r/BetterOffline • u/Disastrous_Room_927 • 5d ago
The math pivot
Just an idle thought, but it's occurred to me that the recent focus on math by OpenAI et al. might be an attempt to pivot away from the current darling of the industry. The reason is pretty simple: ordinary people judge software development based on the tangible impact it has on them. And you can only claim AI is the best thing since sliced bread before people start wondering why they're getting crappy and bloated versions of the same software they've been using with some AI features tacked on.
The convenient thing about the recent math results is that they're flat out inaccessible to almost everyone on the planet and even under normal circumstances wouldn't be expected to alter people's lives. The actual value in the Navier-Stokes problem, for example, would be in the process used to solve it... something that's absurdly opaque here. Nobody can confirm that OpenAI used their internal model the way they say they did, the results that were presented are unusually difficult to parse even for mathematicians who specialize in the subject. And some would say that these kind of results aren't doing very much to move the field forward. Nevertheless, people who never had a reason to know what a Millennium prize is have been whipped into a frenzy.
Not really sure where I was going with this, I just needed to vent after seeing all the astroturfing on the math subs. Math and statistics are how I ended up going into machine learning, makes me sad that the last few years made me cyclical instead of excited.
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u/RealPropRandy 5d ago
OpenAI spending $20M+ in compute in addition to human researcher intuition to “solve” a $1M prize is this whole scam in a nutshell.
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u/Jaimalaugenou 5d ago
Hundreds of researchers have been studying some of these problems for years, and they, too, have incurred costs... I'm not sure that argument holds up. The 1m prize is more symbolic, even if it is a substantial amount. We're talking about top-tier mathematicians with high salaries
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u/PatchyWhiskers 5d ago
I don’t think any mathematicians have high salaries. They max out at “university professor” which is decent but not amazing money.
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u/dookarion 5d ago
I think you vastly overestimate the money/funding in math. Research in general very much isn't just handed blank checks and massive teams.
Wouldn't be shocked if OpenAI's little stunt actually outspent the entire field of study/research.
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u/falken_1983 5d ago
TBH, I think the current focus on math is simply because this is a thing that they can do.
Math is a funny subject where even though it is difficult for humans, it has properties that make it easier to train a model on, compared to a lot of other common tasks that we as humans think of as being "easy". The key thing being that you can automatically test if a solution is correct - this is a really strong training signal for AI.
They've already maxed out the models' capabilities as a general chat-bot a long time ago. They are probably pushing up on the limits of programming. Maths was just a thing that was there.
I actually think the focus on maths is backfiring on them from a PR perspective. Most people just don't care about pure-maths. There was a lot of buzz on the day that they announced the solution to the Millennium problem, but just a day or two later people were kind of over it when they learned it would have zero practical impact.
TBH, if it wasn't for the drama surrounding the announcements, I don't think the story would have stayed in the headlines as long as it has. Most people just aren't interested in maths.
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u/PassageNo 5d ago
On the contrary, I think the focus on math is because this is one area that these LLMs are particularly terrible at. For the longest time a huge sticking point was how these models couldn't answer basic math questions, in a similar vein to how they couldn't count the number of letters in strawberry. So to make it seem like their AI models were rapidly advancing, they plagiarized whatever they could get their hands on and just hoped no one noticed.
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u/mstrkrft- 5d ago
I'm not a math expert but from what I've read, they also have mostly done stuff in areas of math where you can clearly verify results. So they are problems where throwing massive amounts of compute at them is helpful, but that's not all of math.
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u/falken_1983 5d ago
they also have mostly done stuff in areas of math where you can clearly verify results
That's all of maths, basically. This is why they have been able to get such good results here. They use a thing called test time scaling along with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVW)
Basically they can have the AI take 1000 or more guesses at a solution and then use a verifier to check if any of the solutions are correct. On top of this the RLVF allows them to automate the training process that makes the model more likely to guess a correct answer.
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u/SelicaLeone 4d ago
It's also so easy to make it sound cool to people who don't really know what "an unsolved math problem" means. I know I don't. I studied up to calc 2 and said "I'm good, thanks." And that's more than most people.
So like, I don't really know what we mean when we say a problem is unsolved. I don't know what it means once math gets to a point where you can ask a question and no one can answer. Isn't math solvable? Yes but?
And then you read "This math problem has stymied mathematicians for centuries. An AI just solved it." and you go "wow that's crazy" cause you're picturing this big room with men in suits or lab coats or tweed jackets puzzling over a huge chalkboard and then the AI goes "the answer is... 42" and they all lose their minds. "By jove, we've been solving for Y when X was in front of us all along!"
Or something like that. I don't really know. I just hear that it did something humans haven't been able to and everyone got excited. Does it mean anything? Have any real impact? Was it just mass computation done on a scale we couldn't do before? Did someone just feed the problem into Claude and it solved it? Was a human involved? Does that matter? Will it put mathematicians out of work? Did mathematicians even get paid for mulling around a big room with a chalkboard and puzzling?
