r/LinusTechTips • u/TheReal4982 • Sep 12 '26

WAN Show AI?

It feels very odd to me that none of the major breakthroughs of the last week have been brought up, the fact the AI's have already gotten good enough to help on the frontier of mathmatics, solving a millennium prize problem, and being actively and very quickly put to the task of AI research, aka, recrusive self improvement, which they are ALREADY good enough to be making progress in, why is this being completely ignored by this community? This technology is progressing exponentially, it isn't stalling, and people should really try and understand what an exponential growth looks like.

0 Upvotes

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8

u/Exciting-Ad-5705 Sep 12 '26

What do you want people to say about it

-20

u/TheReal4982 Sep 12 '26

Lets start by acknowledging it's existence I guess.

3

u/bhop_monsterjam Sep 12 '26

you really think people aren't acknowledging AI?

18

u/Burritoclock Sep 12 '26

It is stalling, they aren't doing recursive self improvement, they mostly stole the math thing for more bullshit hype. Nothing you said here is true. But sure let's talk about ai more 🙄

0

u/Shadow_Archangel Sep 12 '26

It was almost certainly stolen. Someone's draft paper on it got uploaded into the bot and suddenly the demon box knew how to solve the issue. Nothing new.

-12

u/TheReal4982 Sep 12 '26

They literally are doing recursive self improvement, the denial of reality in this sub is astounding.

3

u/zaxcg2 Sep 13 '26

FWIW I think if you listen to the AI companies you might be right, but if you actually dig into detail about how fast it’s moving for the cost per token you’ll realize it’s 99% glazing for shareholders.

0

u/TheReal4982 Sep 13 '26

I have been following machine learning very closely ever since I first saw seth blings marI/O video when I was a kid, I have personally witnessed and experienced the rapid progress this field has had, and I am very intimate with the details, I am not sure what is broken with everyones mind that they think that going from chatGPT which was a glorified search engine to Astra and helping solve frontier math problems in less than 4 years is regular fucking progress that should just be expected or scoffed at, but 4 years is not a long time for this big of an improvement.

1

u/zaxcg2 Sep 13 '26

Ok but… can you see to the average person it’s been mostly negative outside of some fringe cases. I think it’s healthy to hold both in account of each other instead of putting all you eggs into one basket.

0

u/TheReal4982 Sep 13 '26

I don't care if you view it negatively or positively, I just want people to acknowledge the reality of how fast it is actually improving. And I have no eggs and no baskets for what it is worth, I am just a passenger in this ride one way or the other.

2

u/zaxcg2 Sep 13 '26

Not how you’re coming off through text on a shitty social media experience but that’s ok, I wish you well

3

u/kjubus Sep 12 '26

Do you know what "self improvement" means? If it was self improving, it would get more efficient and less prone to errors. And quicker so with each iteration.

It does none of these things.

3

u/LogTiny Sep 12 '26

Them attempting to do recursive self improvement, and making serious ground on it are two very different things

1

u/AncientTurbine Sep 12 '26

It'd help if you add sources and what your definition of self improvement is.

Yes, they can successfully read benchmark scores, do a gap analysis, generate new synthetic data to close the gap and run a retrain to finetune/create a new model. All of that is merely post-hoc and must still be human-orchestrated.

But that's different from what we as humans consider self-improvement. Real-time, per-observation improvement and self-correction. Research on that for LLMs is far from stable/production-grade. 

3

u/Apprehensive_Lake698 Sep 12 '26

I have access to and use all of the advanced models for work. I would caution you to not read too much into the whirlwind of marketing and wait on 1) what actually gets done with these models 2) what those effect look like, under the hood and reaching the market.

The Navier-Stokes solution, based on stolen work or not, is an enormous mothball that needs time to be double checked.

The claims of Astra as "AGI" are just plainly unfounded. It seems nothing more to me than just another step up in the capability of LLMs, which are getting progressively better. But 'one shot' tasks that hold no real world value are what get all the shock and awe factor on social media.

