Posted by mbustamanter 14 hours ago
One solution is to ban LLM’s, to artificially create a demand for human thought, that just feels like living in an artificially constructed zoo.
Another solution is humans don’t do anything that AI can do better , / doesn’t need the human touch. So I suppose we will all become artists, sportsmen or politicians, the only jobs that will remain except for select few. Maybe this is ok, I don’t know.
Another solution is we find a way to mind-meld with AI so that human + Ai >> AI alone. This is dystopian, who gets to decide who mind melds with AI, how much will it cost etc etc.
For the stupid copes that the prompt required human ingenuity, let me first add that the author used GPT5.6 to write most of the prompt. He just gave some mild direction. That amount of direction does not require deep expertise and the expertise required will keep falling with time, eventually an undergrad can create this loop and then maybe a high school student.
And prompt engineering / loop engineering nonsense is not real. Calling it engineering is a psy-op because it is something simple, imprecise and future models will be much better at it than you.
Memes like the permanent underclass and the massive incentive of replacing workers across the world does not bode well for a better outcome for people across the world.
There will be people benefiting from advances in these fields.
Neither you nor I will be one of them.
looks like you met the reverse Huang lol
I wonder which one that is.
Should I ban table saws because they make people too good at woodworking? Should we ban right-angles?
This line of thought doesn't lead anywhere fruitful.
gig economy is a blessing to keep the LCD busy and doing something productive instead of being nihilistic losers
it’s better to focus on how to keep these “knowledge” workers busy for the AI age
they don’t like to work and complain even on a w2 job (where someone else had to figure out how to capitalize them) so in many ways they’re far more dangerous and hopeless.
Also see comparative advantage re best roles for each actor in an economy
If AI improves human productivity so much that millions of people no longer need to work that should be an incredible thing. But the flawed structure of our society punishes those people rather than freeing them to persue endeavors that interest then.
Anything based on a free market just ends up in.. this.
We can also remove all of the loopholes that result in the biggest companies paying basically no taxes. I also think it may make sense to have a dramatically different tax structure for businesses than effectively income tax.
Outside of really bad luck I've never seen a case where someone was in a situation of working hard + making reasonably okay decisions + struggling, and that's purely due to there being avenues available where you can be rewarded well for your effort if you're of average+ intelligence.
AI is threatening to take that opportunity away.
Literally anything you wanted to make is no plausible to make if not now then in the next couple years.
The thing you’re worried about is capitalism and the connection with working to having the right to keep living. If you can throw off that mental shackle you can start to see how this can be amazing, but you have to drop the idea that everyone has to work at a job for someone else to provide some service in order to do it. It’s hard, I know, but change your mindset some and dream for a better world and we can make it.
Yeah, it's fun for 30 minutes.
Working all day, then not wanting to do much else after because you're tired, is also fun for all of 30 minutes.
People are all “shucks how am I going to be able to justify my career at $job” and are missing the bigger opportunity. Such a lack of imagination I see…
The reality is nobody is going to build robots to clean the ocean because there is no money to be made. There will be robots to clean rich people's pools, sure. And it will put pool boys out of a job, great.
What if money wasn't a thing? What if that wasn't the only incentive in the economy? What if there were other ways to balance supply and demand curves (which is basically the principle use for money) so we could reduce shortages, etc.
Dream big man, I'm serious! And who cares if there is no money to be made? Like, what are you (individually you) doing to create the world you want to live in? What world do you even want to live in?
there will always be disruption and frictions, 頑張って ください
It’s just depression that another avenue for human craftsmanship has been taken over by the machines. Humans are not just infinite consumers. If AI solves all of humanity problems, it’s like living in a zoo, not a life worth living imo.
It's good if we can have robots building things instead of having humans slumped over a workbench in a sweatshop piecing things together. It's good if we can have LLMs spitting out code rather than CS grads working 15 hour days at fintech startups or whatever. The conditions were never (ever) good before.
And, it won't be like a zoo - you'll be able to go wherever you want, do more or less whatever you want. Think about living in The Culture, or the Star Trek universe or whatever. There are options beyond "I'm a pet to the machines." Think big, dream big, then help make it a reality!
