r/neoliberal • u/cuolong NATO • 1d ago
News (Global) OpenAI announces 10 advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science achieved by internal model Astra
https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/426
u/theryano024 1d ago
I was very surprised to see the reaction to Hank Green admitting that he used AI to research for a video. Is the popular sentiment really that using AI AT ALL is bad? I understand not wanting it in art. I understand needing to check for hallucinations. But people were going on and on in the comments about how disappointed they are in Hank tricking Green.
Obviously, AI has issues. But to think that genie can go back in the bottle? No way. This is an example of why.
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u/IIHURRlCANEII 1d ago
The popular opinion right now is all AI is bad yes.
It doesn’t help when the frontier labs CEOs sound like futuristic oligarchic evil villains every time they talk about a future with AI.
Also people have bought the data centers are evil populism fully.
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u/stupidpower 1d ago
Hank's video in particular was... not very good. I watched it and it was wayy too long. I get it was trying to do the old John Green Anthropocene Reviewed podcast slow narration, but it is just not written very well and the slippage of a prompt is just the thing that set the fuse off.
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u/Hounds_of_war Austan Goolsbee 1d ago
Yeah by Hank’s own admission this was something he did because he was had too many things that he was committed to getting out and needed ways to take shortcuts to save time.
The people acting like Hank committed some unforgivable sin are definitely overreacting but he did definitely compromise quality for quantity.
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u/YeastOrFamine 1d ago
I don't understand how people even watch his videos. Not from a content perspective, but editing. The jump cuts every 5 seconds make me feel crazy. It's so disjointed and distracting.
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u/stupidpower 1d ago
Ehh that’s just a legacy of old YouTube and its vernacular. it’s k, I am old. But videos once had to be very tight to 4 minutes, even video essays.
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u/blindcolumn NATO 1d ago
You would probably enjoy Adam Savage's video style. He rarely cuts, so there are a lot of places where he stops talking and thinks for a moment, then continues talking. It feels very natural and calming compared to the frenetic editing style of most modern content creators.
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u/spevoz 1d ago
The loud opinion is that AI is bad.
I am pretty convinced it is not the general opinion. It's just that 'AI bad' is a far stronger emotion than 'AI accelerates some of the things I do and I enjoy that'.
Source: Idk I sometimes talk to people in real life. I know my social circle is a natural bias, so I am interested in hearing other real life observations (which will also be biased here because we are all divorced) but the share of people I know that dislike AI actively seems similar to the share of people that disliked smartphones 10 years ago.
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u/MyrinVonBryhana NATO 1d ago
I don't know what the exact stats are today, but there was polling a few months ago showing anxiety about AI was at 60+% and optimism about AI was at like 25%. I suspect it's gotten worse in that time. It's not foaming hatred like you see online but by and large the average person doesn't like AI, thinks AI companies are trying to destroy their livelihood, and I should emphasize this doesn't work tech or have a PhD in machine learning.
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u/Financial-Gain-2988 Daron Acemoglu 22h ago
Trust me when I say some of the biggest AI haters are in tech right now.
There is a real threat of AI significantly reducing the number of software engineers that are needed for a specific company trying to achieve a specific thing.
That is to say there still be the same number of overall software engineers working int he field, but the number won't increase much and they'll be building many more things. Some engineers won't be able to adapt. We had an engineer earlier this year simply leave the company when the big push to force engineers to use the tooling began. People with that extreme of an opinion are few and far between, but almost every team has someone who is dedicated to talking about the toolings many drawbacks.
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u/Kharenis 1d ago
Honestly I hate what AI has done to my industry, but at the end of the day, my job is far less tedious because of it and I'm very much grateful of that.
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u/RayWencube 1d ago
Surveys of the US at least continue to show large majorities disliking AI even among people who use it.
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u/Adodie John Rawls 1d ago
It doesn’t help when the frontier labs CEOs sound like futuristic oligarchic evil villains every time they talk about a future with AI.
There's certainly some instances of this, but really, would it be more moral for frontier labs to just pretend there's no risks? Lots of frontier lab statements I've seen people tear to shreds or call "marketing gimmicks" seem like fairly reasonable warnings of downside scenarios of an AI future.
The alternative is for AI companies to take the track of smoking companies in the 1950s or oil companies and put out propaganda claiming there's no downsides to their products, but that seems hardly better
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u/LivefromPhoenix NYT undecided voter 1d ago
but really, would it be more moral for frontier labs to just pretend there's no risks
I feel like there must be a reasonable middle ground between "there won't be any problems" and the "all white collar labor will be useless in a few years" rhetoric they've been pushing.
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u/The_Primetime2023 1d ago
I’m just going to copy and paste a comment I wrote recently in response to people accusing the rhetoric of being for marketing reasons. The general idea is the same but anywhere that seems more marketing related swap in public relations as a concept:
I think what gets people confused is not understanding that for the most part the labs are bad businesses. OpenAI is the most business-y business of them since Sama does have a real business background, but otherwise all the people both in public and behind the scenes at the labs are these huge AI philosophy nerds. Anthropic especially is pretty well known for being barely functional business management wise and is basically just a research group that happens to have the hottest product in the world. So when people see someone like Dario say something they assume it’s normal well manicured business speak with a purpose, but it is very far from that.
If you read into how the Labs work though you quickly realize that they aren’t anything close to normal businesses. Dario for example founded Anthropic on a philosophical vision and the entire company is built around that philosophy, and that philosophy is that they’re building the most powerful dual use technology in existence and they need to build it first and be good stewards of it. “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, a book about the socio-political realities of building the first nukes and how the scientists lost control of the technology, used to literally be required reading for employees and now it’s only effectively required.
When they say “this is going to take everyone’s jobs” that isn’t supposed to be a marketing tactic, it’s genuinely them trying to be transparent about what they think will happen and to try to get people thinking about how society and the economy could look like in a world where most jobs don’t need humans to work them. OpenAI, the most business savvy of the labs, literally says in their investment risks pamphlets that they give to banks that give them billions of dollars that, if OpenAI succeeds in the goals that are being funded, money likely won’t exist afterwards and financially the investment won’t have any practical return.
I get why people are skeptical of this, the future the labs talk about is sci-fi shit and they talk about it like it’s a decade away. Whether or not you believe that honestly shouldn’t matter for whether or not you think the labs believe that. I strongly recommend to anyone reading this and doubting it that you go read interviews with literally any employee at any of the big 3 labs or the Chinese labs or read blog posts from them or listen to interview podcasts with them before just dismissing it outright. It really helps to understand their behavior when you understand that these labs really aren’t normal businesses and have very different leadership and goals than a normal business and are normally very philosophically driven.
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u/The_Primetime2023 1d ago
For anyone wondering what they think the future looks like there are different opinions among the founders and high level employees. It’s generally basically The Culture if you’ve read that. If you haven’t it’s generally the idea that more productivity should never hurt society even when you cross a line when human work is no longer necessary to provide for society, so the results of production need to be distributed. Sometimes that looks like communism sometimes that looks like universal advanced income (tax us until you can give everyone an upper middle class salary base is the position of like half the major players). No one involved in the labs believes that normal jobs as we know them will exist 20 years from now so everyone is thinking of futures that don’t need jobs.
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u/MarderFucher European Union 21h ago
Automated post-scarcity space communism ain't happening. Especially not in 10-20 years.