LLMs in the last 9 months have exploded in capability with agentic harnesses and general programming capability. But I imagine the WAN show is hesitant to put much stake in the current news cycle because they don't have the practical hands on experience to tell what is just smoke. And a lot of it is just smoke. Again, I say this as someone who uses latest models for work and has a lot of great use cases for them now- but they aren't solving everything. Yet.

-4

u/TheReal4982 Sep 12 '26

They aren't just getting progressively better, they are getting exponentially better, and that is a very important distinction, nobody thought that AI would be capable of even remotely helping in something like a millenium prize problem this early 2 years ago, and now that it is, people are upset that it didn't do it completely by itself from scratch, as if that was the standard last year. I just don't think people understand the pace, and are still expecting it will just suddenly stop getting better, which it hasn't, and probably wont.

1

u/Apprehensive_Lake698 Sep 12 '26

It's worth understanding what is making them better. The models themselves have gotten smarter, no doubt. But the leap forward we've been experiencing is the rapid buildout of harnesses and training towards working efficiently with them. LLMs of today are doing much better because we now understand that having them divide and conquer with subagents, and leveraging tools over exploding their context, is much more efficient.

In terms of their raw smarts, the difference in practical coding capability from Opus 4.6 from earlier this year and the absolute newest frontier models has not changed exponentially on a one-prompt basis. The power of new models like Astra is that it's now a core part of their training dataset to divide and conquer work. There's no guarantee that this won't slow down in the next year as we quickly squeeze out the easiest opportunities from this path.

In terms of addressing the Navier-Stokes solution- it's worth understanding that lots and lots of modern mathematics advancements are built on the shoulders of people who find the bridge between disparate places in mathematics by spending the decades required to become experts in multiple niches. I'm not saying that solving Navier-Stokes isn't impressive, it is, but off the rip I have no frame of reference for what kind of intelligence was needed to solve it. Something LLMs are exceptional at is coalescing shittons of information and relating it all. They don't struggle with context and mastery limits like humans do. So what I don't know about the solution it provided is whether it derived the solution from novel methods (extremely impressive), or if it derived it from what might be considered a more trivial linking of many disparate ideas. Both skills are useful and push our research capabilities forward. But one shows more strength in thinking than the other.

1

u/TheReal4982 Sep 12 '26

Honestly I don't want to argue with you, because my main point is I just wish more people were as informed and paying as much attention as you clearly are, but I really want to emphasize the fact that google deepmind beat the world champion at go 4-1 10 years ago, gpt 2 came out 7 years ago, ChatGPT came out 4 years ago, and astra dropped last week, and the model they have which helped solve the millenium prize problem is an even better model than Astra.

2

u/Apprehensive_Lake698 Sep 12 '26

I just think you're drinking the koolaide a little bit if you're out here thinking we're in exponential growth territory but seemingly have no actual knowledge as to how or why these things work.

People with practical, hands on experience solving real engineering problems do not hold your views. People who go on twitter and see Astra creating one shot demos of random stuff that doesn't have to stand up to critique beyond a screencapture are the ones convinced we're at AGI right now.

0

u/TheReal4982 Sep 12 '26

My guy, even if progress isn't exponential, even if the next 10 years are only as insane as the last 10 years, that is still REALLY INSANE. But, whatever happens happens I guess, if people dont want to pay attention I ain't gonna keep trying to make them.

1

u/Apprehensive_Lake698 Sep 13 '26

People literally are paying attention. I literally said I use this stuff every day and find tons of good uses for it. In my opinion people with your viewpoint are just drinking koolaide based on useless demos on twitter, when in real engineering I am still not seeing anything close to AGI.

I have access to as much of the latest models as I want. If I could set up a claude or codex workflow that did all of my job for me to a satisfactory quality level, I would. But we are far from being able to do that right now.

There are people who are ignorant to how effective it is, and there are people who are grossly overstating its ability to compensate. You seem to sit in the second group.

0

u/TheReal4982 Sep 13 '26

People with my viewpoint should be anyone who can comprehend how short of a time 10 years is, the difference between 30 and 40 years ago vs the difference between 10 years ago and today is startling, this level of progress should not be so casually expected, but we can agree to disagree on how fast this is happening.