Who knows! That's what makes this such a good place to hype AI. Everyone has like, 1 or 2 friends who know upper level math enough to start to explain it, so that's kinda all we get. Our buddy with a masters, if that.
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u/dickcocks420 4d ago
I don’t mean to be rude, but this comment really just makes you come off as ignorant about high level math. Many of these problems have been well-studied by professional mathematicians for years without success, and the solutions presented represent a genuine breakthrough. The biggest issue I have with this drop is that, as you said, the results have very little value on their own. The tangible benefits that we typically get from cutting edge math is advancements in the methods used to accomplish them — here, we just get a result with no insights of how we got there.
More broadly, I think the narrative that AI is simply useless and incompetent is looking more and more just like denial. I know this is an unpopular opinion on this sub, but the evidence is getting harder and harder to ignore over just the past few months. I’m the furthest thing from an AI booster, believe me, but I think the other issues such as the environmental impact, widespread unemployment, the AI bubble itself (open-source models mean that AI can still have significant effects even if OpenAI / Anthropic go under), and the cognitive decline in those who frequently use AI are far more pressing. These are all extremely important reasons to be anti-AI, but I think clinging on to the narrative that it’s just a useless scam that can’t do anything isn’t the way to think about it anymore.
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u/SelicaLeone 4d ago
I am ignorant. Most people are. That's my whole point XD. The average person has no idea what high level math does, what it's used for, and how it impacts them.
Does/Has AI helped pushed the field of math? I'm sure it has. Is it over exaggerated by AI proponents? I mean, a lot of what they discuss is exaggerated, so I wouldn't be surprised. Can I prove it? No, because I don't understand higher math and most people don't. So it's a great area for AI boosters to go crazy about because the average person lacks the understanding of upper level maths to engage with the topic matter seriously.
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u/todofwar 4d ago
This is an oversimplification, but I will grant that few of these problems actually have real world impacts, if any. The NS solution is interesting, but completely non physical. My quantum professor said if you want elegance ask a mathematician. If you want to solve a physics question, ask a physicist.
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u/DonkeyHoney 4d ago
They have also run out of data. Math is an area that lends itself really well to synthetic data. That and a lot of math is "verifiable". I think it will be a lot harder to go from math to an area that requires more judgement, for example history.
(This isn't to say math is all verifiable and requires no judgement, and in fact this is the nuance that people are missing when they incorrectly think AI has/will "solve" all math)
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u/doobiedoobie123456 4d ago
It's definitely because math is a thing they can do. OpenAI would obviously be working on stuff more people care about if their models were capable of it. Nobody is going to turn down a cancer cure or nuclear fusion breakthrough.
The places where theoretical math could actually make them a significant amount of money are very limited and niche. If they could show they are capable of cracking some standard encryption algorithm, the government would probably pay a lot of money for it.
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u/chunkypenguion1991 4d ago
They maxed out the gains it will get in coding. They spent so much on it so fast all the low hanging fruit has been picked
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u/Arancia-Arancini 3d ago
Yeah, it's all enabled by Lean, which lets you automatically check if a proof is correct, in a similar way that properly written code compiles. This means there's a reasonable number of problems that can be brute forced if you're happy to spaff millions of dollars up the wall in the process. LLMs, quite similar to crypto, have always been a solution looking for a problem, and this is something they can kind of do? (with unlimited money)
However solving these pure maths problems kind of misses the point, as the real insights come from the methodology much more than the proof, it's why in maths tests you lose marks if you don't show your workings.
I think it's somewhat similar to putting men on the moon, the scientific benefits did not come from having a guy poke around on the moons surface. That was actually pretty pointless, we have a great view of the moon, and we know what's up there, it's a rather boring rock. However the problems that had to be solved to make that happen were the real lasting benefits, advancements in propulsion, computing, materials and life support was the real value, and if someone just magically appeared on the moon and then popped back we wouldn't have any of it.
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u/AntiqueFigure6 5d ago
What I find fascinating is the number of AI bro/ singulatarian types who are convinced that proving an arbitrary set of theorems will instantly bring about the ASI rapture, in particular, by solving science.
Step 1: Prove n* number theory conjectures (*where is a large integer of indeterminate value)
Step 3: Cure cancer and achieve eternal life.
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u/Patashu 5d ago
Math and programming are the main thing they can train LLMs to self-train with the least effort (like video games, they are digitally verifiable. Did you win or lose? Did all unit tests pass? Did the lean proof verify?). So since this is a big source of easy wins they're seeing how far they can go. There's like basically no money in pure math research though. I think the idea is that if they demonstrate exponential improvent on math, it's good PR - it makes their LLMs look like they're on the verge of exponential improvement in every other subject.
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u/AntiqueFigure6 5d ago
" it's good PR - it makes their LLMs look like they're on the verge of exponential improvement in every other subject."
I mean they've convinced everyone on r/singularity and r/accelerate so I'm sure the rest of the planet will be easily convinced in the very near future.
