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It's funny we're already at the "actually this isn't very impressive" stage when it was a little over a year ago when we were making fun of LLMs for not being a

by hgoel 12d ago

It's funny we're already at the "actually this isn't very impressive" stage when it was a little over a year ago when we were making fun of LLMs for not being able to add numbers. IC production takes a vast amount of resources and wealth, and it's a known quantity (after all, we've been doing it for decades), but it's still impressive what modern fabs can achieve.

durdn 12d ago
I found this post hilarious exactly about this the other day: First, it’s AI can’t multiply 4-digit numbers. Then it’s AI can only, by brute force, get silver in the IMO with specialized systems. Then it’s OK, well, now a general-purpose model can get gold, but it’s still just the IMO, it’s for high schoolers. Then it’s OK, it can solve a few trivial Erdős problems, but only because nobody seriously tried them before, they were low-hanging fruit. Then it’s OK, a lot of serious mathematicians tried this one, but the result was still obvious in hindsight, it just combined knowledge from a thought-to-be-unrelated field, if any human knew that, they would solve it. And then to OK, but there are still Millennium Prize Problems. Then OK well it's just Navier-Stokes wake me up when its the Riemann Hypothesis. Then-
- sire-vc 11d ago
  If AI does solve the Riemann it will be the watershed moment when the world realises what has happened.
jackb4040 12d ago
Afaik LLMs still can't add numbers. They've just had their system prompts updated to make them use a tool call for any arithmetic.
- hgoel 12d ago
  That does not reflect with testing I just did locally. When the option of writing and running scripts was available, Qwen3.8-flash did indeed prefer to just do a physics related calculation via code. But, with a fresh chat and tool access turned off, it did the work on its own and produced correct results. Each step was rounded similar to how a person working by hand might do things, but matched my own hand calculations perfectly.

by hgoel 12d ago

durdn 12d ago

I found this post hilarious exactly about this the other day: First, it’s AI can’t multiply 4-digit numbers. Then it’s AI can only, by brute force, get silver in the IMO with specialized systems. Then it’s OK, well, now a general-purpose model can get gold, but it’s still just the IMO, it’s for high schoolers. Then it’s OK, it can solve a few trivial Erdős problems, but only because nobody seriously tried them before, they were low-hanging fruit. Then it’s OK, a lot of serious mathematicians tried this one, but the result was still obvious in hindsight, it just combined knowledge from a thought-to-be-unrelated field, if any human knew that, they would solve it. And then to OK, but there are still Millennium Prize Problems. Then OK well it's just Navier-Stokes wake me up when its the Riemann Hypothesis. Then-

sire-vc 11d ago
If AI does solve the Riemann it will be the watershed moment when the world realises what has happened.

jackb4040 12d ago

Afaik LLMs still can't add numbers. They've just had their system prompts updated to make them use a tool call for any arithmetic.

hgoel 12d ago
That does not reflect with testing I just did locally. When the option of writing and running scripts was available, Qwen3.8-flash did indeed prefer to just do a physics related calculation via code. But, with a fresh chat and tool access turned off, it did the work on its own and produced correct results. Each step was rounded similar to how a person working by hand might do things, but matched my own hand calculations perfectly.