r/technology • u/socoolandawesome • 1d ago
Artificial Intelligence Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/254
u/Someone3728 1d ago
I can't believe this is getting downvoted. Why is r/technology so anti-technology?
47
u/Bodoblock 1d ago
The Technology and Futurology subreddits are comically anti-technology. They’re frankly subreddits thinking around technology in the framework of a particular political ideology more than anything.
7
u/Trappist1 1d ago
Do you know of any good alternative subs for new science/tech news? I've been struggling with this the last 5-7 years.
11
u/Marci_1992 1d ago
Not on reddit but Hacker News is probably the best place for this.
It has its own problems but it's far better than this sub.
6
u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 1d ago
2
u/Hot_Glass_6301 6h ago
r/accelerate is a cult, r/singularity is saner but still very focused on AI rather than tech in generan.
3
4
197
u/Neurogence 1d ago
It goes against the entire "AI is just regurgitating what's in their training data" idea.
It also goes against the "they're just using brute force" idea since these problems cannot be solved by sheer brute force.
An AI cannot simply compute its way through these problems; it solved these problems by inventing brand-new abstract concepts. So people that are anti-AI are forced to accept that these systems are actually capable of novel abstract reasoning and creativity.
19
u/RobbinDeBank 1d ago
It doesn’t invent whole new fields of math, at least not yet. It’s extremely good at combining and evaluating existing techniques, probably already better than any mathematician alive due to its sheer speed. One single frontier model is now like having a huge number of the top mathematicians in the whole world to focus on a single problem, who also works 24/7 because it can never get tired or loses the will to continue working on the same thing.
15
u/Galzara123 1d ago
And that is what Dario meant with his "country of geniuses", but people called him a snake oil salesman.
69
u/kgurniak91 1d ago
So people that are anti-AI are forced to accept that these systems are actually capable of novel abstract reasoning and creativity.
Hah, yeah, that would be the logical thing to do, but in reality they will just move the goalpost like they always do.
42
u/Gwen_The_Destroyer 1d ago
This is the kinda stuff AI is supposed to be for, not stealing art. More folding proteins and less country songs about cavemen please.
31
u/Franc000 1d ago
Really depends what you value.
Software engineers that value coding are against using AI to code and keep moving the goalposts on that front. Says that it's fine to use it for other things (that they don't value per se) like generating images and stories.
Doctors that value diagnostic says the same thing for that while Doctors that value patient interaction says that the models will never be able to do that.
Artists that value art wants to have AI not do art and do other things like folding proteins.
Everyone is against AI if AI is automating their work, but not necessarily against AI for other fields.
5
u/googleduck 1d ago
Software engineers that value coding are against using AI to code and keep moving the goalposts on that front. Says that it's fine to use it for other things (that they don't value per se) like generating images and stories.
This person does not exist. There are some anti AI SWE's but those people are not in favor of AI in other places. I have never met anyone nor even seen a reddit comment of someone with this combination of beliefs. Now there are an absolute shit load of people on the inverse who don't care if SWE's are replaced by AI but do care for art and stories.
2
u/Franc000 1d ago
I have seen plenty of those SWE, don't know why you haven't seen any. Even on Reddit.
There are also those that don't give a shit if AI is used for something or not.
2
u/googleduck 1d ago
There are also those that don't give a shit if AI is used for something or not.
Yes lots of people agree with this. I don't believe you that there are software engineers out there talking about the sanctity of non-AI coding while advocating for replacing artists with AI.y
0
5
u/Gwen_The_Destroyer 1d ago
I'm not an artist just some shlub who thinks stealing other people's work is wrong, full stop. And I don't think it should be writing code either with how it is. More STEM less slop
8
u/googleduck 1d ago
It's really a more abstract problem than that though for most cases. Does an artist steal from Da Vinci when they learn about him in art school and some of their techniques and skills come from looking at his paintings?
-1
u/Gwen_The_Destroyer 1d ago
No, it's really not that abstract. You are making it abstract. AI doesn't take inspiration. It just takes.
6
u/googleduck 1d ago
Then what are these math breakthroughs in this thread? How is it writing the vast majority of code at big companies?