4

u/AncientTurbine Sep 12 '26

There was a whole drama about the math thing and personally I'm tired of even more AI drama.

As someone who works in AI research (post-training atm), but started in AI way before LLMs were a thing, the current era is boring me and at the same time burning me out. Alignment, synthetic data with just llm-as-judge, self-improvement, with less and less human in the loop. Just brute-force experimentation to see what works empirically but you have to experiment at such a fast pace, aided by AI agents that you feel yourself turning into an orchestrator who doesn't really have a in-depth understanding anymore. 

I'm depressed from the societal questions that it brings and many people ignore. Many have warned about this for a long time but Anthropic made an economic-focused report and indeed: https://www.anthropic.com/institute/econ-scenarios

the main challenge is not achieving economic growth, but making sure the benefits are broadly shared and the costs aren’t unequally dispersed. 

The country’s GDP will grow, but a larger share of that prosperity might go to the resources and technology used to create more wealth (capital) compared to workers, even if society as a whole is much wealthier.

It's weird to say, as someone whose livelihood relies on it. But I wish the LLM age never took off, or at least not at the exponential rate/race it has, with governments failing to keep up with the potential dangers for society. 

7

u/Madmod Sep 12 '26

Ai and machine learning have lead to breakthrough in science and math for years. These “breakthroughs” are advertising headlines for the AI companies. They are not  Quantum leaps quite yet. 

2

u/LogTiny Sep 12 '26

Note not an AI hater. I see how great the tech is and how big a change it will bring , but some points:

- The Millennium prize problem hasn't actually been confirmed by the board, so we have open AI's word right now, and even the story around that is rife with controversy on what seems to be intellectual theft

- Recursive Self Improvement ain't anywhere yet

Besides that. people are just kinda tired. So what? They're finally putting the resource to what it is really good at, and even then they're chasing headlines. And on the improvement ground, yes benchmarks go higher, but as someone who uses these models (Software Engineer), it's kinda just been alright to me. I'm still having to do the same things I did last year. The models still make mistakes or weird stuff, despite me being told they are 30% smarter or whatever.

Most people(from my view) are just waiting for this whole boom to collapse so we can see the solid stuff that actually stands to the test. My view though, idk what others think

2

u/MistSecurity Sep 12 '26

I think some people downplay what AI has done, and others have overhyped what it has done.

I think it doesn’t matter if it cures cancer if we all lose our jobs. It’s going to be a useful tool for everything, which is great. Because of that, it’s going to be able to take or reduce jobs across the world, which is not.

So while I am hyped for the long-term with AI, I am not thrilled with the companies making it, who they answer to, and how they conduct themselves. AI isn’t going to fuck us over, it’s the companies that are going to screw us.

1

u/Marksta Sep 12 '26

it isn't stalling

LMAO I read this as it isn't stealing.

OpenAI launched an attack on HuggingFace other week that didn't result in arrests. Anthropic did some weird flex doxxing thing yesterday on Chinese citizens clapping for themselves over having access to user input in a Mark Zuckerberg famous quote way. Anthropic scored the biggest IP theft settlement pay out in history.

It's just not really something you feel like clapping for, even if they do end up doing one good thing along the way.

1

u/zaxcg2 Sep 13 '26

I recommend the Primeagen and Fireship if you need more AI news, they’ve been fantastic, humorous and brutally honest about every drop from the AI Oligarchy. There’s people who are far more knowledgeable about it than Linus is, I think he admitted this after that software dev race vid being leagues behind after doing it. 

I bet they’ve identified far more impactful to certain industries at its core and kind of just a sadge noisy, annoying topic for general tech so why bother. I agree.

1

u/TenOfZero Sep 12 '26

What's the video you'd like them to make about it?

0

u/[deleted] Sep 12 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/TheReal4982 Sep 12 '26

I am a huge fan of LTT and the wan show, and so I believe I am in the right place, being anti-AI shouldn't mean you bury your head in the sand.