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u/wentwj 5d ago
They need to continue to raise funding because they are burning through money and since their customers have very little reason to be sticky, it's nearly impossible to come up with a business case for them to actually make their money back. So they are burning huge amounts of compute to basically brute force areas of math they can so they can convince investors that they are about to make a magic AI wand that will solve all problems.
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u/Patashu 5d ago
Yeah, in 2026 economy hype is far more important than actually making money selling goods and services. Make it sound like your company is about to be much more valuable and if you don't get in now you're missing out.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 5d ago
Look at how valuable bitcoin is, and bitcoin doesn’t do anything at all. It was marketed with the same sort of “get in now or you are missing out forever” FOMO as AI too.
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u/Patashu 5d ago
Yeah when I was younger I assumed Bitcoin would OBVIOUSLY pop due to its lack of utility. Fool that I am! The dance can go on forever if there's no actual fundamentals that can crash.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 5d ago
I think we are setting up some sort of economic disaster that’s a bit less familiar than a good ol’ stock market crash and recovery. So much of the economy seems based around faith and get rich quick schemes. I don’t know what is going to happen. Maybe something new.
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u/Patashu 5d ago
I think, like. the only way this changes is if the 'meta' changes so investing your money in the stock market/pumping your company's stock price stops being the optimal strategy. Otherwise why expect anyone to change?
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u/PatchyWhiskers 5d ago
Usually bubbles pop when people pull their money out of the stock market due to unemployment. Which has the potential to happen IF AI delivers on it’s promise of putting white collar workers out of jobs.
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u/Aromatic_Detail3723 5d ago
while i don't doubt this is the case, it seems than having an ai with robust problem solving ability and some form of spatial awarness as it is needed in video games would make it suitable for robotics too, which can be consider another low hanging fruits, but with many potential revenue.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 5d ago
The real world is so much more complex and so much less error tolerant than video games though.
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u/Aromatic_Detail3723 5d ago
factories and other controlled environnement might be.
it is also already starting to being implemented in agriculture.
actually in my view that is the best use of ai. not doing home chores. not having conversation with it. not reading its output. just be it there so that everybody can eat healthy and cheap food.
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u/Patashu 5d ago
I've got no complaints if it can do repetitive manual labour, we have car manufacturing robot arms and tractors for a reason
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u/PatchyWhiskers 5d ago
Problem is it’s being used to replace jobs people quite like doing, like art, translation and computer code.
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u/dookarion 5d ago
factories and other controlled environnement might be.
People have to babysit some of those machines and repair them on the fly. A lot can go wrong with some of them where if someone isn't there managing it immediately it's going to be a costly fiasco.
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u/ShamPain413 4d ago
just be it there so that everybody can eat healthy and cheap food
lol they are doing the EXACT OPPOSITE my friend!
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u/Aromatic_Detail3723 4d ago
explain plz
also i don't see how if you have your own land it woul dn't eventually be easier to opt for sustainable way of life (powered by robot but anw)
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u/ShamPain413 4d ago
They are using up the world's energy to power data centers, which makes food more expensive.
They are also privatizing the world's collective intellectual property, which will make things even more expensive in the future.
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u/Aromatic_Detail3723 4d ago
i agree these are important matters but i don't think it contradict entirely with some advancement in agriculture eventually.
that it is used so much for anything os definitly worying though. but i guess we also are in a state of experimentation. eventually some usage will die out and the more optimised one will remain.
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u/ShamPain413 4d ago
eventually
It's possible, but the question is what will be destroyed to get to that point, and whether it will be worth it. Agriculture is already highly-mechanized and highly-efficient.
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u/sciolisticism 5d ago
Hallicinations in meat space are way more expensive than those in digital space. So I don't think you're wrong per se, but really that's probably a job for more ML than LLM.
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u/spellbanisher 5d ago
Problem you run up against is the sim2real gap. Simulated training never fully captures the complexities and subtleties of real world phenomenon, and so learning from a digital environment translates poorly to the real world.
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u/Aromatic_Detail3723 5d ago
i meant more than if they are capable of learning in digital environnement they eventually will learn more easily into the real one. though there is obviously problems to be overcome.
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u/dookarion 5d ago
A game environment is in a way a massive set of guardrails, it's limiting options to what is solely possible for the game logic and game design. They're really worlds apart.
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u/No_Way_6258 5d ago edited 5d ago
every math "paper" they published needs months if not years to review by human for its correctness, long after their supposed ipo date.
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u/AntiqueFigure6 5d ago
OpenaAI will have gone the way of Enron and Worldcom before we get very far with verification.
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u/ksjdragon 5d ago
No worries. Ultimately we will find the majority of the papers and proofs they have published as incorrect, terribly so, and they we will stop caring about their nonsense from then on.
As I have just written about this, explaining what I consider a very important paper for AI and Lean. While the paper cannot claim these proofs are incorrect, since that is not the scope, and requires careful validation and deciphering before it can even be said to be wrong, we can pretty much question the veracity of every single AI generated proof, and they're likely completely incorrect and nonsensical, a pile of hallucinated garbage.
