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Posted by milkshakes 9 hours ago

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science(openai.com)
419 points | 700 commentspage 6
melagonster 2 days ago|
Wow, so this is the end of science :(
AngryData 5 hours ago||
It solved a handful of novel esoteric problems out of hundreds fed to it. Far from the end of science.
xyzsparetimexyz 2 days ago|||
It's just another tool that can help solve problems. It doesn't know _what_ problems to solve. It turns out that a lot of old problems are now low hanging fruit for these new models. In terms of 'expanding the frontier', we've just discovered dynamite and can now blast our way through mountains. The bottom of the ocean or space are still as hard to reach as ever.
silver_sun 1 day ago||
It's not even predictable like dynamite. Sometimes it can blast through a mountain, impressively, the problem is you can't predict which mountain it works on. And other times it can't even make a dent in a molehill, which is perplexing given what it was capable of earlier. Can we even call it dynamite?
woeirua 2 days ago||
No bud, it’s just the beginning!
casey2 2 days ago||
People weren't their strongest even when most did manual labor. Now that humans are free from mental labor we work on creating and optimizing the best exercises for each mind. Couple that with restructuring transport infrastructure and diets many people will be smarter and fitter than at any time in history. They won't be able to outrun an automobile or out think an autointelligence.
bwestergard 6 hours ago||
"People weren't their strongest even when most did manual labor."

Is there good historical data on some measure of strength across representative populations over time in the modern era? I'm doubtful.

We do know that the introduction of agriculture diminished strength:

"Bone mass was around 20% higher in the foragers - the equivalent to what an average person would lose after three months of weightlessness in space.

After ruling out diet differences and changes in body size as possible causes, researchers have concluded that reductions in physical activity are the root cause of degradation in human bone strength across millennia."

cam.ac.uk/research/news/hunter-gatherer-past-shows-our-fragile-bones-result-from-physical-inactivity-since-invention-of

cindyllm 2 days ago||
[dead]
bryan0 7 hours ago||
I think there's another interesting story here about how this was apparently moderately flagged and triggered the flame-war detector which kept the story off the front page of HN 2 days ago[0]. I think people are having a hard time processing this information rationally(?)

What can we do to make conversations around these incredibly exciting and important topics more constructive? HN is where I expect to read expert comments on these topics, has this style of conversation moved elsewhere?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157930#49132926

tomhow 7 hours ago||
The main issue was that it was submitted late Friday night SF time, meaning it was overnight or Saturday everywhere in the world when the post had its chance on the front page. The flagging was minimal relative to the vote count and had no effect, and the flamewar detector would have been turned off sooner if moderators saw it sooner (it wasn't really a flamewar, just a lot of comments). It still spent 10 hours on the front page.

None of this is anything out of the ordinary; this kind of thing has always happened. The only real story here is that moderators sleep sometimes.

jrflo 7 hours ago|||
I think that HN is particularly negative towards AI because the vast majority of users here will have their prestigious CS careers disrupted by AI advances. So, there's an inherent negative bias towards this news.

I for one am really fascinated by AI's advances in science and math and would like to talk about it somewhere without the constant flamewars...

sothatsit 6 hours ago||
Extreme claims on posts like these also, rightfully, trigger people’s skepticism. I don’t think it’s wrong to question claims that math is dead as a field. But then it leads people to miss the overall trendline.

People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps leading to crazier and crazier results. The much more interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be, and what won’t. Writing has been much more stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there as well. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we get much better at manipulation?

And then there’s questions like, even if AI can answer increasingly complicated math questions, will we still need mathematicians to translate results to the real world, verify them, or decide where to push the frontier?

reducesuffering 5 hours ago||
> HN is where I expect to read expert comments on these topics, has this style of conversation moved elsewhere?

For people who have been paying attention to accurate predictions leading to our present state of the world, HN has collectively been reactionary, incorrectly dismissive, and incredibly behind the curve. In public, people are better informed on LessWrong and AI Twitter circles. That's where frontier researchers are. Barely here

bryan0 46 minutes ago||
Thanks for the pointer to lesswrong. The relevant article on this topic appears to be here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQYEPitFqztcRvBsS/openai-s-u...