Like, out in space you're still going to need a human to make decisions because you can't wait 30min for the tight-beam signal to get back to earth. Also, we're pretty good at soaking up rads and still being "useful" - at least so far I don't see that being a major advantage to the robots. Maybe our place is to be the deep space mechanics that keep the robots alive? I don't know, regardless, you should dream big. What kind of world do you want to live in? Ok, how do we make that world happen?
My big (somewhat unspoken and somewhat immature dream) is that advances in regenerative health tech fix my optic nerves and I can get into the cockpit again one day, then maybe later I can fly some space vehicle like I wanted to since I was a 12 year old. Immature I know, but I miss flying still.
Is that world possible without AI? Probably/maybe? But it's a lot more plausible in a world where we have folded every protein, we have robot surgeons doing robotic procedures, AI generated research, etc.
I actually want to exit. I want to live in a society where humans flourish not AI.
Actually one just needs to walk the streets of Japan and compare that to US. Tokyo has hundreds of small shops with humans doing specific niche stuff, perfecting their arts. That’s all so beautiful.
America has massive warehouses and supermarkets, with completely uninterested and bored out of their mind humans working and I suppose now we will replace them with robots. Great I guess. Maybe all Americans should just sit at home and consume Netflix and Doritos ig.
I want technology to increase human flourishing, not turn us into WallE humans. I am only interested in technological progress when it is done by humans who trained their whole lives for it, as it is a display of human excellence and that can be a beautiful thing. I’m not interested in it if some AI builds it.
Like, I'm building a cabin in the woods (original, I know), but you can build things and do things. You can be that kind of human if you want. But, if Americans could sit at home and consume netflix and doritos I suppose some would, but many would decide to start doing other things too.
I don't think the worlds we want to live in are that far apart to be honest. If I could make a living doing it, I'd try to build wooden sailboats for a living. That would be awesome. I would love it! In a world where I don't have to work to win capitalism tokens, I would probably spend a few years just building wooden sailboats to sail around the bay by my cabin.
The only way you see people flourishing is through coercion, by society or by the world. You'd explicitly rather prolong this codependency for your aesthetic preferences even, as per your own words. We're already just circus monkeys in your world.
You cannot fathom people pursuing self-improvement because e.g. developing or being capable is inherently enjoyable. You only see a world where such activities are a must, or a manufactured must. That's your measuring stick and that's the entire pie for you.
I mean this in the least combative way possible, but it sounds like you have things to sort out on your end first, before charting a course for the world to follow.
Dude, I'm nearly 40. I've seen the shit. When I was flying for a living, literal close friends died because of the results of avarice.
Dream big dude! This constant "doom and gloom" narrative is toxic to your ability to flourish. I have been there, I understand the urge to doom and gloom, but we make the world we want to live in. We do. We choose it.
What world do you want to live in? What is your "optimal" version of the future? How do we get there? What steps would we have to take to make it a reality?
If your vision of the future is "oh, like 10 years ago before $problem_du_jour" then you're already off to a bad start because we ain't going back. There's no regulation that will actually change anything materially (seriously, you think the people getting rich off all this stuff in Congress will voluntarily shoot themselves in the foot?), there's no way to go but forward, so how do we proceed?
I want to live in The Culture, or something like it if it's possible. So, let's start building it and ask permission later.
Maybe average human lifespan gets kicked up to 200 years or whatever and we make do with robots to fill in the gaps in labor with robots?
I don’t know? But this kind of seems to track with how we’re trending now?
People in the real world all having god mode cheats is good, actually
Or imagine a world where we could basically cure every disease? Or a world where people could assume any form factor that they wanted? I don't know, the list goes on and on in a post-scarcity world... and we're seeing how we basically live in a sort of digital post-scarcity now and it is really cool.
If I need a software tool these days I don't buy it, I tend to see if I can make it. Now imagine that for physical things? What a time to be alive.
We also have humans who essentially live post scarcity lives on the back of a monetary windfall, yet their stories are strangely quite often depressing ones.
I think their is good reason to believe most human desires are illusions.
Can I make food with LLMs? Can I build a house and make clothes? This is stupid. No real wealth is being created for the general population here.