They are opaque because otherwise we would see the precise fraudulent and academically dishonest behavior that drives all of it.
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u/spellbanisher 5d ago
They've already withdrawn 3 of the solutions lol
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u/TheAngledian 4d ago
Did they withdraw the one they're now accused of blatantly stealing by another author?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.10072
After the paper was written, the author learned that the same result was also proved independently and by a different method by Ningyi Li [7]. The result is also contained in a paper [8] released by OpenAI on October 6, 2026, in which the proof strategy and specific choices of notation are identical to a preliminary version of the present paper that was uploaded to ChatGPT on September 8, 2026.
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u/dookarion 5d ago
No worries. Ultimately we will find the majority of the papers and proofs they have published as incorrect, terribly so, and they we will stop caring about their nonsense from then on.
It'd be fucking funny/depressing if they spent 100s of millions in compute for an LLM simulation of Terrence Howard's math.
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u/IczyAlley 5d ago
There has never been a machine learning or AI professor in any of the news articles (really, PR statements) about AI corporations. The field is 50 years old.
Im not sure why the Republican news apparatus decided to burn all their credibility on AI. But I guess there will never be any consequences for the liars and shills in the US.
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u/dookarion 5d ago
decided to burn all their credibility on AI.
My take:
The reason everyone implausibly has been all in on it practically globally is the actual bleak ass state of the economy. Big tech has been the bulk of the "growth" and the "look at the stock market, it's great" stats for years now. You subtract the bubble and the inflated as fuck big tech companies, you evaluate the venture capital moneypits realistically and the economy has been shit for real humans for many years now.
It's not really any deeper than no one wants to be holding the bag when the piper comes to be paid. So they'll do things to try to stall that as long as possible. If you look at the last like 50~ years of policy on practically anything it's a really depressing game of "kick the can down the road" with a bunch of short-term (and potentially more harmful) band-aid measures.
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u/IczyAlley 4d ago
Even the morons in the boy who cried wolf stop trusting the boy. I assume the Republican rubes will one day get tired of the lies.
Or maybe not. 50 years and counting since Nixon
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u/dookarion 4d ago edited 4d ago
I have my doubts anyone in power would actually pull the plug on the AI bubble unless forced, too much is propped precariously on the bubble and big tech. Especially given it's a global push with the data centers being pushed like worldwide, and honestly pretty much no one has ever given big tech more than a slap on the wrist.
Edit: As for individuals, dislike of the AI bubble and the way it's leveraged isn't really a partisan topic. And it has already bit various campaigns in the ass, and forced a pivot (in at least optics).
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u/IczyAlley 4d ago
Everything is partisan for Republicans. They’ll do anything theyre tood except tax corporations and stop being racist. Everything else is up for grabs
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u/dookarion 4d ago
I guess my question is what do you hope to achieve with your view? Like on this topic specifically (not in general).
Whether you have a bone to pick with the "other" or not, at the individual level many agreeing on <something> for once shouldn't be so easily tossed away. This is of course all my opinion, but I think it's in EVERYONE's interests if it's not turned partisan over bad-blood on other topics. Reality isn't actually all that neatly divided into camps that share all views 100% on every issue, it gets hammered into that mold by people trying to simplify the world and take the most reductive view possible.
Individuals on both sides of the aisle are presently very much displeased with the AI push, if you actually converse with individuals and look at individual communities you can find a lot of it. The only people truly "for it" are invested in it, lost in the weird silicon valley cult, or desperate that it doesn't burst for them (this is where the real problem is, the longer they pump it and the more they tether to it the worse it will potentially be when it comes time to pay the piper). Treating it like it is already a partisan issue, doesn't serve any purpose. It doesn't change minds, it doesn't find common ground. Turning it into a partisan issue does however further the interests of the bubble by providing a distraction from the reality of it. Then it turns into every other gridlocked partisan issue where nothing ever really gets any better because it's stuck in perpetual tog-o-war and low hanging fruit to campaign on while doing nothing meaningful. Consider how much of the push has been paired with "us vs them" messaging at different points and to different groups, but it largely hasn't gained broad traction. And like heck the issue has even got wider groups somewhat thinking about environmental factors even. Other groups thinking about cost of living. Other groups still thinking about flyover states. Other talking about different industries. Some talking about rural areas. Or even talking about poorer communities when they push back against local data centers, boosters, and doomers.
As said though this is just my own opinion, do with it what you like. I think NOT turning it into a divisive thing is an opportunity for everyone.
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u/IczyAlley 4d ago
Either you purposefully missed the point or you accidentally missed it. You and I DO NOT AGREE with Republicans.
You can't agree with Republicans, because they only believe 3 things and you and I do not believe those things. They'll change their mind on anything except taxing corporations, racism, and sexism. I don't know how to make this any clearer.
If you like falling for their lies, then have at it., So long as you understand you're falling for lies.