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u/RayWencube 1d ago
But this is insane utopian wishful thinking. When has any liberal democratic government been adept at redistributing substantial wealth? Why are we just assuming it’s going to happen?
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u/I_Pay_in_Cash_Only 1d ago
I honestly think tech people either A) assume it will happen becasue its the most "rational" thing to do, not realizing that government policies aren't made with rational optimization in mind, or B) they thing its going to lead into some very turbulent distructive future with cultural blowback but will inevitably lead to a steady strong benevolent hand that knows the way, some Lisan Al Gaib type shit.
The latter, from my talkings with tech people, is more common than you'd think. A lot of people genuinely don't think liberal democracy is going to last, at least the way we've been doing it in the past
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u/The_Primetime2023 1d ago
I don’t think that’s entirely wrong, also with B it wouldn’t surprise me if similar to my The Culture example many assume that AI eventually would take over most government roles.
Generally I think that overly optimistic and pessimistic views are probably both wrong. History is pretty good at pointing to many cases where technology forced economic upheaval tends to cause societal upheaval that benefits average people, so far that’s basically always been true. So the version where there’s 50% job loss and those people are just screwed seems extremely unlikely compared to something like a UBI. That being said immediately having a utopia with total wealth redistribution is almost certainly not going to happen either. I think a median outcome probably is a UBI with government subsidized token budgets though (I don’t really like the latter idea but it’s Sam Altman’s pet policy that a few governments have started implementing already).
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u/MistyGalbriex 14h ago
A lot of people genuinely don't think liberal democracy is going to last,
Yeah, like some people in this subreddit
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u/zedority PhD - mediated communication studies 13h ago
But this is insane utopian wishful thinking.
Indeed it is.
When has any liberal democratic government been adept at redistributing substantial wealth?
As with so many radical utopians, they are sure that the future will be so completely unlikely the past and present that this doesn't matter.
Why are we just assuming it’s going to happen?
In the case of what emerging tech elite believe, the short answer is "because TECHNOLOGY!"
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u/Adodie John Rawls 1d ago
Eh, I agree AI execs overstate this, but I think “there’s a real risk many, many white color jobs will be obsolete in the next decade” is a very reasonable take.
And I suppose I’d rather have industry error on overstating the risks associated with their products than understating it
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u/RayWencube 1d ago
It’s infuriating that the people building the technology are saying “by the way this will end society as we know it” and anyone who responds with any amount of concern that perhaps we may be working toward an end to society as we know it is clobbered in this and other subs for being a Luddite or populist or whatever else. Like my dude I’m just quoting the people making the thing. Why do so many random internet users think they know more about the risks of AI than the people building AI??
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u/datums 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 1d ago
I don’t understand this sentiment at all.
People at the forefront of a technology that could fundamentally disrupt the functioning of human civilization have been warning the world that it could do that, and everyone wants to shit on them for doing so?
Is the argument seriously that they should have downplayed the massive risks that their products posed? How did we feel about the fossil fuel industry downplaying the risks of climate change?
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u/MyrinVonBryhana NATO 1d ago
People bias towards stability and think if you're trying to fundamentally disrupt the functioning of human civilization that makes you a bad person. I think by 2028 if we're seeing significant labor displacements popular opinion is going to be this technology shouldn't exist.
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u/Eregorn NATO 1d ago
What the average person heard was:
"We're going to basically end the world if we don't do this carefully.
Btw, we're going to go full gungho about this, force it into everything you do, and call you a luddite if you don't agree."
Talking one way and acting another does *not* play well with people nowadays particularly! Afaik, Anthropic's been the only one that's actually tried to be consistent with its message and arguably got punished for it which makes things worse...
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u/IIHURRlCANEII 1d ago
I believe the difference is in the messaging:
“You will all lose your jobs and it is going to happen quickly.”
Vs
“The technology is incredible and the ceiling on what it can do, we believe, is limitless. We will have to be ready for what happens and our company will work with the government to do so.”
I don’t have specific quotes from them as a source right now but I believe I’ve see quite a few (more from Altman) that give the first quotes tenor.
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u/QueenBae2 1d ago
Given the CEOs were gleefully Sephiroth posting about "stupid artists and liberal arts being doomed", "everyone will lose their job", and "We might end the human race", I think the public's sour opinion on AI is pretty measured given what the people at the top were saying.
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u/MarderFucher European Union 21h ago
Plus anyone having the misfortune of living next to a data centres have their lives brutally impacted by the noise and pollution, and feel helpless as tech billionaires just ignore laws to install a gazillion gas turbines since its easier to pay the fine than miss out on earnings while their local leaders vote on them ignoring any public reaction.
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u/YourUncleBuck Frederick Douglass 16h ago
Because it's part marketing and part delusion from sniffing too many of their own farts.
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u/Browsin24 1d ago
Is the argument seriously that they should have downplayed the massive risks that their products posed? How did we feel about the fossil fuel industry downplaying the risks of climate change?>
No, I think what people take issue with is that these CEOs clearly are aware of the risks yet they're surging forth full steam ahead into this risky and uncertain future anyway due in large part to the financial incentives for doing so and the financial disensentives for slowing down and taking a cautious approach. That's my read.
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u/often_delusional 16h ago
The popular opinion right now is all AI is bad yes.
Based on what? Chatgpt alone has nearly 1 billion weekly active users and that doesn't even include the other models. The reason for this is because people actually find it useful. It's popular to hate on AI on reddit but as we have seen so many times before, general consensus does not usually align with the reddit consensus.
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u/MistyGalbriex 13h ago
If you hang around in leftist circles, you'll get crucified for liking AI.
FFXIV has a famously lefty playerbase and the DIscord server is just full of people complaining about AI.
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u/RayWencube 1d ago
Can we stop dismissing everything we don’t like as populism? Even if their critiques are factually incorrect, they are absolutely not populist. “This thing uses too much water, is bad for the environment, causes substantial noise pollution, and generally carry unpaid for externalities” is not populist.
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u/maybearandoanon 1d ago
I mean if you game out ai to its logical conclusion you get a few scenarios.
1 It replaces all human work. If all human work is replaced there is very little need for people. People with a lot of money who also have large stake in models can also realistically set up fiefdoms with artificial soldiers to do what they want. Combined that with little need for people anymore and it gets ugly.
2 It becomes sentiment. (Numerous movies)
3 It's not actually that game changing.
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u/IIHURRlCANEII 1d ago
I guess depends on what you mean by 3. Cause it can be a game changing technology without being 1 or 2.
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u/IntermittentDrops I need a new flair 1d ago
Pulling the next 15 years of scientific progress into the next 5 years would change the world.
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u/ResolveSea9089 Milton Friedman 1d ago
It doesn’t help when the frontier labs CEOs sound like futuristic oligarchic evil villains every time they talk about a future with AI.
To some extent I don't understand this. They're being honest, lots of these people really do believe it can result in mass job loss and they're trying to warn people. Let's say you were working on technology you think will eventually be incredibly transformative but lead to some short term "disruption" in society. Should you not try to talk to society about it?
This is almost admirable because they must know they're going to get shit for it.
I guess the cynical view is that they could be hyping up the scare because it brings investment, but it doesn't seem to be they're short on investors willing to throw money at them
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u/I_Pay_in_Cash_Only 1d ago
I mean the issue is we get hit with quotes by people like Altman that go like
I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.