Dream bigger buddy! We can make the world better, we’re not powerless here.
I’m convinced many of you barely go outside and have the capacity for original thoughts.
Sloppity slop slop.
- Hasn't been peer reviewed yet, so take with a grain of salt. This applies to all claimed proofs, not just AI-generated ones. Even humans hallucinate proofs too!
- The prompt is on page 27 here[1]. It is ten pages of advanced mathematics priming the model in the right direction, apparently informed by a year of prior research. That doesn't invalidate the result if it is genuine, but it is worth noting that this wasn't a matter of "ChatGPT, solve this unsolved problem. Make no mistakes." and required substantial domain expertise and human research beforehand.
Sure. That is not even remotely the point I was getting at. Already we see the thread filling up with comments about how human skills are irrelevant, using a mathematics PhD applying his expert skills in a way that the people who are saying that could never have done to justify their inane conclusion.
It wasn't the case for this, but when OpenAI disproved the Unit Distance Conjecture, it was really done autonomously by an automated AI pipeline with a completely AI-generated prompt. No human expertise required at all in the process (well, except for the final human verification).
Saying that's a solution "done autonomously by an automated AI pipeline" is like saying that a self driving car that can only take you to the nearest train station after which you have to ride the rain to where you're going is "autonomously" driving you to your destination. Which is exaggerating the autonomy of the system, rather.
It's not that AI brings equality, but rather that the output varies depending on how much background knowledge you have. You could call it a stratification of input
I'm starting to feel like there's no place left for programmers like me who focus on quickly churning out MVPs.
The obvious baby’s first process is “plan -> execute” but as we learn about the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs you have to start unpacking that process into planning, prototyping, testing, validation, reviews, and tons of research. If you treat it like an extension of your brain that can automate some thought processes, it becomes a lot more powerful.
That skill comes with experience. Most people don't have it immediately after PhD.
Well it seems more and more that 3 months of 500k GPUs churning through data 24/7 to build high dimensional landscapes also counts as experience.
And programming, as the programmer who created Eliza once said, is the act of becoming a legislator of your own universe. So even if there are black boxes, if you want to build a program that fits your own worldview, studying is essential.
> you can't have one LLM to read your mind to prompt another LLM
One might even say that this remarkable facility can be used to “read” the ideas from one entity’s mind, such that after sufficient dialog the second entity obtains a (possibly lossy, but there are mitigations for this) copy of the ideas of the first. You might further be surprised to learn that this sort of idea-transfer business using language has already been happening in our society and species for quite some time indeed.
edit: it reminds me of all that I have to wade through after I've asked an LLM a straightforward question and the answer should have been "yes, you're right."
There are two ways to solve a problem. Either solve the problem, or deem it irrelevant.
The implication here is that, you, the human operator, clearly are just confused. The LLM knows best. You're just a stupid human. The LLM knows objective truth, you do not. You have concerns, questions, the LLM didn't understand your question "properly"? Do not worry, the LLM objectively knows the optimal course of action. It thought through the implications of what you said, took into account all possible data, and came to the objectively correct design for your software, your society, your life.
In some sense, this problem would have been a societal problem within the next several decades anyways, but it's been hyper-accelerated by AI.
Debuggers, testing techniques, testing layers
Essentially things that could be used to ground your ai back to reality and work good for humans too
Of course there is. The same way this was only possible as a result from the professor who prompted it with his specialized 10 page prompt and most importantly his deep knowledge of the problem space, the muscle memory and intuition you've built over the years is what will allow you to get more out of any AI than some guy who says "make a door dash clone" as the entire prompt
I've been realizing that there are more books tied to my background knowledge than I expected, but I'm not sure what will happen as AI advances further.
These days, I'm living for the fun of building my own personal wiki on my homepage
this is changing my mind, at least about experts using advanced tools like any profession where it's like the magic of watching a lifetime of hard-earned skill at work
> After seeing OpenAI’s CDC result, I wrote a much more elaborate prompt following the same general methodology. My prompt is about ten pages long and attached at the end of the preprint (see collection of links below). There is a lot baked into this prompt, on approaches to try and also on how exactly the model should proceed, but it's built exactly in the style of OpenAI's CDC prompt. One note is that I gave it a relatively small error requirement, to prove the quadratic lower bound under order d⁻⁴ accuracy.