Just glanced at it and it looks pretty good!

robinhouston 2 days ago||
In a way the most remarkable thing about this is that it isn't even at the top of the HN homepage. Even if this is a step up from what we've seen before, we're no longer astonished by the idea that AI can make significant advances in mathematics and computer science.
saithound 2 days ago||
I don't think that's it. Multiple or my friends from the target audience (academic mathematicians) admitted to scrolling past because the title made it sound like a review of last month's contributions, instead of 10 new ones.
gbnwl 2 days ago||
There are articles with far fewer upvotes and comments ranking higher on the front page right now, despite being the same age or older than this one. HNs opaque ranking system at it again.
antirez 2 days ago|||
This is not at the top as it is actively flagged by people that can't psychologically cope with the advances of AI. Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.
tomhow 9 hours ago|||
It wasn't heavily flagged. It was pulled down by the flamewar detector due to the large number of comments, and it slid under the radar due to only hitting the front page during overnight hours on Friday night/Saturday morning. It still spent 10 hours on the front page, but all during off peak hours. I've now created a new copy of the post so it can have prime time exposure.
Chance-Device 2 days ago||||
> people that can't psychologically cope with the advances of AI

Yes. And there are many of them. I wonder what would help them come to terms with it. Seriously, people are going to be grieving over this. Loss of identity, loss of social standing, ideas of entire future lives that will now never happen. The greatest crime people may hold AI guilty of is taking away their dreams.

lacy_tinpot 7 hours ago|||
It's given many more an opportunity to fulfill their dreams.
matteoraso 2 days ago|||
People have had to deal with getting their jobs automated away for centuries. None of this is new, and perhaps reminding ourselves of this is the best way to cope.
Chance-Device 2 days ago|||
I understand your sentiment, but I think this really is something different. This isn’t a craft going away, or even an industry being replaced, it’s potentially everything we do. It’s the ground being pulled away beneath people’s feet, everyone, everywhere all at once. I think the vacuum it leaves in people’s lives needs to be filled with something, and I haven’t heard any good ideas about this or how the transition should be managed at all.
nevertoolate 6 hours ago||
There is a glaring fallacy in your “AI will change everything as it is super intelligent” hypothesis. If it is so great thinker which can do everything why not just solve this social impact thingie? Or maybe it is not so capable?
Chance-Device 5 hours ago|||
I don’t think it’s magic. Things need to actually be made to happen regardless of intelligence, and that’s a social issue. Also if AI were powerful enough to fix everything by itself effortlessly it would already be far too powerful for us to control, and we probably shouldn’t allow that to happen on general principle.
lostmsu 5 hours ago|||
That assumes the particular problem actually has a solution (that you will like).
zeven7 1 day ago|||
This is the sentiment of people who haven't accepted that this is in fact something very different from what people have seen in the past.
tuesdaynight 2 days ago||||
I like your comments and agree with a lot of your points, including parts of this one. That said, please don't go to this route. A lot of the doomerism comes from financial insecurity fears. Try to remember that a lot of people are subconsciously afraid of losing their homes. I know that it is pretty hard to ignore them, but try to engage with people that do not dismiss 100% of AI accomplishments.
rwz 1 day ago||
> A lot of the doomerism comes from financial insecurity fears. Try to remember that a lot of people are subconsciously afraid of losing their homes. I

I think recognizing and accounting for your own personal biases is one of the requirements of the being an intellectually honest and rigorous online discourse participant.

Things could be genuinely impressive and fascinating even when directly challenge your ego and material well being.

bencarmin 2 days ago||||
This comment is about the tier of a Reddit atheist going to a funeral and telling a grieving family that "haha grandma is dead and there is no heaven".
lkey 2 days ago||||
Forums change with the times, and this one never existed solely to burnish your ego.

Moreover, mister elite, you don't know why this press release was flagged.

I'm not sure why we should privilege your bitter speculation over more mundane possibilities.

simianwords 2 days ago||
[flagged]
lkey 2 days ago||
You don't accept it is possible that it was initially flagged as a dupe or spam why? There is competition for primary submission here, especially for the primary AI companies.

Moreover, if it wasn't flagged at all, like you suggest, then the grandparent was inventing things to be bitterly resentful about... Which is not a behavior any forum should indulge.

fg137 2 days ago||||
Didn't know I was part of an elite.
w4yai 1 day ago||
You're were for 4 months. That's what we're talking about. It used to be.
antonvs 2 days ago||||
> Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.

It was always mainly a website for employees of an elite.

matt_daemon 2 days ago||||
It’s never been clear to me why the HN algorithm isn’t public. It’s obviously nowhere near as complex as something like Twitter, and of course isn’t a trade secret. The fact it’s private only furthers speculation like this.
BigTTYGothGF 2 days ago||||
> Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.