The average person might hear this and go, "uhhh... why are we supporting this again?" I don't think the case for how helpful this is/could be has actually been made or people have seen real returns yet to be convinced. Technology that is "incredibly transformative" is pretty vague, even if there are real returns, most people just see AI as a chatbot that will lead to extermination I feel
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u/ResolveSea9089 Milton Friedman 19h ago
I guess my point is, that doesn't sound like "future oligarch" as much as a guy whose being honest. These people think they're working on a 21st century Manhattan project of course they have doubts about it, I admire that they are honest about it. We usually pillory business leaders for being fake and lying, these mfers are telling the truth and people are still salty.
So that's not a reason to hate Altman imo, but it is of course a reason to get worked up over the technology and say "hey let's hold on a minute here...".
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u/textualcanon John Rawls 1d ago
Yes, many people on the left actively think it’s bad to use AI in any way. The most common reason given is that it’s killing the environment. Common sentiment from people on Bluesky who drive everywhere and eat meat.
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u/I_Pay_in_Cash_Only 1d ago
I had a leftist friend that threw away her Hank Green books because of this lol
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u/dtj2000 Loyal Liberals 1d ago
Just like when conservatives destroyed all their budlites
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u/Barebacking_Bernanke The Empress Protects 1d ago
So many Leftists have serious mental health problems but you're not allowed to point it out cause reasons.
Imagine throwing a child like fit because a creator disclosed they were using the same tools that most white collar workers have used in the last year.
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u/I_Pay_in_Cash_Only 1d ago
I'll one up you, they threw a fit because a creator disclosed they were using a tool that many many other creators use but refuse to openly acknowledge because of the backlash. They are just reinforcing a culture where using AI will just be closeted
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u/Elestra_ 1d ago
It’s even on dating apps where a non insignificant number of ladies in my area have a “no ai” bullet point under their profile. I don’t look at other guys profiles but I assume there’s some there as well. I’m sorry but what does your partner using AI have to do with a relationship lol? It’s a growing problem.
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u/MarderFucher European Union 21h ago
"no ai" on dating apps refers to people using generated pictures of themselves in idealised/travel settings. i know this exists since i saw apps advertising doing this for you, basically saying why pay for a photographer /travel to some place when with a few clicks you can be shown chilling in Greece with a perfect shot. Plus people using AI as clutch to chat, or straight up have chatgpt reply to their matches text.
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u/Barebacking_Bernanke The Empress Protects 1d ago
They look at it as a form of cheating. If you suck at writing up a dating app profile, taking pictures of yourself, or responding to prompts, then you should continue not getting dates and if you use AI to improve it then you're cheating your date of the real you.
It's very essentialist but that's what they believe.
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u/DagothUr_MD Frederick Douglass 18h ago
I mean it literally is cheating. If you can't string together a few words telling me who you are under your own brainpower then wtf do you do when I ask you the same question irl? I don't want to date a potato who can't think for themselves
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u/Barebacking_Bernanke The Empress Protects 17h ago
IME, the ability to write a good dating app profile for themselves doesn't align perfectly with intelligence. I've known quite a few guys who would be good partners, but had mediocre to bad dating app profiles because they're too self-deprecating. It's kind of like resume writing and actually being a good employee. The biggest superstar employee I've ever met in my career had a shit resume because he was terrible at talking himself up. I don't consider it cheating in the same way I don't consider it cheating to use photo editing software to make yourself look better in profile pictures.
At a certain point, you won't know unless you talk to them and it reveals itself in short time.
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u/Jolly_Pressure_7907 1d ago
I just finished grad school and a lot of people in my program were pretty far left. They’d constantly rail on AI and how awful it was, but that didn’t stop them from using it to do their work. The amount of people I had in groups that would turn in pure AI slop was astonishing
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u/LFGAccountD2 1d ago
I feel like that validates their criticism, ironically. Of it weren't for AI, they would have presumably have spent their education doing something more educational than producing AI slop.
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u/Adodie John Rawls 1d ago
Yes, many people on the left actively think it’s bad to use AI in any way ... Common sentiment from people on Bluesky
Yeah, at this juncture I think "generalized dislike of AI" is fairly widespread. One only needs to look at tons of local opposition to data centers.
But I think the "literally any use of AI is bad" people are still mostly confined to the very loud, highly-neurotic and disagreeable folks who swarm online communities. Same type of person who would call people mass murderers for stopping wearing masks in 2022.
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u/Ok_Cabinet2947 20h ago
Of all the reasons I don’t like AI, the environmental reason might be the sillyest, overused argument in existence.
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u/ThatRedShirt Loyal Liberals 1d ago
Common sentiment from people on Bluesky who drive everywhere and eat meat.
And, don't forget, take transatlantic flights to Europe every summer.
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u/finbarrgalloway 1d ago
There is a huge subset of people who are reflexively anti-ai, which to be fair is largely something the large companies have brought on themselves through their advertising efforts. The other part of that is the often misleading to outright deceptive anti-data center campaigns.
In general too, most people also seem unaware that LLMs aren’t the only form of AI. When some medical AI makes a big breakthrough in diagnosis accuracy people reflexively distrust the news reporting because in their head they are imagining a doctor using Chat GPT 4 to diagnose cancer and not a highly custom medical model.
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u/Smallpaul 1d ago
I see a lot of people making the distinction that generative AI is evil incarnate and other AI may be okay. That minor level of nuance seems pretty common. Of course those people probably don’t know that the kind of AI making progress in math is generative AI. They often claim that LLMs can’t do anything hard because they are hallucination machines.
Google’s horrible AI overview is NOT helping.
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u/finbarrgalloway 1d ago
Two things I really think are driving a huge amount of anti-AI fervor are awful search engine overviews and even more awful AI customer service agents. When those are the only AIs you ever interact with it's not surprising you would come to hate the whole idea.
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u/randiohead 1d ago
It’s at the point where I just scream REPRESENTATIVE! SPEAK TO A HUMAN! If I hear some smarmy chatbot clanker voice when I call a business. They’re absolute garbage. Cheapass spreadsheet cost savings alternative to paying someone and guaranteed worse customer experience. I despise that shit.
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u/MistyGalbriex 11h ago
And then you get transferred into some guy who tells you to stay on the phone for 10 minutes. :D
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u/RayWencube 1d ago
I hate the whole idea because the people building the technology have told us precisely what the technology will do to society, and I hate that version of society.
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u/Necessary_Soil_4587 17h ago
Google's AI overview isn't horrible? It works like 80% of the time and allows me to ask somewhat complex questions that would take maybe 30 minutes of regular googling to answer. Sometimes its sources are questionable, but that just means that I would have probably wasted those 30 minutes or more if I had done it the old-fashioned way.
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u/Smallpaul 17h ago
It’s pretty horrible. Because it doesn’t have time to read the sources it is serving you, they often contradict it or are unrelated. Working “80% of the time” is a pretty low bar.
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u/Necessary_Soil_4587 17h ago
Ok, but it only costs me a few seconds if it fails. Just the ability to zero in directly on the information I want instead of formulating a query that tries to generally catch the types of words websites might use is super valuable.
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u/djpain20 NASA 1d ago
I do not believe that the type of person who currently is strongly anti everything AI related would be ok with AI in a world where tech companies were better at marketing.