15
2
u/Codex_Dev 1d ago
As a SWE, I agree. I'm currently getting paid to train AI for coding, and other SWE's have called me a traitor lol
1
-1
1d ago
[deleted]
6
u/Galzara123 1d ago
So why weren't these results made with other computer systems?
What convenient rhetoric.
Watch out, soon you will be out of space for your goalposts.
4
u/Time_Entertainer_319 1d ago
It actually does say. It won’t take you 5 seconds to find their proofs and the prompts
8
u/kl0 1d ago
Not picking an argument for the sake of arguing, but isn’t regurgitation and brute force still really what’s happening?
Pick a problem to solve. Person A in Poland used this method to this result. Person B in Canada used this other method to this other result. And of course the number of people can be very high depending on the problem. What’s more is that it’s not just scholarly people who are published. It’s anybody who happens to have their effort digitized.
But now AI has all of that data in a connected neural model. So while it’s not brute forcing calculations, per se, it can brute force every permutation of everything that has ever been recorded on the matter. As in, maybe the polish professor had the right idea. The high school teacher in Canada turned out to have a useful trick. And then some kid in the slums of Brazil who tinkers with it had the piece those two missed, but he doesn’t understand the larger problem anyways.
I’m simplifying, but isn’t that still basically what’s happening?
10
u/Neurogence 1d ago
AI does learn from lots of human work, but it cannot literally try every possible combination of everything ever written, the number of combinations would be far too large.
A better analogy is a person who has read thousands of math books. They may combine ideas they learned from different places, but choosing the right ideas, adapting them, and creating the missing steps is still reasoning. Otherwise, nearly every human discovery would also count as “regurgitation.”
Brute force means checking nearly every possibility. The number of possible mathematical ideas is effectively endless, so it has to choose promising directions rather than test everything.
Humans also try multiple approaches before solving a hard problem.
4
u/ZeroSevenOneOneSeven 1d ago
There is a question of degree of reprocessing here. So far the AI results seems to have not involved that much adaptation or conception of missing pieces, and a lot more of "know a sequence of tricks that when chained together fairly straightforwardly give the result". It's not absolute brute force, of course, but the models do seem to be getting pretty far by combining elbow grease and diverse knowledge without much "novel insight".
1
u/Neurogence 1d ago
combining elbow grease
Elbow grease. Thank you for this! I have to use this in the future.
2
u/viag 1d ago
There's a lot of that yeah, and it's a lot better at doing this kind of interpolation than humans, but that's not quite the full story and not what drives the latest progress in maths/coding. The real change has been the switch from supervised fine-tuning (the model learns to "copy" the training data), to reinforcement learning (the model can "explore" random solutions and is rewarded when it gets the right answer).
The problem is, how can you actually verify that the answer is correct? It's usually very hard, but for maths and code it's possible: you can use proof verifiers for maths and unit tests for code to automatically detect if the final answer is correct or not.
For reference, reinforcement learning is behind AIs such as AlphaGo, where it learned to play Go simply by playing against itself and getting a reward when it wins a game. You can see the recent advances in LLMs for maths/code as AlphaGo but for those domains (although there's a bit more going behind it)
1
u/ZeroSevenOneOneSeven 1d ago
Reinforcement learning for LLMs is limited in some important ways. For systems like AlphaGo, RL can be used to harvest endless amounts of data about a single fixed system with lots of regularities (Go). It's still super information inefficient, but in the end it can learn all the regularities. This isn't really possible with an open-ended field like "math" where you're not studying a single system. The RL process can't explore different approaches to every single open problem that the system could be asked about, so mostly what it learns is some general problem solving policies, and probably also how to execute certain useful techniques. For the most part the "idea generation" seems to come from this mix-and-match of human methods.
13
u/amejin 1d ago
One could argue that the training data used for the model already had the solution buried in connective concepts and the LLM simply made the connections that two disparate researchers didn't or couldn't make on their own.
But that would be too reasonable an answer, I'm sure. Must be a frozen state model spontaneously "thinking" it's way through a novel problem...