> After 148 minutes, GPT-5.6 Sol Pro returned a proposed proof resolving the quadratic dimension dependence at accuracy of order d⁻³. After checking things myself, I formally verified the proof in Lean, and it passed the formal verification check.
>So I wouldn't really say that this result is using or creating some fundamentally new techniques in convex geometry or optimization theory. What this means from my perspective is that if a result is attainable with existing techniques, modern AI methods will be able to solve those problems. I don't think researchers in math/TCS will be made obsolete, but I think it will instead no longer make sense to work on any low-hanging, or even medium-hanging (you know what I mean) fruit. We'll be needed for problems where actual novel approaches are needed.
While they’ll never have the same subjective experience as humans, what stops an LLM from applying similar lines of thought* in a manner that results in a novel conjecture?
They are prediction machines, and so are we in a way. We can give them nearly limitless resources to scale their predictive capabilities. We have billions of years of training baked in. They distill directly from our knowledge and can walk down paths that no human has before.
It’s silly to say they’ll never do anything novel.
At their current capabilities, it sounds like they are already capable of being a specific type is research assistant. What will that look like in 10-20 years?
AI can be totally biased...
The fact that it can spout bullshit all day long to a human who can be tired and would actually act on the said bullshit, is not very comforting...
For example, an LLM could confidently declare something a tired human would take as a fact, but would backfire in a real world.
One thing is that an LLM can never assume, or find out, an inconsistency in its training data. Novel ideas often require correction of existing assumptions. As far as I understand, it is impossible, by design, for LLMs to contradict what is in its training data.
For example, an LLM trained on the data from an internet comprised of people who believe in the earth centric hypothesis can never say "Hey, that cannot be correct", or come up with the heliocentric alternative
But maybe it is not applicable to pure Math...
You state this as a fact - are you aware the question is unresolved?
EDIT: I'd love to know why you're downvoting me for stating a known fact.
I can confidently state that GPT-5.6 Sol is not experiencing the same reality as me. They _might_ be "experiencing" and I personally think they are, but their reality and experience is not the same as ours.
Maths was already infinite, it's still infinite, but who wants to spend all their lives changing rooms inside Hilbert's Hotel?
Most of us aren't Terence Tao
How's It Hanging, Brother?
Sure, it's not a breakthrough that opens new roads in mathematics- is this where the goalpost has moved now?
Oh wait, sorry, I do know why you're getting downvoted. Fear.
Humans have a deep need to be special magic flowers - and they can't stand it when science eventually shows them they're not.
But if the current trends continue, Elon will own all of the robots and the rest of us will be at his mercy.
How we change that - I don't know. But I do know we don't change it by putting our heads in the sand. AI is here and it is real. We MUST take it seriously. Shunning is not a viable option.
Whether that's UBI, or Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, or UBS, or some AI managed economy, or some other such thing, we need to decide that "hey, we don't want to tied survival to output under our current system."
That's really the Rubicon we have to cross, and there are a LOT of people who can't really come up with a better way in their own heads yet.
Look, we all saw how things can be during the pandemic. That was a dark time, but it also gives us a model, we can just... do things. We just have to decide to do them.
WTF does the pandemic have to do with this? "dark time", oh yeah, people stuck at home watching Netflix, what an incommensurable suffering!
Buddy, I can admire the naive childish optimism to a degree, but come on. "We just have to all decide". Do you live in a Disney movie?
I'm not sure, but if I may guess, I suspect he's talking about the fact that the entire US shut down for a year and people survived because the US Government printed money and gave it away free to businesses so they wouldn't collapse. (PPP loans.)
If we can do something like that for the pandemic, we can do something similar when push really comes to shove.
Like, am I crazy here? The rules that we live by are largely made up and the points don't matter - we can decide to live in a better world if we want to. It's hard, and there are obstacles, for sure, but this appeal to doom for the sake of doom just... why? We have made unfathomable progress over the last century and if we keep trying we can make progress like that over the next century too!
OK, this is Twitter-level conversation here, not interested. But hey, stay positive, more power to you.