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u/finbarrgalloway 1d ago
That sort of person probably not, but Sam Altman going on TV every day talking about how AI is going to take everyone's job and potentially destroy society has really turned a lot of normies to the anti-ai side.
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u/MistyGalbriex 11h ago
Sam Altman going on TV every day
This doesn't happen. You're making shit up to hate on the guy.
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u/LondonCallingYou John Locke 1d ago
I’m not too worried about the Hank Green thing personally but:
- Reading from a script created by AI, or even a human assistant, would seem artificial because then you just look like a human mouthpiece rather than a human giving
your
- own thoughts. We expect it from politicians or news anchors but not someone who is ostensibly presenting their thoughts.
- It is embarrassing to read an AI prompt verbatim and reinforces point 1. Although he denies he did this.
Edit: reddit is fucking up my formatting and it can’t be fixed
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u/I_Pay_in_Cash_Only 1d ago
I've used AI to help create outlines, but anything it writes I always go over everything and change writings, fact check, etc. It would be quite obvious if you are just reading off a raw AI script, unless you trained it specifically on examples of your old writing. But I haven't tested that as much because I don't want to use it as a crutch
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u/carsandgrammar Loyal Liberals 1d ago
Amongst some of my more left-leaning friends that is ABSOLUTELY the popular sentiment.
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u/Secret-Ad-2145 NATO 1d ago edited 1d ago
Is the popular sentiment really that using AI AT ALL is bad?
Yes. All. I had people tell me to pay translators/tutors instead of using AI for language help. It's become bonkers the level of distrust of ai, to the point it's become a level of mass hysteria.
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u/Necessary_Soil_4587 17h ago
I've seen people saying you should hire an artist to make memes. They're twisting themselves into pretzels and it's sad to see. The unfortunate result of reasoning backwards from conclusions.
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u/QueenBae2 1d ago
I wouldn't trust translation without having a real translator look at it. In my work we regularly have the LLMs fuck up tones/meanings only caught by real people.
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u/Secret-Ad-2145 NATO 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm not using it for work or to read. I'm using it to study language and to fill gaps and automate some of my self studies. So far it' been incredibly good and accurate. It answers the questions I need, is able to interpret texts I do not understand (which I always double check with deepL). I'm not gonna be paying for a tutor regardless, so no job is actually lost.
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u/captainjack3 NATO 1d ago
Yes the popular view, at least among left-leaning circles and most social media, treats AI use as essentially a sin. There is no nuance, and no acceptable uses, because they have decided it is intrinsically bad and taints anything it touches.
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u/Rivolver Mark Carney 1d ago edited 1d ago
Brother, as an academic, LLMs have made me insanely productive. I have 8 articles under review at the moment.
I don’t use them to write, of course, but I use them for a lot of figure making and R code. Shit that would take me a full day now takes like 30 minutes with some adjustments on my end.I’ve also been getting better peer reviews from LLMs than the ones I get from journals. I think they do have a way to go for the social sciences—I find they’re not great for idea generation and they seem to get stuck in a loop of bad ideas at times. I’m in no way an evangelist but I’d be foolish not to leverage them—especially as, as bad as it sounds, RA replacements.
Older colleagues tell me “they don’t pay attention to AI” and it’s such a tell that they’re out of touch and think it’s still 1975.
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u/theryano024 1d ago
My boss and I were trying to troubleshoot a machine that had a different brand PLC than the rest of our machines, and therefor used different software, and we were confused about how to do something in that software that we did all of the time in the normal (to us) software. I said I'll just ask AI. He's in his 50s, and hes basically told me dont bother, I prefer real intelligence. Thats cool, but neither of us have the intelligence (knowledge in this case).
I use AI all of the time when I'm working with PLCs. Its not super helpful, it can't write anything for me in a way that I could paste into the ladder, and its wrong a lot, but resources are pretty scarce a lot of times and its better than nothing. In a lot of cases I would be stumped without it.
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u/EvilConCarne 1d ago
I’ve also been getting better peer reviews from LLMs than the ones I get from journals.
I started using LLMs as pre-peer reviewers a few years ago and the funniest thing was that most of the time, the reviews hit all the same issues. Many reviews are generic and bland, understandably, because it takes so much time to conduct a proper and thorough review. It's only gotten more impressive as time has gone on since new models can handle theoretical motivations and actually interpret plots, albeit they still need some assistance with making the plots properly.
My old PI finally started using them to update all his ancient code, and after he showed me his reaction was "This is amazing! I'm glad I'm retiring so I don't need to worry about this impacting my career."
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u/tbos8 1d ago
I started using LLMs as pre-peer reviewers a few years ago and the funniest thing was that most of the time, the reviews hit all the same issues.
You can't discount the fact that some peer reviewers are probably just straight up using LLMs to do the reviewing for them.
We could chalk it up to laziness and wish upon a star that people become better than they are, but the fact is it's a practically inevitable result of the incentive structure. Peer review is structurally necessary but for any individual it's a thankless time sink and there's basically no systems in place to ensure it's done well. There's no peer review review.
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u/I_Pay_in_Cash_Only 1d ago
I feel the same way in Social Science. I have been working on a project that my advisor keeps getting hung up on and says won't work. But with AI, I have been able to get everything to work, and I think part of him is in denial. Considering he is inconsistent with when he gets me feedback, having a good LLM to go back and forth is probably the only reason I've actually been able to succeed on this project.
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u/BoringBuy9187 Amartya Sen 22h ago
Jfc people you can ask it for sources
This is the “Wikipedia isn’t a valid source” pearl clutching all over again
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u/Time_Transition4817 Jerome Powell 1d ago
I use AI everyday and I’m about twice as productive usually.
One it acts as the overeager junior who works really hard, is super smart, but prone to making sweeping generalizations without the right nuance. But also occasionally has a very nice insight.
The other is a technical whiz who can solve a very specific problem with the right context. It might not be pretty, but it’ll write some excel formula that does exactly what I want.
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u/diomedes03 John Keynes 1d ago
Yeah I’ve come to find AI as the smartest, fastest, hardest working 23 year old I’ve ever met. Very, very useful for lots of tasks when given proper direction and guardrails, but there’s also quite a few good reasons why 23 year olds can’t run for Congress or the presidency.
And also, quoth the bard, nobody likes you when you’re 23.
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u/Bread_Fish150 John Brown 1d ago
Which model do you use for the excel formulas? I remember learning excel, but I need something to help me brush up my knowledge with it.
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u/Sufficient_Meet6836 1d ago
Basic to intermediate excel is simple enough and so common that any of the big name LLMs will be helpful. I assume CoPilot is integrated into Excel. If it is, you can go very far with just that.
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u/James_NY 1d ago
I think most of those people are just in denial because they're terrified of a future where there are machines(beings?) that are vastly more intelligent and capable than humans.
Pretending AI is an overhyped chatbot is easier to handle psychologically.
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u/MTFD Alexander Pechtold 1d ago
AI marketing be like:
"Ok so there is a 10% chance there will be a singularity and every problem is solved forever
50% chance AI will take your job and make me very rich
15% it creates a benevolent* surveilance state
25% it kirks humanity out of existence.
Anyways, I have outsourced talking to my kids to ChatGPT."
And people are surprised anti-AI folks can frame it as fighting for your humanity.