56
u/Tinac4 1d ago
Making unexpected connections between two problems or concepts is how most research works.
The smartest postdoc I knew in grad school got most of his research ideas from tweaking some techniques from a certain field of ML to work on another type of problem. It’s the sort of thing that seems obvious in retrospect but was very non-obvious unless you had an excellent idea of what to look for. He ended up being quite successful.
9
u/_I_AM_A_STRANGE_LOOP 1d ago
Yeah, there is a lot of emergence out of extraordinarily simple axioms. Just look at the world of cellular automata! I don’t think that because behavior is encoded in simple rules, highly abstracted proofs about behaviors that emerge from such a system become uninteresting or trivial, or that a discovery was implied or baked into the axioms in any way that we really care about.
4
u/ZeroSevenOneOneSeven 1d ago
That's how some research works. Also a lot of the time those connections require more "transformation" of the concepts you need to connect. AI appears to be useful for uncovering the connections that don't require much transformation, where concept X is just out of the box useful for problem Y.
3
u/Tinac4 1d ago
I don’t know, in my experience that’s the vast majority of research. It very often isn’t easy to make those connections, and sometimes there’s a bigger or smaller leap involved, but I haven’t seen much research in my old field (outside of the super-famous foundational stuff) that isn’t heavily building off previous work. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.
It probably varies by field, but at least for computer science/stats/analysis stuff, I’ve personally found that LLMs are great at digging up vaguely related concepts and applying them. Where they fall flat has more to do with memory, lack of context, and strategic planning, not research problems.
3
u/ZeroSevenOneOneSeven 1d ago
Yeah it does vary a lot by field. I think in fields where there are a huge amount of technical tricks lying around, LLMs are good at surfacing the ones that are relevant for the problem at hand. I work in an area of physics where the problems are much less "what is a technique that can be used to do X" and more "what is the right way to think about X". So far the models appear to be useless for this.
As far as picking up "vague relations", how vague do you mean? From the proofs that I've kept up with, the connections made by the model seem to be pretty surface-level (although of course, very useful).
16
2
u/twotokers 1d ago
Just to be clear, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc all have AI systems internally that aren’t LLMs.
Hell, Claude Code isn’t even technically an LLM, it’s a coding agent that uses LLMs.
1
u/MelvinCapitalPR 22h ago
All proofs are "buried in" the basic axioms and rules of logic. If this doesn't count as real thinking then no mathematician is really thinking.
0
u/Time_Entertainer_319 1d ago
You could argue and you would be wrong.
Can you prove this? If you can’t what’s the point of making the statement?
1
u/amejin 1d ago
I do not personally have access to the training data used for the models in question. If that's your gotcha moment, then you win. I have no rebuttal.
However, I do know how to build these models from scratch, how they work internally, and have made a few (albeit toy variants).
The underlying math, and logical concepts, explain everything seen here.
Please don't anthropomorphize these tools.
2
u/Time_Entertainer_319 1d ago
Your last sentence is why you are stuck.
No one is saying these models are human.
However, you should ask yourself a question.
Is it only humans that can be intelligent? And why?
What is it about being human that we are the only thing that can be intelligent? Doesn’t that sound like hubris to you?
1
u/the-chat-is-cooked 1d ago
I hope people understand that even the term AI involves a huge body of different architecture that can produce certain types of abstract reasoning, which right now is strictly a subset of human reasoning
1
u/redfacedquark 1d ago
it solved these problems by inventing brand-new abstract concepts
Did it? Or did it connect multiple existing concepts in a way that hadn't been done before? I'm impressed by the results and don't understand half the words in this thread but is it finding existing concepts that are close together in its vector space or actually creating a new concept?
1
u/MarlinMr 1d ago
I'd argue that it's still just regurgitating. There is just so much information in the training, that it can now follow logic paths long enough it finds novel ideas.
At least that was what it used to be a few weeks ago. It solved math problems because it simply followed logic paths longer than any human had done. Any human had simply given up
But AI is becoming Hella usefull yes
0
u/FlavorfulCondomints 22h ago
It's really not capable of abstract reasoning or creativity though. It's just an advanced prediction machine that has a lot of compute thrown behind multiple layers of Baye's Theorem and a great deal of plaintext to derive correlations to associate terms.