Never was.

dwb 2 days ago||||
So condescending. “Can’t psychologically cope”? Can you hear yourself? There’s some advances, but we’re losing a lot too. Don’t get dazzled by the hype.
pistoriusp 2 days ago||||
Interesting. I had no idea that a person could see what is flagged?
defrost 2 days ago||
If you page through the /newest listings you can see [flagged] and [flagged][dead] submissions.

eg. this: [flagged] A migrant surge tests Spain's open policies (economist.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131860

is clearly marked as flagged.

Unlike the current submission: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science (openai.com) which isn't [flagged].

* https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

robinhouston 2 days ago||
That's true, but submissions are only killed in that way if they receive a ‘fatal’ number of flags. However, flags lower the rank of a story even at non-fatal levels. What antirez is suggesting here is that the rank of this story has been lowered by flags – and that seems plausible, if you compare its rank to that of other stories with a similar age and number of points.
defrost 2 days ago||
[flagged] submissions aren't [dead] (killed), they are still active and can be upvoted and commented upon.

> if you compare its rank to that of other stories with a similar age and number of points.

Ranking is complicated enough here even before weighting, speed of initial upvotes can play against ranking, number of comments and the shape of the comment tree also affect ranking. And yes, various subjects and submission sources do get weightings that impact ranking.

What's funny, to myself at least, is that any attention at all is paid to "HN front page ranking" - I've been on again off again active here since 2008 .. and can't recall ever really looking at a default HN "front page" ever.

( There's /newest /newcomments /active etc to browse and sites such as https://hckrnews.com/ )

ofjcihen 1 day ago||||
Or maybe, just maybe, other people have different opinions than you?

Is that possible or is everyone else too common to have those?

bwfan123 2 days ago||||
> Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite

hah, sorry, we are plebs out here.

over_bridge 9 hours ago||
Jokes on him. I'm a peasant and I've been here for years
revetkn 2 days ago||||
[flagged]
root_axis 2 days ago||||
[flagged]
ltitu 2 days ago|||
We cannot psychologically stand that Redis is hyped by OpenAI:

https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/vector_datab...

How are the sales going?

halJordan 2 days ago||
If you're actively throwing away brand new greenfield research because it was generated by a computer at a company that stans industry-spanning software so that you can stay mad at your pet celebrity project, you might be the problem.
3aasgf 2 days ago||
You have to give AI one thing: It is vastly better at understanding text than AI boosters.

Which is a low bar, but still.

curt15 2 days ago|||
What about AI research itself? Is OpenAI close to automating its human staff out of a job?
zild3d 16 hours ago|||
> What about AI research itself? Is OpenAI close to automating its human staff out of a job?

It's more like they've already automated the parts of the jobs that the humans most closely thought of as the "their job"

ianm218 2 days ago||||
They and Anthropic have indicated that the models are substantially augmenting the research and doing large amounts of work autonomously at this point. Here is one of the many blog posts on it [1]. Many people would dismiss this as "marketing" so take it for what you will.

My guess from following this stuff quite closely is that these companies are still a couple years away from fully autonomous research staff.

[1]. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...

yewenjie 2 days ago|||
Yes, but they wouldn't publish that bit lest other companies steal the ideas.
gizmodo59 2 days ago|||
It’s also very very divided (x companies, oss vs not and other interests)
schleck8 2 days ago|||
This is one of the most impactful mathematical publications in history by all accounts

I think we've now hit a point where 99.9% of the population gloss over these types of AI advancements because of human competence being insufficient

No human could have published this because it requires paradigm shifts (e. g. Section 5) in multiple mathematical domains. Mastering one of them to this degree is rare, mastering 3+ pretty much non existent for humans.

jofzar 2 days ago||
Honestly just a bit burnt out on posts like this
bhawika_kaushik 6 hours ago||
[dead]
jsnell 9 hours ago||
Original submission (460 votes) two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49132058

For some reason comments got moved to this one.

tomhow 8 hours ago|
Its visibility was diminished due to the flamewar detector and most of its front page time being during overnight hours on Friday night/Saturday morning USA time. I've created a new copy to give it some primetime exposure, because it seems like an important enough announcement to warrant it.
k2xl 2 days ago||
[dead]
deyiao 2 days ago||
[dead]
drcongo 9 hours ago|
This thread has an absolutely wild points to comments ratio.
big_toast 8 hours ago|
tomhow explains they gave the story another shot here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158443
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