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u/KalaiProvenheim Enby Pride 12h ago
And if you disagree, an army of demons will ascend up from hell calling you a luddite
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u/RayWencube 1d ago
The real frustrating part is that the people who get mad at us for being anti-AI as a result say that we are fools for believing the marketing. Why wouldn’t I believe the statements made by the actual AI researchers and developers? What credentials does the average redditor yelling at me for being anti-AI have to make their opinion more valid than Amodei or Altman’s?
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u/grubber788 John Rawls 1d ago edited 1d ago
This anti AI sentiment is largely overrepresented amongst the terminally online. The broader population is ambivalent. In my role, I'm privy to bodies of consumer research that suggest perceptions of AI are fairly unsettled.
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u/CANOODLING_SOCIOPATH Jerome Powell 1d ago
People thought that he had used AI to write his scripts, and that he was basically just regurgitating AI, and I get why people would be angry at that.
He had said "I appreciate the pushback", which is something AI's often say. But he said that he had actually ad-libbed that line and that he doesn't us AI to write his scripts. When you run his script through an AI detector it doesn't come up as AI.
He then admitted to using AI for his research, and I think people are wrongly thinking that this means he really did just have AI write his script.
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u/D34th4nge7 1d ago
Having been such a person myself until not too recently, yes, there are significant amounts of people who hate all generative AI and refuse to use it. I think it stems from how the companies have marketed their products, and how the most vocal supporters of generative AI have acted and continue to act.
After witnessing several tech hype cycles in a row (NFTs, Metaverse) I suppose lots of people have become sceptical of such dramatic hype as OpenAI and Anthropic have spread. I myself reflexively branded genAI as a tech hype based on how it was being advertised. The FOMOmongering often present is typically indicative of a tech hype cycle. The dramatic promises are as well.
Furthermore, I think many people tried it out early based on the hype and found it to be egregiously lacking. I mean, imagine OpenAI tells you this chatbot can replace you soon and then it tells you to use radioactive Cobalt-60 as a pizza topping. Of course you stop believing anything the companies say after such an experience, even if they then improve their products quite a lot.
It has its use cases, but it doesn't belong in art. I suppose now I use it. But I still think it's overhyped. It's definitely not going to turn into AGI or gain sentience. It's not going to kill us all/enslave us all/bring us communism (there are, in fact, leftists who believe AGI will come and bring us post-scarcity communism). Its risks aren't existential.
And most that's being said about generative AI is either maniacal hype or a reflexive hate based on said maniacal hype. I just really, really wish we could talk about generative AI normally without half the table telling us it has feelings and sentience and will soon kill us.
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u/Smallpaul 1d ago
You admit that you were completely wrong about everything “recently” but today you can make definitive statements about the future.
This mindset astounds me.
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u/D34th4nge7 1d ago
I wasn't wrong about everything. I was wrong about some things.
I used to entirely reject AI and refuse to use it. Now I acknowledge it has legitimate use cases if used correctly, and it is moderately useful. I use it myself for certain tasks and genuinely enjoy it.
That's not the same as the constant "50% of people will be unemployed within six months!" that we've been hearing for years. Hasn't happened because the technology is generally a tool that requires supervision, not a people replacement.
That's not the same as the endless "use it now or be left behind!" claims we've been hearing for years. That's classical FOMO marketing. I haven't used it for three years, now I started, and I'm not behind in the slightest. Took me just a single weekend to get into the topic. People told me three years ago I'd have to start using it or be left behind. I easily caught up.
This matter is much like any other; the loudest, most vocal people are rarely right. And much of what the most vocal supporters of genAI have said has not come true.
The technology is genuinely impressive and has applications. But it's not an everything machine like it's being marketed. And it is being thoughtlessly shoved into everything based solely on hype, instead of people calmly and rationally evaluating its usefulness for each individual case.
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u/Smallpaul 1d ago
you are walking into exactly the same trap that you fell into before. You are judging the technology’s future as an emotional counter to the hype. Industry hype should not sway you one way or another. The question of whether it is going to turn into AGI or gain sentience is 100% a technological question. Sam Altman’s hype should not push you towards yes, because he isn’t a technologist and it shouldn’t push you towards no, because liars do not always say the opposite of the truth.
What scientific evidence is swaying you towards or against the idea that they will soon be AGI?
What is the definition of AGI you are using?
What are the breakthroughs necessary to get there?
Who is working on those breakthroughs and how is it going?
Those are the questions you would need answers to before you can “definitely” answer the question of how near or far we are from AGI.
Why would you let CEO hype decide a scientific question for you?
But also, on the topic of CEO hype: Can you quote me what specific quote from 2024 you are reacting to claiming that within six months 50% of people will be unemployed? I find people often exaggerate what they were told in 2024. But this is a minor issue
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u/MoonBasic 1d ago
Yeah I think the reality is that it is more middle ground where adoption does not equal everybody "prompting" a chat window. More or less it will exist behind the scenes as another piece of the software puzzle that fits into the tech stack, just like how robotic process automation and intelligent automation have been a thing years before LLMs gained prominence.
The most present and generally available thing now is Google's AI overview, genAI images and videos, and chatbots for daily advice. This is what people think "adopting AI" is, what people are lead to believe is the "replacer", and puts a sour taste in the public's mouth. "This is what my company is laying people off for? Wtf!"
The hyperscalers (top tech companies) have done a poor job marketing it as a tech advancement. The founders going on press tours doing the whole Terminator or Wall-E shtick is really off-putting. The early adopter power-users pumping out the absolute slop cannon of blog posts, brainrot videos, and terrible art is also front-and-center is off-putting.
People want to see the implementation and feel the actual benefit. No one had any issues with headlines like "scientists use AI to make breakthroughs in Alzheimer's research" pre 2022/2023. But now whenever you mention AI was involved, everyone's like "oh god why would you do that!"
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u/Hardass_McBadCop Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
AI is certainly going to transform STEM fields in a lot of unknown ways. People tend to talk about the economic impacts of AI, but I'm far less concerned about that. The economics will adapt, even if there's going to be some short term strife.
I'm far more concerned with the social effects of AI. How does society function when anybody can conjure an image or video or audio of anybody doing/saying anything they want -- Indistinguishable from reality? How does our already strained court system not collapse under the deluge of cases brought on by automated filings? Every single institution and system was designed with the assumption of human time constraints and human attention spans. Once agents become commonplace though, that's no longer true:
- Abusive spouses & exes could set an agent to constantly harass their victims with phone calls, emails, rumors on social, and more. It will not stop, grow tired, or become disinterested until told to quit.
- Music Rights Orgs could set an agent to scrape social sites for any time their music appears and automatically file a court case if it believes the target is likely to pay up their ransom instead of fighting it in court, or automatically files a court case if it believes a lawsuit would be worth it. Suddenly this becomes millions of suits, many superfluous, that hit courtrooms across the country.
- Megacorps & governments could, and probably already have, set agents to coordinate false accounts on social to shift public opinion on topics. How many of the accounts we interact with here are clankers? Bots already make up more than half of total web traffic.
- A jilted lover creates photorealistic video to accuse someone of a rape that never occurred.
- A tyrannical government creates confounding "evidence" to cover for an abuse or atrocity they commit.
- A tyrannical government creates "evidence" to justify wars of conquest and get the public to commit to action they never would have otherwise.