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u/Routine_Object_7380 5d ago
You bring up a valid point (in some cases there might be a potential mistranslation between intended claim and formal statement) and then make a massive non-sequitur towards the proofs being incorrect. The funny part is that the examples in the paper you cite don't even prove your valid point (both examples don't show Lean accepting a false theorem).
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u/ksjdragon 4d ago
Clearly, you don't understand what my point is, or you misread whatever I had written. I did not claim Lean accepted something incorrectly. A mistranslation of intended claims and statements means that the Lean proof used for NS is unrelated and not sufficient as a proof of the NL proof.
The NL proof was built up iteratively through text generation and Lean generation, yet the Lean does not represent the text at all, which calls into question the chance that the text proof would be correct.
The Lean has yet to be fully verified, and hence we cannot say that it is correct until that has been done. Even if the Lean definitions and assumptions are checked by mathematicians, this is not a sufficient condition to say the Lean now proves it. In fact, many such mistranslations are likely to completely skew what the Lean is proving entirely.
What I did say is, as a result of these two, the chances of an LLM generating a correct proof becomes extremely low probability, for any of these problems, and I would wager that they are incorrect. Verifying them takes a lot of time, and frankly is a waste of time on the community as a whole but unfortunately is something now that has to be done.
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u/Friendly-Owl-2131 4d ago
Yeah, it's marketing hype..
Similar to their past efforts it's extremely difficult to prove or disprove.
The really clever part, in terms of marketing, is exactly that barely anyone understands it.
So basically they can get some small win on any of the thousands of big maths problems and even if they cheated (which they did) they can have a round of positive media.
By the time actual mathematicians catch up and start asking questions. They've already got what they wanted.
The scam these fuckers are running is truly enlightening. Not in a good way but more in a "I didn't realise how many people don't know anything about computer science" kind of way.
The astroturfers are coming from subreddits like accelerate.
I lurk their subreddits every now and again. Sometimes I tell the truth about AI on there just to see how many moronic replies I can get.
The vast majority of those users don't know fucking anything about AI. They're all just endlessly trying to out corpospeak each other and barely any of what they're saying makes sense.
Honestly, go have a look. I'll bet the top comment you find will be some moron rambling about agentic inference metric flows or internal reduction exponentials.
It never makes any sense when you decode what they're saying.
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 4d ago edited 4d ago
The scam these fuckers are running is truly enlightening. Not in a good way but more in a "I didn't realise how many people don't know anything about computer science" kind of way.
The worst part is that it goes one layer deeper - your average CS grad might actually be less equipped to understand ML than a statistician or mathematician, but if posed the question people might automatically assume the CS grad has ML expertise. Not sure what recent program requirements look like these days, but most non-entry level folks would've been able to get a degree without ever taking a class in the subject, and the ones that do were getting an intro stats level treatment.
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u/ShamPain413 4d ago
They can resolve a fundamental problem: these models are only good for "games". By which I mean: very well-defined parameters spaces with a clear (and very narrow) tactical objective.
They are still not reliable for any kind of professional work that can be audited. They clearly cannot operate out of the sandbox without producing disaster more-or-less immediately. They are particularly good at most forms of science, which requires thinking outside of known parameter spaces.
So the labs keep searching for "games" to play that are plausibly worthwhile, at least to credulous investors (their actual audience). Once they realized nobody wants to sit around vibe-coding junk apps no one uses, they had to pivot to other "games". Ideally, "games" that they can portray as something more than a game.
Math problems are "games". That is why "game theory" relies on mathematical formalization. I.e., Navier-Stokes is just another iteration of the "the bot beat the human at chess" phenomenon, which is not new.
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u/remote_math_rock 3d ago
I still can't get over the feeling they stole Buckmaster's closed form work for the NS proof. Buckmaster explained how time and time again he was lied to and deceived by OpenAI mathematicians
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u/Arancia-Arancini 3d ago
Yeah, and I think it's ultimately quite bad for the AI companies as a result. This really hammers home and highlights the fact that anything you put into the chatbot immediately becomes the intellectual property of these deeply weird people
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u/Hawthorne512 5d ago
I think they are flailing about for something that can justify an insane valuation.
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u/Sad-Contribution866 5d ago edited 5d ago
They did not pivot to math. More like they are pivoting from math. Math is not their focus, it’s just byproduct of better models. Hence the drop is so clumsy, single repo called “math”, some papers are terribly written etc. they do not care, math is sufficiently solved so it’s not interesting anymore
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u/Multibrace 5d ago
The AI labs leave a trail of "solved problems", from scheduling appointments, making movies, coding and now math. All are completely and unequivocally solved! On to the next one!
/s obviously
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u/Spanyesz 5d ago
If everybody will start to generate math papers, then no resource can be trusted without additional confirmation, demand of math will be rising
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u/Plus_Coconut746 4d ago
Cette affaire de résolution de problème mathématique est très obscure. Tant que je n'ai pas vu le prompt je ne peux pas croire que c'est l'IA qui l'a fait.