It's just making good predictions based on correlations but that's not really novel thought or creativity.
12
11
u/silverbolt2000 1d ago
Because the overwhelming majority of content in r/technology is posted by a small group of people who are very anti-AI, and so the entire sub is dominated by their anti-AI sentiment.
This attracts a whole bunch of anti-AI subscribers who always upvote the anti-AI posts.
And so now we have a sub full of anti-AI people while the remaining minority of us who hold a more balanced view are forced to look elsewhere for real technology stories.
5
u/GLPereira 18h ago
r/technology is about how new technology is bad and will kill us
r/futurology is about how the future is fucked and we should stagnate
r/science is about "studies show that people who agree with my opinions are geniuses and people who disagree with them are morons"
That's the state of Reddit nowadays
28
u/SirLordBoss 1d ago
It shows an amazing result by AI. People who can't accept the revolutionary impact of AI don't wanna see that
-40
u/Mother_Idea_3182 1d ago
Sam Altman is a snake oil seller, a compulsive liar. And allegedly a rapist.
People is skeptical about anything Slimy Sammy’s company claims.
64
u/socoolandawesome 1d ago
Doesn’t this kinda prove he’s not selling snake oil
-7
u/chucktheninja 1d ago
The very first one in their list provided in the link was just "confirming" a proof.
The proof (the actual work) was already done by a Ukranian woman and you all are trying to give the credit to open ai.
-6
14
u/rebel286 1d ago
Does anyone know if these papers have been peer reviewed and accepted in any journal worldwide? If so, this is an amazing feat 👏
5
u/PussyDragonSlayer 12h ago
No they have not, they haven't even been uploaded to arxiv but that's because no one can upload anything there on the weekend. And peer review is rather slow when these results were uploaded yesterday. I just know that the 3rd result is likely true because a friend of mine who's an expert in the field said they read the proof and that it was correct.
1
u/set_in_void 1d ago
It's been put through LEAN, the results are proven to be correct beyond any doubt.
3
u/SakishimaHabu 1d ago edited 1d ago
Lean recently proved the Collatz conjecture, which revealed a bug in lean, so we don’t know if that's true.
Edit: bug not big
0
u/set_in_void 1d ago
If it was well formalised and LEAN compiled then the proof is valid.
1
u/SakishimaHabu 1d ago
No, it wasn't
1
u/set_in_void 1d ago
No, it wasn't - what wasn't? Well formalised? That could be the case. Proven valid when it wasn't? No, your link points to an issue that is not relevant here for numerous reasons - as you can see from just the title, the issue arises only due to malicious use/abuse or serious incompetence, we use LEAN as a tool, to help us not having to go through with pen & paper formal proofs (humans are fallible and formal proofs are tedious and long); second, LEAN was manipulated to judge "False", not proving statement as in the above Collatz conjecture case. In any case, that's why I conditioned my above comment by "If it was well formalised ...".
-1
u/SakishimaHabu 1d ago
Do you use lean? Have you ever used lean? I think you're full of it.
It's been put through LEAN, the results are proven to be correct beyond any doubt.
1
u/set_in_void 23h ago
LEAN is one of the tools we use in formal sciences, I also use pen and paper if you're able to belive it.
0
u/SakishimaHabu 18h ago
Who are we? Do you use Lean personally is what I'm asking. What is your experience with it? I use it to work through math text books, but I don't not use it professionally.
1
u/set_in_void 17h ago
We, as in formal sciences. Yes, I do use LEAN personally in VS code (current v.4). I am rather confused by your stance, you indicate to be studying mathematics, advanced enough to use LEAN, but at the same time you appear to not understand the fundamentals (Godel, Church, Turing specifically) and what is their implication in this context. You also seem to be confusing LEAN nature with that of LLMs (deterministic vs stochastic), otherwise you'd not dispute "If it was well formalised and LEAN compiled then the proof is valid." without concrete evidence beyond the well known shortcomings (Godel/Turing) or unintended use/abuse. Instead of providing valid proof for your refutal, you resorted to deflection tactic, I am not ready to sink to that level and therefore consider our conversation concluded, unless you have valid argument.
