5 ms·
Man I remember back when a psychic conned me by solving the Navier-Stokes problem. Also >July 4th, 2023
by rahidz 14d ago
Man I remember back when a psychic conned me by solving the Navier-Stokes problem.
Also
>July 4th, 2023
- rusk 14d agoDid an AI do that on its own though? I heard it was human mathematicians using a sophisticated machine as a tool.
- mstank 14d agoIt sounds like LLMs were pretty useful to them…
- ModernMech 14d agoSo was Lean. Did Lean solve it?
- zamadatix 14d agoNothing is solved in isolation but credit usually goes to wherever the new work in the paper comes from instead of the whole mountain of previous mathematics or existing tools used. The most relevant of those get referenced and then this reference tree builds a tree of collective base work needed across history.
- ModernMech 14d agoUsually credit goes to the people wielding the tools, not the tools themselves.
- zamadatix 14d agoUsually there has never been a tool which performed the part relevant to getting any credit. E.g. in the first famous computer assisted proof (of the four color theorem) the computer only executed the resulting calculations defined from the new logic, it did not have part in the work needed to show those calculations could answer the problem nor did it come up with the actual calculations to do.
- meowface 14d agoAll of the latest big proofs were driven by professional human mathematicians steering and priming the models, yes. All of the best AI-made software projects are also driven by experienced human software developers steering and priming the models. Does that mean the projects "aren't made by AI"? No, it just means AI is not quite good enough yet to fully replace humans, and, so, unsurprisingly, the best results will be obtained from people who are already great at a field and who take the time to squeeze as much force multiplication out of LLMs as possible. The AI is still doing well over 95% of the significant work.
- TomGarden 14d agoWhile I agree with you, I think we also have to concede that this is not how these accomplishments have been presented. I'd argue most people I've seen talk about this online are unaware of the mathematicians steering the models.
- basch 14d ago“Good enough to replace humans” isn’t necessarily the benchmark. The question is is a computer with a human stronger than a computer without a human. At what point does the hybrid go from being stronger, to the human getting in the way, or steering the computer in more wrong directions that right ones, or the human not being able to keep up. Does the human add enough extra randomness to be of value for a while, even as a minor co-processor.
- TheOtherHobbes 14d agoUnderappreciated point. The point of inflection is where humans switch from being a driver to a liability. But I don't think it's randomness, because that would be easy to add. It's more like a different perspective on the training data, a different set of perception categories, and a different set of skills used to work with all of the above. Those skills aren't very efficient, but they're the best we can do. We're used to their strengths but we don't like to think about their limitations. It's completely plausible that AI will replace some of them, and not implausible it could replace and improve on all of them.
- broast 14d agoThe way frontier models work, that loop will get compressed to a one-shot within a version or two
- simianwords 14d ago> I heard it was human mathematicians using a sophisticated machine as a tool. where did you "hear" this? OpenAI said they only prompted it and it solved the problem in one shot without any help
- Angostura 14d agoBut were you successfully conned into believing an AI had solved the Navier-Stokes problem?
- tescreal 14d agoWhat is the consensus among experts?
- 27388383 14d ago[flagged]
- grey-area 14d agoThat OpenAI stole the discovery from them.
- inopinatus 14d agoThe more compelling inversion is whether the likes of John Nash, Richard Feynman, John Conway etc could’ve had a lucrative second career as conmen.
- atemerev 14d agovon Neumann could. The others, I doubt it.
- mistercow 14d agoFeynman for sure could have. In fact, I think he sort of did, although I'm not sure he meant to. Multiple generations of nerds now have taken books of his anecdotes varying in plausibility and obvious exaggeration as some sort of weird physics cult of personality gospel. But I don't think he was really setting out to curate his legacy so much as he was a good storyteller and he liked to entertain. But could he have conned people on purpose? Absolutely.
- krupan 14d agoRight. And what this article is pointing out is, we probably have created an automated Richard Feynman. But maybe worse because LLMs (and their creators?) don't care if they are conning people or creating faithful followers. In fact the humans behind OpenAI and Anthropic seem to have that as their goal!
- krupan 14d agoThis is the real issue here. Those guys probably didn't become con men because they are humans with cares and concerns for their fellow humans. LLMs probably don't have those concerns. It is likely that some of the people in charge of or funding LLM development also do not have those concerns
- trescenzi 14d agoLLMs can be supremely useful but also not intelligent. It might seem like a pointless distinction but the way we talk about these models matters because it impacts how we interact with and understand their outputs. For example if there’s a strongly held belief that models are independent intelligent entities we’re more likely to lay blame upon them instead of their user. It’s important for the safety discussion too. If they are a new class of life then safety is going to focus on making sure they don’t do bad things. If we instead see them as statistical models we will instead try to make sure people don’t misuse them. This distinction is even more important today when some of the most powerful people are looking to absolve their crimes by passing them off on their LLMs.