But we also decided during that time to literally pay people to stay home for awhile. That was a really revolutionary thing and it was awesome. We could decide to do that again.
You can ad hominem until the cows come home, but yeah, we literally just kind of have to collectively decide that there are better ways to do things.
There's a fantastic book called "The Last Emperor of Mexico" I read a few years ago that really talks about how the idea of a Republic or Democracy in general was a pretty novel concept in the mid 1800s. People were a lot more skeptical about it than we're lead to believe now. But eventually, the ideas of aristocracy and some "well bred" group of various types of monarchs became silly on it's face. Now the default is that we should have some sort of democratic representation. That would seem utopian AF in 1820.
Well, we're going to have to bridge that sort of gap for getting rid of the need to justify our existence through work too. The transition is going to be weird, but we'll have to come up with something else and run with it.
Dream big buddy, I know it's hard, lord knows I do, but dream big, and work little by little towards those things you want to see in the world.
I'm very curious how people reconcile their fear/hatred of AI with actual objective reality. This is actually what interests me most about the whole AI thing. How we tell ourselves what we tell ourselves.
There was a good comment on the Pelican bicycle svg yesterday about how these models aren't getting much better beyond what the companies focus training them on. I think that's what's happening in this case too, they probably put this in the training set.
- Claude isn't doing that
as evidence to support the assumption that
- it's a marketing trick
Which is obviously non sequitur, as if it were a marketing trick, Anthropic could do it too. Anthropic isn't known for not spending on marketing.
Honestly, nowadays I question human's reasoning ability more than I question AI's.
Because Claude can't do it. Anyone who tells you that Fable is better than GPT 5.6 at pure math is lying to you.
I do think it's very likely that OpenAI pays for solutions like these to put in the training set, and then we get material like this Reddit thread. They market themselves as selling "intelligence", and solving these math problems is something people view as highly intelligent. I'm not a mathematician, so I cannot fully judge it, but based on my experience using LLMs for novel problems in other domains, they seem to really struggle with things that aren't common. That leads me to believe they train for specific outcomes like this. Also, there are a lot of jobs out there for data annotation, including software problems (Meta has basically reorganized its entire engineering department to create training data for coding problems).
This comment on the Pelican svg better articulates what I'm getting at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950883
The way you should read this is (IMO) not that LLMs have somehow achieved AGI, but that a lot of mathematical research is more about knowing a huge amount of mathematical background, being stubborn, and getting lucky with an approach than it is about brilliant insight. Many people who don't think of themselves as particularly mathematically gifted could have made progress on these problems if they were given enough time and were interested enough. What's notably different about 5.6 (and born out in benchmark after benchmark) is that it does seem to genuinely "reason" through stuff at all -- without that, persistence is pretty worthless because the LLM just goes wildly off the rails if it's put to work for long enough (5.6 itself will still do this if it can't find an answer in a reasonable amount of time).
You are correct that LLMs are trained on existing proofs but hiring researchers to solve unsolved problems is just unrealistic, both in terms of how none of the mathematicians simply came out and took credit for their own discovery or exposed this, and how training sets are not easily memorized (rather, the meta techniques are learned).
OpenAI just has better training methods and techniques for pure math over Anthropic, it’s one of their biggest strengths
I hope people are screenshotting this stuff. This really needs to be documented. It's remarkable how wild it's getting.
Making the parrots ever more complex and training on ever more data produced by intelligent, creative beings may make them more useful or convincing but does at no point give rise to intelligence or creativity.
Not much to do about it, I guess, but continue to call it out.
Is "stochastic parrot" too disrespectful for you? Do you think it is a slur?
edit: and this is a genuine question, also. How do you do stochastic parrot = "just summarize everything" = "no form of creativity" = "fear/hatred" so quickly?
Are summaries not creative? Are Maxwell's equations not summaries? Do people hate and fear parrots?
Alternatively, if you think that even Maxwell was a stochastic parrot, then presumably almost every human who has ever lived was also a stochastic parrot except a few rare examples like Einstein. Not sure what definition you are using but it seems too broad to be useful.
It's doing math proofs. At this point, it's fully clear that objective reality is that the LLM is not parroting anything here.