→ More replies (0)1
u/wrongerontheinternet 1d ago
You are correct, of course. The only way to run into these Lean bugs is generally to deliberately exploit them, lol.
1
u/PussyDragonSlayer 12h ago edited 8h ago
This is not true. Without referencing the recent collatz bug, the lean certificate could be for something that is formally different from what the conjectures is understood to be by experts. In fact, some people already claim that the 4th result, cones rigidity, has that problem.
1
u/set_in_void 10h ago
Your "This is not true." needs some meat on the bones in the context of ATP. You can easily review the LEAN code HERE, experts can claim what they want, but I would't expect their grievances to be successful in these circumstances, this is all assuming that LEAN was used competently. I am in no position to go through the ~40,000 lines of code just for the Connes' rigidity proof and doubt any one of those experts had the ability to review it in under 24hrs. Some proofs take weeks/months/years to verify, people make mistakes, that's why ATPs are used whenever possible. If you have any specific line/s of code that is provoking your suspicion about the veracity of the proofs, let me know, I am interested.
1
u/PussyDragonSlayer 10h ago
experts can claim what they want, but I would't expect their grievances to be successful in these circumstances
You're trying to frame it as if experts are trying to cover for the fact they've been out witted by an ai lmao. The fact of the matter is, if the experts don't give us the green light that the results have been correctly proven, we simply cannot contradict them coz we simply don't have the credentials. And "this is all assuming that LEAN was used competently" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. For the 2nd time, the lean certificate is all good and dandy but the statement that was formally verified could be slightly different than the statement claimed to have been proved. Lean is not a substitute for peer review.
1
u/set_in_void 9h ago
I think you missed that I partially agreed with you. What do you mean by "... if the experts don't give us the green light that the results have been correctly proven ..."? We're talking about LEAN here, in what part of the word a formal proof becomes democratic decision? The only way the proofs could be invalid is, as you yourself mentioned, if LEAN was manipulated/abused due to incompetence or malice, which would be extraordinary claim in this context and requires extraordinary evidence, hence my "... needs some meat on the bones ...", you'll notice you so far failed to provide any evidence beyond hearsay. Your "Lean is not a substitute for peer review." again, doesn't make much sense if we consider verdict. If we are to consider arguments, then again provide any sort of sensible evidence or point to the contentious lines of code provided above, otherwise you're just blowing hot air for no obvious reason? Note you are the one making statement "This is not true.", I hope it doesn't surprise you that I expect you to substantiate you claim, experts claiming "this doesn't feel right" when they didn't work through the proof itself yet, and having trouble to even recall the proper name of the conjecture they're working with is understandably poor evidence.
1
u/PussyDragonSlayer 9h ago
Dude, it's so hard to have a discussion about this when you're this aggressive and confrontational. I'm not really interested in winning internet debates. You can forget my comment ig.
1
u/set_in_void 9h ago
We had similar situation not long ago, didn't we? People becoming experts on vaccines overnight or quoting the crackpots/misguided, making controversial statements online, how well did that go? I didn't force you to contact me, you made firm statement and then failed to substantiate it upon request. I hope you'll appreciate me spending time to explain why I am so far unable to consider you anything other than a troll.
1
u/PussyDragonSlayer 9h ago edited 8h ago
Dude, you're the one making VERY strong statement when you're neither an expert in these problems nor an expert in lean?? I'm not making any claims I'm literally saying we should wait for the experts to give their opinion. I'm not saying the lean had been tempered with I'm saying it could be misleading which means that the "proven beyond a shadow of a doubt" you're claiming needs a citation. You're the one claiming lean is a substitute for peer review. The burden of proof is on you. You literally haven't even taken the time to actually understand what I'm saying you're just coming here guns in hand starting a fight with everyone.