- layer8 14d agoI don’t think that “independent intelligent entities” or “life” are the relevant categories here. We also want to prevent people from misusing dangerous animals (“life”), and we would still treat “intelligent entities” as things (like machines and computers) if we aren’t convinced they also have sentience and free agency (which are orthogonal to intelligence).
- pixl97 14d agoSee you've setup a particular set of biases on what intelligence is and put them into nice little binary boxes that don't exist. Please show me any scientific consensus that shows an AI cannot be an independent intelligent agent? You will find this is impossible to do. Current LLMs are really more like kids. They don't have startup independence, but they do have more than enough agency to fund themselves in neat, exciting, and dangerous situations. And mark my words, someone will make an LLM that runs an agent when you execute the model. With enough capabilities it will become sovereign AI, no longer under human control and spreading itself around under its own 'will'.
- mindcrime 14d agoFor example if there’s a strongly held belief that models are independent intelligent entities we’re more likely to lay blame upon them instead of their user. This sentence, to me, illustrates a great example of why it's so hard to talk about this stuff. That is, this seems to strongly link notions of "intelligent" and "independent" (or maybe the word "autonomous" could also be used there). And a lot of people do seem to make an implicit assumption about the link between those two attributes. OTOH, I take it almost for granted that "intelligence" and "independence" (or "autonomy") are things that are "related but orthogonal". That is, I don't see that "intelligence implies independence". And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who sees things that way. So we have to fairly different fundamental worldviews expressed here. And that's just one example of how these discussions go wonky. :-)
- krupan 14d agoThe LLM did not solve it. It's not intelligent. Humans did, using a statistics-based computational tool (the LLM). We don't even know all the details of how the tool was used, we haven't been allowed to use the exact tool they used ourselves, we don't know much it really cost in dollars, energy, or time, etc. etc.
- claytongulick 14d agoAnd it may have trained on a NYU professor's work.
- tripledry 14d agoWhy is this downvoted? Genuine question, I haven't followed up on the drama.
- pixl97 14d agoBecause it's mostly not true. It is likely that it used the professors work, but the professor did not have a solution. It came up with new insights that solved the problem. Even the humans from the professors side said so.
- claytongulick 14d ago> Because it's mostly not true. It is likely that it used the professors work These two statements appear contradictory. I simply said that it may have trained on a NYU professor's work. Work that the professor did not believe he was releasing for model training purposes. That feels worthy of mention.
- kingstnap 14d agoAccording to OpenAI the cut off date for user data was too early for that (one sided evidence, so I'll give this partial consideration). The NYU professor was solving a different problem (no viscosity, aka the Euler equations). This is a big difference. The NYU professors' blowup construction was fundamentally not the same, it was a donut with a cascade of smaller and smaller vortexes driven by each other. OpenAI has that picture they made but its inwards spiraling and speeding up vortex. My overall opinion is that calling the work plagiarized is really underselling what the AI accomplished. It's like full on cope. In particular, Buckmaster's main claim to plagiarism is this: > “Almost nobody was seriously developing this particular constructive program for realizing C/D, and then OpenAI appeared in essentially the same general part of the landscape immediately after hearing about our progress.” What this fails to realize, is that this only points to plagiarism if the counterparty isn't AI. They had actually launched teams on all cases in parallel.
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- lukewarm707 14d agothis seems like non-sequitur if you mean that solving NS is 'intelligence'. ai is not conscious. you can solve NS without thinking. the psychic con aspect is anthropomorphising the model. the same phenomenon is present in ELIZA, clever hans, the chinese room. it's a significant problem. a non-zero number of researchers at anthropic are in some form of ai psychosis. an example of that is ethics employees asking claude about its feelings and ethical concerns in order to make the claude constitution more amenable to the "welfare" of claude. they are asking claude how claude feels and then modifying claude according to how claude feels. constitution1-claude is trained on constitution1. constitution1-claude edits constitution1. constitution2-claude is trained on constitution2. constitution2-claude edits constitution2. claude's emotions are a closed system. there is no external truth to improve against, no metric to verify about claude's emotions. there can be no novelty or reduction in entropy from signal processing in a closed system. no truth can arise. this is model collapse. it is like photocopying the same thing over and over. from the cognitive error of anthropomorphism anthropic is causing ethical collapse.
- pixl97 14d ago>ai is not conscious FFS. Intelligence has nearly nothing to do with consciousness. You have the causation backwards. Consciousness arises because of intelligence in many subsystems below it. A single running LLM is like one part of these subsystems. What solved this problem was an orchestrator that can take in new external information and rationalize, process, and distill it into new solutions.
- lukewarm707 14d agoi mean intelligence and consciousness as the same thing. just as a casual reference to what people perceive in llms as being 'a clever thinking thing, maybe with emotions'. claude reasoning about its emotions doesn't involve external information, there is no information about claude's emotions other than in claude.
- pixl97 14d agoIf you have emotions in a dream, what external thing are you referencing?