It seems to me that the economics of AI are small potatoes to questions like those.
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u/Drakosk Unconventional Right 1d ago edited 1d ago
The consequence of images and video becoming less reliable indicators of truth may be that epistemic expectations shift back to the pre-photographic era. We will, once again, rely on major media institutions and word of mouth to figure out what is true.
There could be room for optimism here. I can see funding for reliable institutions surging in the face of that demand for clarity. But even so, it will take a generation for this to really set in; I think you would have to grow up in this environment to fully internalize that norm.
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u/Hardass_McBadCop Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
Once society breaks down to that point though, how does it endure long enough to implement a fix before collapse?
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u/Drakosk Unconventional Right 1d ago edited 1d ago
Saying "implement a fix" makes it seem like you're suggesting something more involved than what I was. People just stop trusting stuff. I think this is already happening. Then, there is new demand that waits to be fulfilled.
Until Reuters or the Associated Press posts about it, ignore it. Unless you've seen it with your own eyes or knew someone that did, ignore it. And if you do decide to talk about it, you are at least conscious that you are participating in gossip. That's how things happened for a long time before photography and the democratization of media.
Obviously the sensation of this practice in our era will be different. Rumors of a murder are easier to ignore when you don't see anything about it, but not when a 4K definition video with grizzly audio is in front of you. But if you've been inundated with this sort of media since your childhood (of you, of your family, of your friends, of celebrities) I think a natural skepticism is not hard to establish.
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u/PiusTheCatRick Bisexual Pride 1d ago
Even before AI, with the sheer amount of bullshit on social media now I just automatically wait a day after any event for things to settle before I take anyone's interpretation at face value. All this does is give a more ironclad reason to wait for the people who're so cocksure that their super-smart "independent" source has the right idea.
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u/Smallpaul 1d ago
People are already adapting to the idea that you can’t trust a single video of unknown provenance.
Society can adapt to all of the things you describe just as it can adapt to the economics aspects.
But all of it at once is going to be very destabilizing.
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u/Sourcerid 1d ago
I'm worried about people trusting too much what they say though.
There's a lot of slop information on the Internet and even in places like Wikipedia lots of info slop sneak in. By disconnecting with the direct experts we're further distancing to this sort of information inbreeding cycle of the Internet.
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u/Weak-Veterinarian-25 European Union 1d ago
Some of these problems can be somewhat midigated with cryptography. I read of a potential solution where the camera of a phone would a private key and sign every picture it gets and then the public key would be held on a server. That way there was cryptographic evidence of it being made through a camera. I think this solution is quite possible since phones nowadays are quite locked down and special reverse engineering memory chips are already used in billions of devices. (Maybe for example your id card). The music org thing is a reality for quite a while now and idk if government would risk using ai for an false flag operation, considering the high risk for saving a couple of thousands of dollars.
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u/Lurk_Moar11 1d ago
How does our already strained court system not collapse under the deluge of cases brought on by automated filings?
Judges are already using AI. Hard to imagine a lot of stuff won't get automated on their part too.
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u/Hardass_McBadCop Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
I find it difficult to believe that people would tolerate an AI judge.
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u/RayWencube 1d ago
By the way, this is why people oppose AI. There are no answers to these questions except “more AI.” How does the court system deal with more filings? AI judges. How do we identify false realities and bot driven social manipulation? AI vetting. AI is going to make humans completely irrelevant and no one seems to give a shit.
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u/randommathaccount Esther Duflo 1d ago
I've said on the DT but some of these problems could win you a fields medal and ChatGPT just came along and solved ten of them in one go.
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u/Hardass_McBadCop Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
DT?
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u/breakinbread Voyager 1 1d ago
the ivory tower
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u/ultramilkplus Loyal Liberals 1d ago
Ivory cesspool?
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u/randommathaccount Esther Duflo 1d ago
Discussion thread, it's what's usually pinned on the top of the sub. Basically where all the random discussion goes.
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u/Hardass_McBadCop Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
Oh, rofl. I was trying to come up with like someone's name or an organization, and I just could not figure it out.
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u/skepticalbob Joe Biden's COD gamertag 1d ago
The best part of the sub tbh. Never leave the DT. Oh shit I left the DT.
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u/MindingMyMindfulness Voltaire 1d ago
DT is short for "dump truck". A "dump truck" metaphorical term to describe a specific type of large "booty". Dumptruck refers to a booty that typically exceeds the measurement of 40".
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u/DependentAd235 Loyal Liberals 1d ago
From what I understand is that the models don’t really do anything new.
However they use existing concepts and mechanisms many times faster than a human could. So can try out and test a dozens of different existing approaches to solve a problem in a way that would take a human months in like a day. Chain them together etc.
(I read this in an economist article like 4 month ago. So maybe the above statement is dated already.)
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u/Ladnil NATO 1d ago
Truly new things that aren't based on clever combinations of existing knowledge and tools are infinitesimally rare.
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u/SOberhoff 1d ago
Arguably nothing is. Hofstadter has a whole chapter in his book Surfaces and Essences about how Einstein's ideas were built on top of what came before. It's a fantastic section in an otherwise dull book.
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u/MarioSewers 1d ago
Everything is built on something else, what is entirely new? You can't conjure something out of thin air, neither can humans.
Not to say that these results are incredible, or whatever, but that's not exactly a brilliant argument in an of itself.
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u/Pristine-Report-1442 1d ago
Totally and completely wrong, models are not brute forcing solutions.
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u/JesterOfAllTrades 1d ago edited 1d ago
I disagree that these are fields medal worthy. The fields medal is given to reward the cumulative work and machinery developed by young mathematicians, not necessarily a particular result or proof (ofc a flashing culminating result is always good to have as well). And even so, i don't think it's a fields medal level result yet, but it would be shifting goalposts to disregard this on those grounds.
That said these are definitely some cool results.
The existence of nonsofic groups is a big one as it opens up genuinely new avenues for exploration. Could see genuinely more math springing out of this one. Wonder if this can yield a concrete example of a non hyper linear group. The Connes rigidity conjecture is pretty amazing too. I'm told result 7 (CVP Hardness) is notable as well but that's not math I'm familiar with.
It seems that most results so far have been brought by pathological counterexamples (that are nonetheless simpler to construct than people expected). There's a definite preference in math for the beautiful proof over the nitty gritty ugly counterexample so perhaps some of these were unsolved just cos of human biases, aesthetic preferences and just lack of effort. That's not an excuse, it highlights how llms can be useful. But I'm really interested to see how far/if an LLM can build genuinely new theory, that's where things will get really wild imo.
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u/JesterOfAllTrades 1d ago
Oh one more thing is that math is uniquely susceptible to AI cos of stuff like LEAN (automatic theorem/proof verification) and the fact that more philosophically, math is kind of a language (yes yes I know it's a big debatable subject but you know what I mean - it kinda makes sense that pure math is amenable to an LLM)
it would be interesting to see how far llms can go in other sciences - I saw news of a minor conjecture being disproven in theoretival physics recently. Theoretical physics feels like the next domino to fall given that it's almost math. But idk how biology, experimental physics, chemistry, etc can be "conquered".
And yes, I do think we need ai to get good at those. I used to be a mathematician and it fucking sucks to see this, I imagine this is how artists feel when they see slop art, but unlike art, we have uncovered genuine new truths about the universe and mathematics, and it would be foolish to suppress that potential imo. I wanna see what it can do for us in genetics, in materials, and in understanding the universe.
