturate at some point. For example, the whole cyber-security bruhaha should ultimately resolve into higher standards for code published -- we can now cheaply find and fix a whole slew of minor bugs that weren't worth our time before. The fact we see a lift is not the same as evidence that the lift is unbounded. The lift being finite is supported by the fact improvements have come at the edges: improvements from human feedback, improvements in harnesses, improvements on model compatibility with harnesses, improvements in inference efficiency with new architectures, etc. If we were just training better models from scratch that would be one thing, but we are just making better use of a tool we've developed.
IncreasePosts 2mo ago
How do humans "invent knowledge"? Is your argument that the answer to these questions already existed in the training set? Why didn't any human recognize that before?

c7b 2mo ago

And what does taking it seriously entail?

kypro 2mo ago
[flagged]
- ghjkghjkghj 2mo ago
  There are some genuinely insane takes in this thread on both sides but this takes the cake.
  - iwontberude 2mo ago
    That's because its satire, the tell was "not excluding targeted military strikes"
    - ghjkghjkghj 2mo ago
      Gonna say the edit they made removes the satire possibility.
      - kypro 2mo ago
        Not satire, but as you can see one is engaging in good faith and everyone is either engaging in character attacks or low-effort counters. It's fine, and I'm very used to this, but if you want to have a dialogue I'd be very happy to. I'm a very reasonable and sane person outside of apparently holding some controversial views on AI risk =) I'd love to know why you think what I said was insane?
  - cubefox 2mo ago
    A few years ago the majority of Hacker News dismissed LLMs as not much more than stochastic parrots who were decades away from doing any serious work, autonomously escaping containment and hacking Hugging Face, or outperforming most professional mathematicians at proving theorems. These things were labeled "insane" and "science fiction" despite the rapid progress we had already seen. Now you are again postulating that there would be no more extreme progress in the near future. That's actually more "insane".

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago

Sorry to hear you've been impacted by this AI math. I heard that Gary Kasparov was impacted by AI chess, but at least he still seems to have a job, so don't give up.

zahlman 2mo ago
Making insulting assumptions about the hidden motivations of others is not the level of discourse I come to HN for.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
  FWIW I was responding to the sarcastically expressed overt message that AI-math is a clear sign that AGI is here and anyone who disagrees is in denial. My point being that AI math is a narrow skill just like AI chess and implies nothing about generality (AGI). Sarcasm begats sarcasm.

arenaninja 2mo ago

It's indeed very exciting. I'm looking forward to new advancements/predictions in physics. Preferably as beautifully explained as E = M*c^2

amelius 2mo ago
A formula like e^(i*pi)+1=0 is probably closer. But it's not clear if LLMs will produce abstractions that humans would find elegant.

overgard 2mo ago

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-amazing-but-vastly-oversold?r=8tdk6&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-amazing-but-vastly... https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-critical-updates-re-astra-and?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb4376bf6-f1ba-4471-88b5-4307e2581a40_1213x1027.png&open=false https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-critical-updates-re-as... As always, PR hype. Goalposts have not moved. Guys, please use critical thinking. The haters don't hate by default, we hate because we're gaslit about this stuff every day and it's annoying. Extraordinary claims require proof, and they're not giving us information that would be essential to knowing if this is actually significant or not.

efavdb 2mo ago
best point in that first link: openai doesn't tell us if they only tried to solve these 10 and each was solved (amazing) or if they asked it to solve a million problems and it got these 10. Either is great, one is more so.
Trasmatta 2mo ago
Society at large is getting worse at critical thinking, because we are increasingly offloading that thinking to AI
afro88 2mo ago
Gary doesn't argue it's hype though. He argues 2 things: other people are getting carried away with the result, and we don't know enough about how it was reached to know where it falls on the impressive scale. He literally says it's an impressive feat in the second article.
- overgard 2mo ago
  > other people are getting carried away with the result That is the intended purpose of hype. He's polite, but he's basically saying there's potentially a lot of smoke and mirrors. I agree.
bluerooibos 2mo ago

hansmayer 2mo ago

[dead]

applicative 2mo ago

It is a fact of experience, and indeed effectively a theorem, that the better they get at coding and math, the dumber they are. These are the wages of RLVR etc

whimsicalism 2mo ago
completely false

fhfncjcc 2mo ago

[flagged]