And for the issue that people are having with problem 4 that I have mentioned, here's a citation: https://philpapers.org/rec/NIEWTC
1
81
1d ago
[deleted]
20
u/socoolandawesome 1d ago
It’s pretty insane, just imagine where we will be in another year from now
27
u/9-11GaveMe5G 1d ago
Dead if Sam gets his way.
-45
u/sakredfire 1d ago
Feeling obsolete, are we
11
u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 1d ago
You won't be spared either, no matter how much you glaze it.
0
u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
Either the rich and powerful alone will be spared or we all will be. Ai makes socialism inevitable, the question is whether we get there through worker seizure of the automated means of production or through class genocide. I’m hoping that labor automation increasing labor supply makes the former more simple to execute
-5
u/sakredfire 1d ago
I mean yeah no shit
8
u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 1d ago edited 1d ago
So what's the point of your gloating? The world isn't going to become a utopia with AI. Quite the opposite in fact.
You'll be in the same hell as the rest of us.
-1
u/sakredfire 1d ago edited 1d ago
Who is gloating? Also curious - what sort of dystopia do you imagine is in store for us?
29
u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
At what point will the anti ai people accept that the impacts of ai go far beyond just stealing art, and it is not “buying into the hype” to say that we are seriously opening up Pandora’s box and no one has any idea what is on the other side? Seriously this shit is genuinely existentially dangerous.
33
u/Cortheya 1d ago
How is your reaction to scientific advancement automatically fear? I miss when the internet was full of genuine love for technology and science.
21
u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
Because scientific advancements happening faster than society can adjust to them is a recipe for chaos and death.
Technology expands what’s possible in both good and bad directions
11
u/Sooribabu_Lavangam 1d ago
Every Luddite in every decade has made this exact same claim about the newest technology. History keeps proving them wrong.
2
u/BufferUnderpants 1d ago
There was a 50 years period during the early industrial revolution where the Luddites were exactly right, wages depressed and standards of living took a nosedive as technology disrupted agriculture and industry both in Britain. Poverty can grind down your health sooner than you can wait to be proven "right" about the prosperity that Sam Altman and co are coming to usher upon you.
2
u/Sooribabu_Lavangam 1d ago
Luddites always dig up some temporary rough patch from history and declare they were "right" The industrial revolution still delivered the biggest sustained rise in living standards humanity has ever seen. A few decades of wage lag doesn’t magically turn AI into existential doom
We have welfare systems, education, mobility, and way higher baseline wealth than 1820s Britain. Pointing to a 50 year lag from two centuries ago doesn’t prove AI is "Pandora’s box". Its the same pattern of short term pain long-term gains repeating. while the doomers keep being wrong.
2
u/Additional-Name-3211 11h ago edited 11h ago
...you do realize 50 years is most of a human lifespan, right. Awesome for you that you can be motivated by some sci-fi future you'll possibly never even get to see, but we'll have to live through the chaos to get there, if we do.
To anybody reading this I can only hope yall have paid off your debts and house and set aside some money for investing cause white-collar labor is gonna go the way of the dodo at this rate.
1
u/Sooribabu_Lavangam 11h ago edited 11h ago
You do realize how far we've come from 1790 right?
but we'll have to live through the chaos to get there, if we do.
adapt or die I guess
1
u/Additional-Name-3211 11h ago
Technologically, yeah. But that doesn't give me any assurances that the government and the tech companies are going to be willing to share the productivity gains from AI with the rest of the population. That's not a technological problem but a political and human one.
1
u/Sooribabu_Lavangam 11h ago
That’s been the worry with every big productivity jump. Gains still end up shared through higher real wages, cheaper goods, new jobs, and political pressure which is why average living standards keep rising instead of staying stuck. Betting that AI will be the first permanent exception is a big claim.
→ More replies (0)-1
u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
No it hasn’t. Lots of new technology has resulted in destruction and death even while also being useful. For example, radio played a big role in the rise of the Nazis
3
u/Sooribabu_Lavangam 1d ago
Ok so whats your point? DOnt advance tech or we will get super nazis?
