5 ms·
[flagged]
by vatsachak 1mo ago
[flagged]
- kccqzy 1mo agoWhat benefit is there if the machine has unlocked understanding but no human has? What incentives are there for humans to learn and gain such understanding from machines?
- vatsachak 1mo agoBecause it's beautiful. Because you love math for maths sake and not some weird egotistical game
- mswphd 1mo agothe way LLMs write math is not beautiful. it is exactly analogous to the software that LLMs develop is not beautiful. it may achieve impressive end products, but if you like understanding the methods/architecture, looking under the hood is often a field of horrors.
- NoDodgeQuestion 1mo agoYou feel lean4 proof, that you 99.999% chance not understand is beautiful?
- vatsachak 1mo agohttps://cdn.openai.com/pdf/32d9f210-8b73-45e0-91bc-82a30aef8a9a/navier-stokes.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/32d9f210-8b73-45e0-91bc-82a30aef8...
- kccqzy 1mo agoHow many humans on earth have finished reading this 100+ page PDF and actually appreciate the beauty contained therein (or the lack of beauty)?
- legobmw99 1mo agoIs "loving math for maths sake" just about knowing the answers? I think one can love math for exactly the process and understanding that a several-thousand-line uncommented Lean proof denies. If a deity rearranged the stars to spell out "The Riemann hypothesis is false" for a night, would that be intellectually sufficient?
- vatsachak 1mo agoNo that's not sufficient but that's not what's happening. Why do we believe that we cannot train models which could explain the jargon in more human terms when current LLMs can perfectly explain the most complicated codebases?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Toynbeeidea 1mo agoThe same incentive there always was: Because you wanna know. What incentive were you thinking of?
- kccqzy 1mo agoThe usual incentives in academia: publishing papers. Consider the difference between publishing a paper that introduces a novel method to do X, versus publishing a paper that merely interprets Claude’s method to do X. The latter might not even be publishable.
- vatsachak 1mo agoThat means that academia is outdated not that LLM math is bad
- kccqzy 1mo agoOkay so you are saying the old incentive structure is outdated. What is the new incentive structure in the LLM era? What exactly makes people want to understand LLM-produced math?
- vatsachak 1mo agoI actually read through a bunch of LLM slop on the weekends trying to catch white whales I couldn't during my math PhD. The incentive is solving the problem and understanding the solution.
- alecfv26 1mo agoThe point is human understanding. If the LLMs understand, but the humans don’t, where does that leave humanity? Building things we don’t understand is a sure path to facing consequences we can’t predict. Your comment also conveniently ignores the plagiarism aspect of it all. Who is coping here?
- vatsachak 1mo agoAny serious mathematician would read the LLM output and rework their understanding. I read a bourgain paper a week in grad school and they're probably worse than an LLM generated paper. I still had to recreate the tricks in my own language. As far as I can tell the plagiarism accusations are also coping to the fact that the new models are super human at slam dunking research projects. Do we think that OpenAI is going to try and slam dunk more projects in the future at 15 million a pop? No lol
- Drupon 1mo agoFor your sake, based on your comments throughout this post, I hope you didn't pay for any stage of your education.
- vatsachak 1mo agoI have a paper in JEMS and have solved 20 year old conjectures. I also know that math academia is a catty game which is mostly driven by politics and ego
- nerevarthelame 1mo agoPerhaps these Fields Medalists are coping that OpenAI made them look stupid, as you suggested. And perhaps you're coping because of some personal grudge you have against academia.
- vatsachak 1mo agoBoth are true I admit
- thesmtsolver2 1mo agoThe biggest cope is buying OpenAI's "We can't prove we didn't plagiarize" Apparently, we have AGI that can solve Millennium Prize problems but can't trace simple data flows lol.
- vatsachak 1mo agoHow is it plagiarism if no one else had the full proof idea first?
- thesmtsolver2 1mo agoYou can steal lemmas, rough proof directions, conceptual ideas etc without stealing the full proof. Any of that done unattributed is plagiarism. Either OpenAI is incompetent or evil if they can't publicly prove the allegations wrong. Or even at least state categorically they didn't train on their conversations (even without proof).
- seiferteric 1mo agoNot quite, all the proofs or disproofs so far AFAIK were using existing methods that humans developed and were already using to attack the problems, but AI is just more thorough. What AI can't do currently is develop new mathematical methods to attack problems that can't be solved with existing methods and AFAIK there is no known path to get current gen AI to do so.
- vatsachak 1mo agoThat's fair and I agree. But stockfish can play successful middle games and there's no reason that AI cannot create research programs
- tomhow 1mo agoPlease don't sneer on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html