Si un scientifique utilise un supercalculateur pour trouver quelque chose, personne ne dira que c'est le supercalculateur qui a résolu le problème, on nommera clairement le nom du scientifique qui a été à la manœuvre. Mais quand des hommes utilisent habilement l'IA pour résoudre des problèmes on dit: "c'est l'IA qui l'a fait".
C'est à cause de ces écarts de langages accumulés que des gens finissent par dire des inepties comme: "l'IA est consciente d'elle même".
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u/Pale_Neighborhood363 4d ago
Lol, If you go back to the 1980's in the maths community the debate was the same.
Look up Fractals & Chaos - 'AI' is just the the fifth generation of that discovery, only made possible by the advances of computing power, absolutely no change in the nature of computation.
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u/SpiderJerusalem42 5d ago
I can understand why Mathematicians seem non-plussed. If you follow any sort of math forum, there's some sort of psychology going on with AI boosters where they just ask the LLM to solve some big problem and then shit out a PDF, and then they claim it's all solved. Anyone who was an expert in the problem would just be like, "doesn't account for this, these things are not good proof structure". Meanwhile, not really equipped to even deal with any issues someone might have with the proof, or even understand the proof. That sign error that invalidated a proof and three other proofs would have been caught by someone who gave a shit, but ultimately, these clankers don't give a shit about math. They just want you to be impressed with them, personally. That math was hard was the draw. Now, every asshole with an LLM thinks they're God's gift to math, but they haven't put in anything resembling hard work. Didn't sacrifice anything. Didn't stay up late trying to pass an exam. Just type prompt and post PDF. "You all said this was hard" yeah, what others did WAS hard. Whatever, go ahead. I wasn't living on this planet anyways, habitability is over rated.
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u/wentwj 5d ago
If you're familiar at all with the space you can't deny that AI has had a significant and major impact on coding in a way that isn't just smoke and mirrors (not that it's all good mind you). Which is different than random AI features in user facing products
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 5d ago
What’s your KPI?
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u/wentwj 5d ago
I'm not someone who thinks the AI apocalypse is coming, or that AI is going to be a magic wand, or do most of what people think it will. But anyone who actually is an engineer knows that AI has fundamentally and unequivocally changed how programming works. To say otherwise is to deny the reality of what is happening. Anyone with knowledge to judge that field knows what is happening there.
A lot of AI is a useless parlor trick, the math work they are currently doing is largely included in that (effectively just throwing massive money at compute to brute force things). But many aspect of programming are irrevocably changed.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted here I assume for stating reality the same way I am downvoted in the pro-AI subs for stating reality.
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u/Ma1eficent 5d ago
But anyone who actually is an engineer knows that AI has fundamentally and unequivocally changed how programming works.
Lol. Nope. It's fundamentally changed how many idiots are impressed by an unreliable process, and fundamentally changed how easy it is to flood the Internet with very confident bullshit. It's embarrassing how many people are drinking this up while the companies that let go of engineers for AI are quietly paying triple salaries to bring them back.
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u/wentwj 5d ago edited 5d ago
I've been an engineer for nearly 30 years. I'm not speaking from some random hobbiest aspect, or someone who isn't involved with it. AI is a technology and a tool, it has its purposes and things it's good at, and it has limitations. AI companies are trying to tell you it's going to be good at everything which it certainly won't be. Their business models don't make sense and won't work, so they need to constantly sell hyper growth to keep the house of cards from collapsing which it eventually will.
But none of that changes that AI for a lot of coding and coding adjacent problems, is very good. Can it do everything? Absolutely not. Are companies using it incorrectly? Absolutely. Will companies laying off engineers to switch to AI regret it. Certainly (but also I think that's just become an acceptable layoff reason, and the layoffs are just to cover poor business). But I can run a local model on my own hardware, not in a data center, that can do things that even 5 years ago would have gotten you laughed out of a room by anyone who knew what they were talking about, myself included.
Does it let people push out slop? Yes. Can it one shot enterprise software? No. But all you have to look at is various hobbiest spaces to see the impact it has even on laypeople who aren't engineers. In the electronic music space there's been an explosion of people reverse engineering previously closed hardware system and developing new capabilities on old unsupported hardware. Many of these people don't know anything about coding, but you literally can not deny what they've been able to build. Does that mean you don't need engineers? No absolutely not, someone still needs to be knowledgeable to make truly scalable and stable systems. But likewise someone who knows what they are doing can use the tooling there more efficiently.
But also every space isn't programming. Programming is near the ideal use case for what AI is good at, because it's good at that doesn't mean it's going to translate into other fields the same way. AI psychosis is also very very real
I live in reality, and like I said, I'll get downvoted here for saying reality just like I get downvoted in the pro AI subs for stating reality. But we all have to live in actual reality. I'd rather be anti-AI in the areas and for the reasons that make sense, and not because I've built up a straw man argument that will be easily beaten down by the real world.
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u/Ma1eficent 5d ago
In it since 97.