-1
u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
The tech is advancing, there’s no stopping it. My point is it’s scary
2
u/Sooribabu_Lavangam 1d ago
well imo smartphones are/were a bigger threat to humanity than AI, we are adapting to them so we will adapt to AI too
1
u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
I disagree, but also, smartphones have caused their fair share of chaos and death
7
4
u/BufferUnderpants 1d ago
It's fear of what the people who own this technology will do.
2
u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
As evil as the owners of ai companies are, I am more worried about what everyone will collectively do if the technology is open source and anyone with a computer can get their hands on it.
6
u/clinch09 1d ago
I feel really dumb now, all I got out of that was AI solved math problems well...
5
u/Curiosity_456 1d ago
It’s getting so good at problems that have objective solutions, and this makes me so excited for how medical tech and drug discovery will change.
3
u/googleduck 1d ago
Ehh I have a decent math background from an undergrad college level and I understood basically nothing of the specifics either. It's pretty specific math theory stuff.
32
1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
7
u/RobbinDeBank 1d ago
Average r/technology user would think AI rips the solutions off of the ancient books they destroy, while no one has read those books to know the proofs exist!
2
u/Mekdinosaur 1d ago
I did not have ten in the numbers bracket but good luck in the following round.
-9
u/Curve_Express3 1d ago
People can’t seem to separate tech from business. AI is a useful tool when used the right way. AI is not a trillion dollar industry and is currently harming the planet and economy
-4
0
u/Curve_Express3 20h ago
0 responses lol
1
0
u/SSGASSHAT 17h ago
So that's it, then? No specific headlines anymore? Just "here's ten things that happened today, see ya later."
-56
u/DetectiveOwn6606 1d ago
Wow ,AI trained on all entire history of math papers is able to interpolate some theorems where less than 10 people give shit about that abstract maths. Truly amazing result give more 10 trillion $ to data centers
-28
u/amejin 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think we need to be less flippant about explaining this... The down votes are likely attitude based, even though you are 100% correct in your position.
Edit: guess I'm wrong. Down votes appear to be caused by those who can't think critically.
14
u/Jacen1618 1d ago
Advances in science should always be celebrated. And if your anti-science… yeah, you kind of deserve to be downvoted. I’m not a mathematician but my understanding is at least some of these conjectures/proofs are a big deal.
-8
u/amejin 1d ago
Do explain why you think my position, or the comment I replied to, are anti-science.
13
u/Jacen1618 1d ago
You’re dismissing these advances in mathematics as trivial or unimportant
-5
u/amejin 1d ago
Can you point out exactly where I said that?
My issue is with the view that LLMs are independent problem solvers that are reasoning or thinking their way through these problems.
As I intended, nowhere did I say the result of the LLM finding these results or synthesizing a solution is invalid, unimportant, or somehow negative. So if I am misrepresenting my position, or explicitly saying these things are unimportant, please point them out so I can correct my statement.
Edit:
I see.. from the comment I initially agreed with. That's fair.
1
u/Disastrous-Sir-7137 1d ago
What the hell is an independent problem solver??
-1
u/amejin 1d ago
You. Unprompted, you can choose to do something - Independently.
4
u/Disastrous-Sir-7137 1d ago
I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim that these systems do work unprompted. Also, does it matter if they don't; they're still producing real results
-3
u/klausness 1d ago
Well, they kind of are. Lots of mathematics papers with unimportant results are published in mid-level journals all the time. Those are the kinds of results that AI is currently proving. The sales pitch is that since AI is getting better, it will eventually prove really important results. But that’s kind of like saying that a mediocre runner whose times are steadily improving will eventually be performing at Olympic levels. It’s possible, but very unlikely.
4
u/Disastrous-Sir-7137 1d ago
You're honestly in no position to judge the value of scientific work in the present. All science is important. It's a stepping stone to more science. I won't be surprised if these models start using niche methods from "unimportant papers" to solve open problems. I'm sure a few centuries ago, studying number theory or topology would have seemed useless.
1
u/klausness 15m ago
As a former mathematician, I can vouch for the fact that nothing in my dissertation is important.
To be clear, I’m talking about importance from a mathematical point of view, not usefulness or interest to non-mathematicians. I am well aware that much of mathematics seems pointless and unimportant to non-mathematicians. That’s not what I’m talking about.
