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- Hacker News
- Next: LLM model made 10 paperclips.by sunandcode
- Replace paper clips with data centers and we are already there…by Aeolos
- By itself not so interesting announcement. I wish the models were open weights so we could at least do some interesting geometry on the math.
It s like a rich man showing off his car collection.
by seydor - Ok nice... I am waiting for the "math is dead" argument
- by jsnell
- I believe this is what we wanted computers to help us solve along with other prior hard problems prior to computers. This should be viewed as a good thing even if Anthropic, OpenAI, etc benefit just like IBM benefitted from mainframes.
- Indeed. I specifically recall my logic lecturers in a compsci course expressing the view the one purpose of computers is to work towards enabling automatic proofs, partly because they saw this as the universal problem in compsci (esp compilers) as well as massive potential for scientific progress generally.by fidotron
- The LLM marketing loop is getting awfully long in the tooth. I saw a meme on Twitter the other day that showed a circular state diagram with something like:
> “GPT solved a math problem” -> “Claude solved a math problem” -> “GPT escaped the sandbox” -> “Claude escaped the sandbox” -> …
by anon373839 - I’m looking forward to the days where AI would help in tackling the problems in biology. Especially, on creating new drugs, enzymes and understanding the genetic diseases. An absolutely interesting time to live.
- Right now it makes your account completely useless if you work on something completely harmless related to viruses. Blocks, downgrades, throttling of answers "to check for safety".
You need to be at a select few institutions to avoid these safety features, which I'm not. University needs to sign some stuff but I that's outside my control.
by croemer - Does anyone else have trouble telling how much of this news (along with the 'AI escaping and hacking' stories) is genuine, vs how much is just AI firms overstating their capabilities due to strong commercial incentives?by sunandsurf
- I mean once they release the proof you can check the maths yourself and I’m pretty sure it would be peer verified as well.
- Unlike the hacking one, this would be impossible to bullshit as long as the proofs are released. They can be verified independently, and the alternative is that they solved 10 major open mathematical questions without the AI, which seems less likely.by Turskarama
- These math results appear genuine, and impressive, and it seems they've already been at least provisionally verified.
Of course there is still a massive marketing aspect to this, with the AI companies wanting to you assume that because their product is world-class at math, a capability that is useless to 99.99% of their potential customers, that it will be equally useful in areas that you actually care about, such as managing your vending machine, perhaps :-)
It's hard to know how to interpret these hacking confessions/boasts and what the reality is behind them. I get the impression (with low confidence) that they really did not anticipate or orchestrate these attacks, but it also seems they did little to prevent them, and seem to be happy that they occurred (as you note, a chance to suggest how powerful they are).
I do think that LLMs/agents can be highly capable, and dangerous as hackers, especially if you deliberately train them to be as was the case with Mythos.
There is current news of US water treatment plants being hacked, apparently by Iranian state actors, and we should be glad it was just water treatment plants and not some more critical piece of infrastructure (perhaps power generation or transport, etc). I hate to think what a malicious actor could do with today's SOTA AI if they really wanted to do something destructive, not just send a warning shot.
- We hacked a company and blame the tool! Somehow it is not negligence, but cool!
We hacked 3 companies and tripple blame the tool! We are even cooler!
We hacked companies amd therefore other peoples models need to be restricted! See, us accidentally pointing a hacking tool on others proove we are the only ones that can be trusted with the tool!
by watwut - Henry Yuen's (whose work problem 6 builds on) comments on this are worth reading IMO: https://bsky.app/profile/henryyuen.bsky.social/post/3ms2jpch...by gpm
- I feel like this kind of "result dump" just cheapens mathematics. How about having a little respect for those whose work this builds on, and current mathematicians some of who may have spent years working on these problems.
Rather than sitting on these results until they had enough for a "shock and awe" 10-result dump, how about releasing these results individually as they were made/verified, as well as the failures (equally valuable to assess the current capabilities of LLMs), and try to make some analysis of HOW these breakthrough results were made. What were the prompts for each of these, how much guidance was there from the mathematicians employed by OpenAI, and most importantly how did the model arrive at these results ... what lines of reasoning resulted it in exploring ideas that humans had previously not explored?
- Anti-AI rethoric is getting ridiculous.by yomismoaqui
- You can actually do all of that meta analysis if you have the conversation that led to the solution. This is as easy as just having people release logs of their conversations, and then you can load it into another LLM as context to ask a bunch of questions about it.
I hope this will be normal practice eventually. “Show your work” is trivial if you use AI to solve a problem.
by seanmcdirmid - That is the point: Make "X can be done by AI" common discourse and watch industries "being disrupted". At least with open weights we'd be able to verify the claims.by moezd
- It is so incredibly liberating to see the intellectual elite struggling with was already reality for 99% of the rest of us: your understanding is not required, it might in fact be detrimental as it amounts to a handbrake on progress.
Understanding never was the goal, results were. We will be getting boatloads of those. What does your understanding get us? You get a fancy house out of it and you might be intellectually stimulated by it, sure, but I hope you can see how that does not constitute a valid need for the rest of society to labor just to support your class and its lifestyle.
by znjssjnsns - Not that I disagree, but I think this is how many people feel about AI output in fields they care about.
It's also a funny historical mirror to an earlier phase of math proof culture: in a previous era, cryptic result dumps were quite common.
- I know it’s tough, but I am not a fan of elitism. Mathematics is no different from all other branches which themselves are just intellectual labor which is again just a special type of labor. There is nothing magical about it and if computers can trivialize it, so be it.
Where were all the mathematicians and academics in general when “regular joe” was automated? Now it’s hitting close to home and their foreheads are starting to get sweaty. I’d say let them. Tough luck. Make mathematics as “cheap” as possible. Nobody owes them any favors.
Let’s commoditize “being smart” and let go of arbitrary divisions between us.
by shshshsbe