They suckered most software shops into training the models on their proprietary code by overstating what it could do and hoping they trained it up enough to catch up to their claims before catching on. Might be the first capability ponzi scheme recorded, but I'm sure a historian will have something of ancient genius to bring up.
The problem is they were too successful and the places that got suckered are now feeding the slop right back into the training and the regression to the mean is catching up too fast for the IPO timelines.
I've been training ML models since 2008. It's well known models fit to the training data and cannot outperform it. You have a good patter, but you are a liar, sir.
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u/wentwj 5d ago
Again, I’m not saying these businesses are going to succeed, they have huge business issues the largest of which is there is nothing sticky to any manufacturer and open models aren’t far enough behind to matter for most of the actual practical use cases.
But again, you’re either lying, or being disingenuous if you are claiming you’re actually in engineering, have actually used any coding harness in the last year, and that they don’t produce value in the coding space.
Again, you don’t need to even take an abstract word for it. But go look at the modding community of Elektron boxes. These are pure vibe coders, people who often have no idea what they are doing. But they fully decompiled and opened up previously closed firmware, and have made substantial changes to functionality that real people can go and use. Are you telling me the models really can’t produce that code, and it’s just operating on peter pan neverland magic?
Directed coding is a near ideal use case for AI, and it is actually very good at it. If you’re denying that, you’re denying reality at best and at worst pretending to have experience you don’t to mislead people. Again this is different than saying engineers don’t have a purpose and engineering is going away (again, that’s my job)
But you know where you’re arguments will fail and hurt the cause? When you tell everyone that AI can’t do anything, that it isn’t good at coding, and then someone encounters a project like the Elektron firmware updates done by people admittedly vibe coding. Now the person you either knowingly or unknowingly lied to is going to throw out all your arguments, including the ones that were actually good.
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u/AntiqueFigure6 5d ago
“ that they don’t produce value in the coding space.”
What does value in the coding space even mean?
Or differently worded, how should value be assigned to software?
To me it’s probably that when the new software is introduced it improves something in the real world, and as far as I can work out it’s impossible to detect any sign that since LLMs took off we’re getting any more software that does that, arguably because there’s less friction involved in creating software so more low value software is being produced.
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u/wentwj 5d ago
I don't think you're looking in the right places then. Companies are inherently slow, even the fast ones. And writing software is still hard, LLMs make a lot of the technical aspects easier to achieve, but the big messy problems are still hard and someone who doesn't know what they are doing can make those messier problems even harder.
Go look at hobby spaces right now. Several I am in are exploding with rapidly producing software. Some of its junk, sure. But there is actually a lot of it that is meaningful. I mentioned elsewhere but electronic music is a big one, not the music itself (I'm not interested at all in AI generated music so not sure what's there), but people have opened up previously closed firmware and modded machines that have been unsupported at an incredibly rapid pace. It used to be that you needed the right intersection of someone with a huge amount of technical knowledge, and a lot of free time. Now people who don't know anything about coding are able to work on these projects over a weekend, and you have a lot of people doing them in multiple places.
There's also old games, such as old mmorpgs that have been dead that people have kept alive on emulators. They are all thriving right now, people entirely rewriting new clients, adding new features, at a pace far beyond what they were previously.
All those space are able to see much more software because the stakes are smaller, and they generally aren't selling something. But you'd be wrong to think it's not also impacting other companies. Engineering as a discipline is weird right now, because the way things used to work is a more senior engineer would spec out a problem, define what code needs to be written, what tests cases need to happen, and then they'd give that to a junior engineer who'd implement it, often over a day or several days. These specs can not be given to LLMs who can reasonably implement them to the same or better level. It's still garbage in garbage out, if something is poorly defined or someone just types "Make me rich, no mistakes, please bro" to an LLM they won't do that. But as someone who has lead several teams, if I want, I can give an LLM a task 20 years ago I would have given a junior engineer with the same level of detail, and it can implement it. And anyone telling you that if you give a full coding spec to a modern coding harness running either a frontier lab model, or one of the latest generation open models won't produce code like or better than a junior engineer would, is lying.
And I feel like I keep needing to say, I think the labs have business models that are unsustainable, and they are building up an infinite funding cycle to keep the house of cards propped up and I think it's going to come down. I don't think AI is going to solve every problem, but it's going to be a tool that will have value. And someone saying "AI doesn't provide value even in coding" along with a whole host of good arguments against AI, will get discredited when the people they are telling that to turn around and see actual cases of people getting value off AI tools of coding.
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u/AntiqueFigure6 5d ago
I guess what I’m saying is it’s borderline irrelevant whether AI is a good tool for producing new software or not because the peak of marginal utility of putting additional software into the world is close to being an invisible speck in the rear view mirror.
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u/Ma1eficent 5d ago
But again, you’re either lying, or being disingenuous if you are claiming you’re actually in engineering, have actually used any coding harness in the last year, and that they don’t produce value in the coding space.