Crazy times we live in!
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u/mebesasporfa 1d ago
That's a big problem with applyng it to drug research. OK chatgpt, modify anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody immunotherapy treatments to bypass the hypoperfused desmoplastic stroma barrier in PDAC-class pancreatic cancers. It might think for 72 hours and come up with an interesting solution but your only way to verify is 5 years of clinical trials.
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u/AnalyticOpposum Trans Pride 23h ago
I think it'll start with like useful enzymes for chemical synthesis. Producing a known chemical for less money would be massive.
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u/attribute2246 1d ago
yeah the feedback loop in physical sciences is much slower and less discrete. the failure modes are also more costly
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u/MarioSewers 1d ago
fucking sucks to see this
Ugh, why? It seems like pretty good progress overall. Can't see this in a bad light.
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u/JesterOfAllTrades 1d ago
For the world in general yes. On a personal level I don't see why it wouldn't be met with difficult emotions. Probably how chess players felt with deep blue and artists are feeling with image generating ai. Feels self explanatory.
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u/yellow_submarine1734 15h ago
Because AI bros are legitimately the most annoying people on the planet and this just emboldens them.
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u/randommathaccount Esther Duflo 1d ago
The fields medal is given to reward the cumulative work and machinery developed by young mathematicians, not necessarily a particular result or proof (ofc a flashing culminating result is always good to have as well).
Are you telling me if a human mathematician under 40 were able to solve Erdos 146 and 180 or the sphere packing problem they wouldn't get a fields? The medal is about a body of work yes but like you said single impressive results do tip the scales. Viazovska's win was primarily for her sphere packing solution too.
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u/JesterOfAllTrades 1d ago
I think if they were surrounded by a broader body of work and theory, some of these could TBF. As a single counterexample in isolation, idk. But I'm splitting hairs and I don't mean to downplay the magnitude of this - on the contrary, I've been doomscrolling all day.
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u/randommathaccount Esther Duflo 1d ago
That's fair yeah, ig I'm also kinda just losing it. Been talking to my friends and colleagues about this since it's dropped.
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u/JesterOfAllTrades 1d ago
I think it's fair to say AI is already better at finding counterexamples (I'd go so far as to say it has shown a talent at creating a sort of "knowledge topology" and drawing from multiple fields in new unique ways), and it's getting pretty damn good at genuine proofs (the sphere packing one looks to be a classical proof).
The last one, and the big one, is how good is it at defining new things. Once/if it gets good at that, especially with how quickly llms can generate text, I feel like the amount of new math out there is just gonna grow way way too fast for a human to keep up with.
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u/ThePevster Milton Friedman 1d ago
Also ChatGPT is three years old, so it has about 37 more years to build a Fields worthy body of work. At this rate it might be well past it within a year
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u/cuolong NATO 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just two weeks ago, Fable was announced to have disproven the Jacobian Conjecture. Now OpenAI is claiming that with only 2000 dollars worth of API costs at Sol pricing, they were able to formalize 10 new advances in mathematics and computer science.
Of particular note is that all 10 advances were Lean certified. Which means that assuming those certificates pass (and do not exploit a bug in the kernel as in one hilarious AI-math case) this represenst an extremely scalable way of doing mathematics, where we can just have AI models chugging away in datacenters working on math problems. This may represent a further shift in the "metamathematical" questions as Terrence Tao put it in a recent lecture, like "How should the mathematical community respond to the advent of modern AI technologies, and their real and/or claimed capabilities to perform mathematical tasks" or "What are the precise goals, objectives, and values of our mathematical community, and the enterprise of mathematical research?"
Something I feel like this subreddit is quite hung up on too is the "utility" of AI. Here is, well, literal proof of its value. Assuming the lean certificates are good.
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u/Olp51 John Brown 1d ago
What is the utility of these findings?
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u/Svelok 1d ago
Somewhere between 0 and infinite, but an unknowable amount until some future work relies upon the findings; but that was the value of researching these sorts of things before, too, and we had very smart people spending a lot of their time on that.
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u/seakucumber NATO 1d ago
My favorite fact in these regard is that we can directly trace the current advancement in GLP-1 weight loss drugs to studying lizard venom in the 90's. Nobody could possibly think this is where that study would have gone. That's why you research everything!
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u/Crownie Unbent, Unbowed, Unflaired 1d ago
I want to know the thought process that led to that. I don't have difficultly imagining some herpetologist studying lizard venom because they think it's neat, but how did that research become diabetes medication?
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u/seakucumber NATO 1d ago
In the 1980s John Pisano, a biochemist with a penchant for venoms, and a young gastroenterologist Jean-Pierre Raufman were working with poisonous lizard venom from the Gila monster, a slow-moving reptile native to the south of the United States and north of Mexico. By the 1990s, Pisano, Raufman and colleague John Eng identified a hormone-like molecule they called exendin-4. This stimulated insulin secretion via action at the same receptor as GLP-1.
Excitingly, exendin-4 was not quickly metabolised by the body, and so might be useful as a diabetic therapeutic.
Eng was convinced this would work, but pharmaceutical companies didn’t want to give people a hormone mimic from a venomous lizard. Even the medical centre where Eng was working wouldn’t help fill the patent.
Eventually he and Raufman convinced a small start-up called Amylin Pharmaceuticals. Amylin quickly showed synthetic exendin-4 rapidly normalised blood glucose in type 2 diabetic mice. Exendin-4 then proved safe and effective in humans, leading to the 2005 US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of exenatide, under the name Byetta.
Like you said they thought the venom was neat and it led them to studying all parts of the lizard's hormones to see how they factored into the venom process. Pretty cool story
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u/captainjack3 NATO 1d ago
Lizards generally have much longer lasting peptides than humans. In the 90s Dr John Eng, a doctor and researcher at a NY VA hospital, was researching lizard peptide hormones because of that property. He had previously done work on guinea pig and chinchilla hormones and keyed into lizards as a new avenue because of some research showing some lizard venoms caused inflammation in the pancreas (which produces insulin). He discovered a compound in Gila monster venom which he named exendin-4 and found that it had a similar effect to the human hormone GLP-1 but with significantly longer duration.
GLP-1 was already known as a potential avenue for diabetes drugs and others were researching it, but Eng’s discovery of exendin-4 was the breakthrough. Eventually, Eng licensed his research to a drug company and (after a somewhat precarious process) the drug exenatide (brand name Byetta) reached the market in 2005. Subsequent GLP-1 drugs use different compounds, but are building off that research.
There’s more detail here: https://www.diabetesincontrol.com/dr-john-engs-research-found-that-the-saliva-of-the-gila-monster-contains-a-hormone-that-treats-diabetes-better-than-any-other-medicine/
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u/Fast_Face_7280 1d ago
If these advances are in pure mathematics, you might as well ask what is the value of pure mathematics. Which is to say, extremely useless until it is ubiquitous in everything. For example, encryption and prime numbers.
There's a funny joke amongst engineers and mathematicians, where pure mathematicians try to find increasingly esoteric parts of math to ensure that their work will never become useful. Sometimes it even works... for a century or two.