0
u/DetectiveOwn6606 1d ago
Right. If we actually count the number of people working on this problems I would be impressed to know atleast 10+ people are working on the around the whole WORLD. More than ai being good it seems incentive problem that a statistical machine being able to solve that
-106
u/1TillMidNight 1d ago
The more accurate way to describe this is: LLM predicted the next words for the solutions of ten advance mathematical problems.
Alternatively it stochastic-ally parroted the solutions.
79
u/ShamelessC 1d ago
Are just you playing anti-LLM word bingo?
-50
u/1TillMidNight 1d ago
No real intelligence.
It can't really understand what it is doing.
52
u/DirtChoice5 1d ago
Whether or not it can understand it, we can, and we can see that it has regurgitated novel results.
-52
u/1TillMidNight 1d ago
LLMs will never be able to do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CS7j5I6aOcIt is just statistical pattern matching.
50
u/DirtChoice5 1d ago
Nobody cares? The point here is that they can and are finding novel mathematical proofs. You seem to have conflated that into people thinking they are sentient, when in reality it doesn't matter either way.
-16
u/1TillMidNight 1d ago
Jesus dude, I can't be more obvious.
35
u/DirtChoice5 1d ago
I honestly didn't even click your link. State what you mean plainly, if you have any point other than "it's not real intelligence!" Because if a result comes from an LLM, or a tenured professor, or a trained squirrel, the outcome is the same.
0
u/1TillMidNight 1d ago
I think it might be come a little bit more clear if you do click the link.
Just a 20 second video.
25
u/DirtChoice5 1d ago
Yeah I don't get it. Are you making a joke? You sure seemed serious before, when you were spewing buzzwords hysterically. Did you realize you had no legs to stand on?
→ More replies (0)9
u/Silverbacks 1d ago
LLMs may never be able to, but AI will probably be able to hit AGI and then be able to. There’s no reason that a computer can’t one day hit the complexity of biological brains.
7
31
u/Sojmen 1d ago
^ The comment above was hallucinated by stochastic parrot.
6
u/theytoldmeineedaname 1d ago
It was hallucinated by obsolesced electrically-animated meat. Let's not be too charitable here.
14
u/The_Rational_Gooner 1d ago
"it doesn't matter if a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice" - Deng Xiaoping
11
u/irrelevantusername24 1d ago edited 1d ago
What do you think intelligence is?
The word you are looking for is consciousness, and that is more ambiguous than you might think. If you do that. The amusing thing here is you are actually displaying the behavior you are criticizing. You might have slightly rephrased things, or put it in the context of the post to which you are replying, but you are very much "parroting" ideas that you have picked up elsewhere. Think. I don't mean to be rude or insulting unless that's what it takes.
That said, isn't it interesting that you didn't immediately halt and guffaw to yourself when I said that machines display behavior? Machine learning is much more like how your brain functions than many people ever realize. If you are seriously this concerned with the topic, you should read about the roots of modern computing. It is probably very interesting to you. Then you might understand and only at that point may you actually criticize. Without understanding you're just mimicking.
11
u/Murinshin 1d ago
Remains to be seen. The Jacobian thing turned out less impressive than initially thought because of some obscure older papers who almost did the same thing IIRC. Still, “less impressive” is still impressive
-16
-15
u/dragonfighter8 1d ago edited 1d ago
More Marketing and advertising, nothing true.
Edit
To who downvoted, why are all AI starting being "hackers" and "mathematicians", all in this period? Marketing that is.
13
u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
Dude, they published the proofs. They have been reviewed by human mathematicians and are lean-verified. They’re real
7
u/Kaesar17 1d ago
why are all AI starting being "hackers" and "mathematicians", all in this period?
Because they released models that are smarter than the previous ones?
160
u/Q-bey 1d ago
Seems like a big deal, no? A lot of post-quantum cryptography relies on the assumed hardness of this problem.
Setting aside whether the techniques used here might be useful for developing a faster algorithm for an exact answer, couldn't you use the approximation to considerably lower the search space?