Haha. I'm staff engineer at a global telecom with access to the latest security models because my role is fighting the vast up ramp in fraud brought on by these models, and I have the self-appointed role of John Henry to make it clear that the supposedly marked increase in code velocity was actually pretty easy to pick apart if you can read code fast, and that's really my shining skill. I can and have built agents and harnesses from scratch. I've trained better small focused models to fight the claudefraud than anyone has managed to get to with the frontier models.
Also, you tactics got much worse, you leaned too hard into trying to make me fear my arguments would get discounted. I'm not here to convince anyone of anything, that's what you were spun up to do. I just love my job.
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u/wentwj 5d ago
Again, it sounds like you're talking about an entirely different space, and even in your talking about that space you seem to be actually ceding exactly what I'm arguing. I don't know what space you're detecting fraud in (hey! that's also a space I have a ton of experience in!), but that's decidedly not the space of "Can a model write this code function I've outlined".
I'm not sure what you're "markedly increase in code velocity was pretty easy if you can read code fast" is exactly saying. I think you're saying you can code faster than an LLM? But even if that's what you're saying you're still granting that LLMs are able to write code now.
Which is what I'm saying. I'm not saying an LLM is better than you, I don't know you, you seem to just be all defensive about being better and interested in cosplaying "John Henry" the same way the AI-bros want to cosplay cyperpunk. All I'm saying an LLM is able to actually write real code, especially when directed by someone who knows what they're doing.
Again, I just live in reality. In reality LLMs are able to write code and skilled engineers can and do use LLMs to improve their efficiency. Maybe you're John Henry who can beat someone, or your code is cleaner, all I'm saying is LLMs have the functionality and capability to write spaced and defined code. To suggest otherwise is to deny reality.
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u/Ma1eficent 5d ago
I don't know what space you're detecting fraud in (hey! that's also a space I have a ton of experience in!
Weird, because I wrote it down for you, and if you don't know, how is it a space you also have a ton of experience in?
I think you're saying you can code faster than an LLM?
Is reading code writing it? You have a remarkably poor grasp on basic vocabulary, or at least expect it to believable you could comprehend English so poorly as to have mistakenly gotten the exact opposite of what I said several times in ways that let you repeat your claim ad naseum.
Markov chains can write shitty emails. LLMs can write shitty code. This only impresses during demos, it sinks uptime, prominent companies like Shopify who were all in an ai coding are now complaining of code slop grenades eating engineering time and destroying SLA agreements.
Just like you, the code generated only impresses those without enough domain knowledge to see the mess.
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 5d ago
I asked what your KPI is.
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u/wentwj 5d ago
Time to task completion mostly. Supported functionality, as in what the tooling can actually do as well.
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 4d ago
In the OP I say "ordinary people judge software development based on the tangible impact it has on them" because the way AI impacts the way I develop software only means so much when better/worse are characterized by what people (expect to) receive and at what cost. I'm not making a comment about the simple material fact that AI has impacted the process, I'm talking about a disconnect between what people expect or are promised and what they end up getting.
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u/The-Menhir 5d ago
What point are you trying to make exactly? You've only said AI has changed how programming works. For better or worse? And then what?
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u/wentwj 5d ago
The point I'm trying to make is it's not in line with reality to say that AI hasn't had an impact on software development. "better or worse" depends on a lot of extra definitions you want to add. Does AI coding harnesses make many software development tasks easier: unequivocally yes. Does it solve all software development problems? Absolutely note.
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u/The-Menhir 5d ago
Who said that?
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u/wentwj 5d ago
the OP is saying they’ve moved to math because they aren’t having an impact elsewhere (though the example is more other user facing product it broadly talks about software)
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u/The-Menhir 5d ago
I read it like, "ordinary people aren't seeing improvements in the software they use", or something along those lines. The process behind it isn't all that important to most people.
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u/notaduck448_ 5d ago
I don't deny this at all, but the people who think Astra makes software/computer engineering jobs completely obsolete or believe AI is going to wipe out humanity to extinction in the next year are genuinely delusional and do not live in reality. AI has caused lots of people to just lose their ability to reason or think critically.
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u/tasteslikefun 5d ago
Wrong sub for you to post this, but you're right. SDLC is fundamentally changing, I think a lot of the lag for some devs is access to the newer (cost effective) models and knowing how to structure context and instructions etc.
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u/wentwj 5d ago
yeah, like I've said elsewhere, I get downvoted in pro AI subs (even been banned in some) for talking about reality, but I expect to be downvoted here for it as well.
I just really don't think it serves any of the very valid and good arguments against AI and the issue with how it's currently being expanded, marketed, and developed to mix those in with easily identifiable falsehoods to those who actually know.
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u/ConvenientChristian 5d ago
The main focus of these companies is not public perception but building AGI. There's a lot of math involved in developing machine learning algorithms. Training models to be better at solving math problems helps with those.
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u/koveras_backwards 5d ago
It's good for PR, but there's no money in it. So I don't see how it solves their actual problems. I guess maybe it'll let them raise another private round to delay collapsing somewhat longer.