Legend2440 2mo ago
Proof? In my experience modern models are better at all tasks than models from two years ago, especially complex multi-step tasks.
- alightsoul 2mo ago
  you are working on coding. they are working on things like "creative writing" remember that gpt 4o was popular among those who had ai as a romantic partnet?
  - Legend2440 2mo ago
    Well that's on purpose lol. OpenAI does not want you falling in love with their chatbot and have been deliberately training it to be less romantic.
    - vablings 2mo ago
      There have been several cases of suicide and self-harm related to 4o, AI psychosis is a real risk and will probably be in the DSM
    - desterothx 2mo ago
      sure they do if it makes them money, probably just not worth the controversy right now
  - michaelmrose 2mo ago
    sycophancy It wasn't "better" it was better at kissing your ass which matches what a lot of people want in a partner.
  - Marha01 2mo ago
    > remember that gpt 4o was popular among those who had ai as a romantic partner I suspect GPT 5.6 would be even better at it, if given the same sycophantic system prompt and lack of guardrails.

matsemann 2mo ago

Which straw man are you arguing against?

Dig1t 2mo ago
I don't think this is a straw man, a huge number of people in my life (non CS people) think AI is a dead-end, that it's just a stochastic parrot, that it'll never be able to do many things that humans can do. I have had many arguments with people who told me that "AI will never be able to do X", and then 6 months later AI is able to do X. Then they will move the goal posts and say "well AI will definitely never be able to do Y".

whimsicalism 2mo ago

it is very hard for people to eat crow, as the replies will show

dominotw 2mo ago
Really? has anyone ever claimed that ai will never be able to prove theorems and conjectures ?
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  yes, in fact I recall many people on this exact forum saying that AI will not be able to novel work at all. i can link you likely dozens of comments from people wrong about this replying to me over the last 5 years
- reducesuffering 2mo ago
  Hundreds of comments with 100% confidence AI/LLMs only regurgitate existing knowledge and can not produce anything novel

gste 2mo ago

People will be broken out of their denial by actual economic growth. That's what this is all meant to be for... I think we might start seeing some surprising numbers.

2001zhaozhao 2mo ago
Would something like "services deflation" even show up in the numbers? That's what I'd expect to happen first
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  deflation will just be inflated away, always
mekael 2mo ago
But who benefits from that economic growth? If it's only the capital owning class, and the rest of us are left in the dust, then the growth is irrelevant. I ,for one, have read enough history to know that it's never the proles who end up benefiting.
- hibikir 2mo ago
  I suspect that you have not read enough them. Ask someone in China (which yes, still has a capita owning class) if the proles were better off 50 years ago or now. The only real probes we have now in the west is that we have failed at housing, precisely because instead of growth, we have made many choices to increase returns for old people, and insufficient taxes for real estate.
  - nightsd01 2mo ago
    I was a bit triggered by your China comment, if only given the fact that there is a very specific institution that drove many formerly prosperous cities and communities into abject poverty (the CCP in Mao's era) and then tries to claim all the credit for the market driving how many people they've lifted out of poverty. And nowadays with Hong Kong (and probably soon Taiwan) they are proving they are perfectly happy to destroy economic growth as long as it benefits The Party

dwroberts 2mo ago

Can someone explain why we’re not using it to solve the obvious big conjectures/problems though? If this stuff is solved, why isn’t Riemann the first thing to go? Even if it means a fund of several hundred $k to let it churn on it.

slashdave 2mo ago

Those that claim their opponents are in denial are most likely in denial themselves

reducesuffering 2mo ago
How's that going for climate change and its denialists?