I don't have enough information about the announcement for it to mean much to me. I don't know much about this field of maths. I don't know how many mathematicians were actively working on this problem. It could be zero, which would indicate it's not really that interesting. The article gushes about how it's a Very Important Problem, but it's not even mentioned on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conjectures_by_Paul_Er.... I'm sure the busy folk at openAI will fix that soon however. Furthermore the extensive dishonesty of companies like openAI makes me suspicious of just how this was achieved. Overall the announcement is of little interest to my "priors", although I don't typically think in such terms.
It is extremely well known. Lots of people have tried to solve it and it stood basically stuck for 80 years. It is getting harder every day to downplay these models.
Given its elementary nature (very easy to state), you can bet that a lot of very bright people have worked on it (I know of one MIT graduate who specialized in Geometry had a lot of interest in it).
I don't believe the result at all. I think it contains faulty logic. Perhaps the mathematicians involved can read the tea leaves and decide something interesting happened, but all this AI psychosis bullshit still refuses to accept that AIs do not, and cannot, have a mental model of the world.
Moreover, model output is incredibly good at looking credible but being wrong. It has NEVER produced something correct for me in a field of which I am an expert without some external oracle to validate claims (like e.g., Lean)
At this point the term "AI psychosis" is the more apt label for AI skeptics. Here we have literal Fields medalists vouching for correctness and relative importance of the result, but who cares, "I don't believe the result at all". Just pure denial of reality.
You should believe that the proof works at least as much as any ither paper in mathematics. The proof has been scrutinized by experts and simplified and improved. If you don't believe that then I'm sorry but you are deluding yourself.
The GP said "I like how everyone laughed when OpenAI said their models will have PhD-Level Intelligence", and you said you still laughed, so I just wanted to confirm if you did laugh at that. Apparently you did not. Thanks for the confirmation. I think you should not, given your admittedly limited understanding.
You don't know the names of the mathematicians who've given their thoughts on this? If not, you really should just not comment on anything mathematical ever again.
I do know their names. However I'm not in the field and there are many cases in recent years of high-profile scientists putting their weight behind highly dubious claims. Thanks for the advice, by the way.
Note that I'm not disputing the validity of the counterexample itself.
That's fair. If you're familiar with mathematics culture though, you'd know that "LLM hype" is not really in their blood and is certainly not something that gains you PR points. I think it's safe to take their comments at face value. I do think the ice is beginning to thaw though and perhaps in the next few years, there will begin to become more of a hype phase in math if some really high profile problems begin to fall to AI, although one might argue at that point that the hype would be deserved.
Doesn't make much sense, does it? If I accept that I don't have enough information on something, then I withhold judgement. There's nothing so reserved about mockery and cynicism. You're not cautious, you outright hedge that it's all a lie, and paint everyone else to be a complete idiot for thinking at all otherwise.
The world runs on trust, specifically trusting expert advice. It'd seem that due to resource constraints and scale, that's the best available option. By extension, there should be absolutely nothing weird or surprising on people following suit. It's why these companies themselves rely on expert counsel, and defer to their appraisals for marketing. The opposite is what's weird and unusual, and what requires more substantiation.
It's interesting that those who come out swinging against "trusting the experts", or really, trusting anyone else but them, not only ~never acknowledge this, but are seemingly outright proud of it, considering it as their own unique little trait, egocentrically revelling in it. It's almost as if epistemic rigor and truthfulness was not their actual concern.
Woohoo, I'm distrustful and cynical. Behold my unfathomable wisdom! Bonus points if they're also hurtful, because flipping the arrow on "hard truths -> hurt feelings" is a masterclass in reasoning too, of course.
I can appreciate faulting experts and organizations for misusing people's trust, and looking out for this angle, but given how unavoidable and fundamentally useful trusting itself is, blaming people for defaulting to trusting makes no sense to me whatsoever. It comes across as just the usual trope of blaming the individual. If you're from a lower-trust culture / environment, I can appreciate why you'd have a more distrustful default disposition (and why people might come across as suckers), but the principle still holds.
The problem was pretty well known, and had many human attempts. There's some room to argue that the right humans hadn't attempted it, as the solution used advanced methods from another field of math. But imho, whereas many prior AI victories could be explained by not enough human attention, there is no such excuse in this case, and one should acknowledge this is a notable achievement.
No it's not. Where do you come up with this? Just because you searched the phrase on Google and there's a single result for it on a wiki? Who do you know that's using this expression regularly?
I've spent years watching prediction markets and finding them to be, by a wide margin, the most accurate way for me to understand the world. It is not remotely close.
It sucks that they're going mainstream, providing incentives to bad actors to profit from their power, and it sucks that they've gone so heavily for the predatory gambling market to boot.
> the most accurate way for me to understand the world
Are you sure it's not survivorship bias or similar? I've seen multiple trend lines that are very confident only to switch to the opposite outcome at the very end.
Are you sure you're not the one seeing the survivorship bias? Something that is 10% likely to happen ends up switching to the opposite outcome at the very end 1/10 times. There are thousands of prediction markets up at any given time, so there are going to be plenty of examples of unlikely events happening.
Prediction markets, like many other micro-financialization trends, is unhealthy for society. I'm not going to trust research from the very company selling the product. History provides ample examples of how that works without the need to gamble on it.
I would invite you to look into the statistics on foreclosures, bankruptcy, and gambling hotline traffic which compare jurisdictions that have allowed this stuff vs not. Those with demographic breakdowns help to show those most at risk.
Polymarket has $5 million of wagers on "Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by end of April?"
The toll Iran charges for safe passage is $2 million per ship, and at current prices such a ship would be carrying about $200 million of oil. Oh, and we live in a world where a single billionaire will happily spend $200 million to influence politics.
The polymarket number merely shows that nobody's paid to make it higher or lower yet.
This is reasoning from a mistake. Market valuation is about VALUE, which is an abstract idea assigned by the market, which is not the same thing as MONEY, which can be "printed"[1]. Market values go up and down on their own, irrespective of the amount of money in circulation. They reflect consensus (often irrational) for what the securities "should be trading at", and that's all. If the currency inflates or deflates, the markets do too.
[1] Though recognize that by engaging in that frame you're painting yourself as an unserious amateur being influenced by partisan media. Real governments do not "print money" in any real sense, and attempts to conflate things like bond debt with it run afoul, yet again, of the money/value mistake.
Translation is big thing, maybe not the same scale as railroads, but still important. The rest is of dubious economic utility (as in you can do it with LLM easier than without, but if you think a little you could just as well not do it at all without losing anything). On the other hand, disrupting signalling will have pretty long-lasting consequences. People used to assume that a long formal-sounding text is a signal of seriousness, certainly so if it's personally addressed. Now it's just a sign of sloppiness. School essays are probably dead as a genre (good riddance). Hell, maybe even some edgy censorable language will enter mainstream as a definite proof of non-LLMness - and stay.
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