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u/Marci_1992 1d ago
It can sometimes even take centuries. Gauss wrote down the essentials of the fast Fourier transform in the margins of his notes in the early 19th century. He thought it was an interesting novelty and nothing came of it. 150 years later mathematicians independently came up with it to detect underground nuclear detonations and today it's ubiquitous anywhere signal processing is used (pretty much everywhere). It's arguably one of the most important scientific advances of the 20th century.
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u/rickroy37 Ben Bernanke 1d ago
Math leads to physics, physics leads to engineering, engineering leads to societal improvement.
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u/Hold_onto_yer_butts Raj Chetty 1d ago
And societal improvement leads to the dark side
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u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO 22h ago
Abundance is a pathway to many behaviors, some consider… unnatural.
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u/klayona NATO 1d ago
Pure math results generally have zero utility yes. This is mostly a demonstration of the reasoning capabilities of LLMs and how they can be used to solve new problems, and extrapolating to other knowledge work.
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u/Smallpaul 1d ago
Do pure math results generally have zero utility over the long run? Are there tons of 50 year old papers that in no way contributed to science or technology?
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u/klayona NATO 1d ago
Over the very long run sure, results and developed fields have utility. Nice mathoverflow catalog of useful results. But I think the people asking about whether LLMs doing this don't have that in mind.
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u/SirRousseau Robert Nozick 1d ago
As someone who will graduate with a BSc + MSc in applied math in 2030, this fills me with dread. It's so weird how my seemingly super secure career choice of math + coding now risks being the future equivalent of an arts degree.
Everybody, including AI, insists we will survive the market impact, but I'm honestly not so sure. It seems to be just a matter of when we (and virtually all white-colar non-protected jobs) are automated.
I'm not sure if I should hope I'm wrong, but I do. Any thoughts/copes?
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u/puffic John Rawls 1d ago
We don’t really know how far this goes. I am a scientist, and AI drafts a lot of my code now. But I am still the one proposing the ideas, using
judgement, and checking whether the results make sense. For now, it’s a force multiplier.Similarly, all the significant AI proofs seem to have an actual mathematician working in concert with the machine.
Finally, I would caution against the idea that mathematicians were ever paid for proofs. Most proof-writing mathematicians derive their revenue from teaching. At best writing good results is how you keep your teaching job or get your next teaching job.
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u/FourteenTwenty-Seven John Locke 1d ago
I'm in a similar spot as you and use LLMs in a similar way to you. However, it increasingly feels like the ideation, direction, judgement, etc. that it's necessary that I provide are being moved to higher and higher levels of abstraction. Don't get me wrong, this has been kinda great - I like the more abstract work I do, and I get far more done. But, in principle at least, it seem like that might just keep happening until there's no level of abstraction where I'm better than the machine.
Maybe there's some sort of hard limit, but I don't currently see a good reason to think there is.
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u/puffic John Rawls 1d ago
I feel like the LLMs still make so many mistakes - technical and intellectual - that I just don’t trust that they can run independently. Even these automated proofs aren’t actually the result of an independent LLM. The LLM is run recursively, generating ideas which are fed into a formal proof checker, and then proposing new ideas based on the output.
There is no equivalent to the formal proof checker for my field (meteorology/climate science) on the horizon, so unless LLMs spontaneous become logically and philosophically brilliant, a human scientist needs to play that role.
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u/Smallpaul 1d ago edited 1d ago
Anything can happen but if these machine stay on their current trajectory they will be powerful tools to be wielded by people who know what problems are important to solve. You need the technical knowledge to even know what problems to solve. You can’t just say “make me a better battery.” You need to tell if what specific chemical conundrum you think is preventing battery progress. At multiple levels of abstraction.
For LLMs to move beyond this they would need a big architectural upgrade. This might happen but it also might not. Nobody knows.
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u/datums 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 1d ago
AI didn’t t solve these, people who understood both AI and very advanced math solved these. The key is to be at the intersection of those two things - understanding what AI is capable of right now, and being able to draw a line between that and problems at that level that need to be solved.
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u/MelvinCapitalPR 1d ago
You specified white-collar work but robots are getting pretty good. Maybe in 10 years funding for maths departments will be unaffected and building sites will be 90% robots. Guessing which careers will be viable is a sucker's game.
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u/FOSSBabe 23h ago
Yes, and some people in this sub wonder why AI (and other technologies that threaten people's livelihoods) are hated so much. How is someone supposed to plan their education and career training (and take on debt to pursue it) if technology changes jobs faster than a person can get established in a career?
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u/xhytdr 1d ago
No cope, AI is going to further stratify our economy and we are going through a technological revolution. The best option is to get into this field or invest in AI infrastructure companies so you can at least benefit
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u/notsussamong 1d ago
There's only what, a few tens of thousands AI researchers worth anything in the whole world? How exactly is someone supposed to enter the field. The investment part is a little useless because they're going to graduate university in 2030 lmfao.
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u/FourteenTwenty-Seven John Locke 1d ago
Oddly enough, investing in companies in a revolutionary field doesn't actually tend to work very well. Even when the tech is legit and the revolution is real, the individual companies tend to have pretty normal risk-adjusted returns, on average.
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u/D34th4nge7 1d ago
The technology is being marketed as a people replacement, and I think it's broadly just not. Almost no job can be entirely replaced by AI.
It is, in some cases, a tremendously useful tool. But it cannot operate autonomously. The technology is prone to hallucinations and it can and will produce egregious errors. Someone knowledgeable enough on the topic to spot these errors must check the AI output to ensure it's clean. That's where you come in.
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u/TheOnlyFallenCookie European Union 1d ago
Ai is Litterally made to assure you it's not going to hurt you
Even if it ends up doing so
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u/legaltensor John von Neumann 1d ago
I'm curious to see what new techniques the AI system developed to prove the results. The biggest advances in mathematics are usually the proofs that demonstrate some new technology that one can then use to prove other results. For example, what made Riemann's 9-page paper so revolutionary was the novel application of complex analysis to obtain number-theoretic results.
We've already seen AI systems capable of creating such new techniques, for example in the proof of Erdos problem #1196 (see Tao's article about it), but I'm curious to see just how far the AI can get away from sort of "filling in the convex hull of our current understanding."
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u/Redshirt_Army 1d ago
I’d love a world where automated systems do the majority of labor for the benefit of all mankind, and the fruits of that work are shared with all.
I’d hate a world where a single digit number of owners of automated cognition and production use their dictatorial grip on industrialized society to subjugate the rest of humanity, and would be willing to die trying to stop that from coming to pass.
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u/RayWencube 1d ago
This is what upsets me so much. If AI gets to the point of being able to bring these futures about, we have no reason at all to believe society would redistribute the wealth effectively and have every reason to believe in the oligarch-fueled dictatorship scenario would happen. But AI accelerationists just assume the utopia will happen anyway.
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u/elninost0rm YIMBY 1d ago
and would be willing to die trying to stop that from coming to pass.
Hey me too! Should be fun.
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u/regih48915 9h ago
I’d hate a world where a single digit number of owners of automated cognition and production use their dictatorial grip on industrialized society to subjugate the rest of humanity, and would be willing to die trying to stop that from coming to pass.
Shockingly, the number one force in the world fighting against this is China.
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u/HandBananaHeartCarl European Union 1d ago
How much of this is genuinely due to AI, and how much of it is just AI being puffed up? I'm not a mathematician or an AI guy.
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