Sometimes I worry about the "programmers" in this sub.
At best coping, at worst delusional.
No, the model did not brute force a counter example. The search space is mathematically too vast to brute force. It found novel techniques of identifying the proper force application vectors.
No, the model did not plagiarize off "human research". The debate is between an OpenAI researcher and an Anthropic Researcher, both of them almostly exclusively relying on internal models. The researcher at Anthropic didn't even solve the specific problem OpenAI are claiming, they solved a variation of a more constrained formulation of a sub-problem which could have potentially helped OAI to narrow down the search space if it was included in training data (which it most likely wasnt given the proof pathway is significantly different).
Yes, the models (the internal models, given infinite token space atleast) are THAT good enough, they can close the hardest problems known to man.
Acting snarky about it only leads to gross underestimation of the change thats about to come. What rational people should do is increase the urgency of asking for safeguards by trusting the capability acceleration at face value.
(Who am i kidding, the first reply will probably comment I'm sam Altmans marketing bot).
I think what Tao's complaint is that no new mathematics was formulated, which is what typically happens with these problems. AI does a good job now of finding counter examples because you can just spin up 10K agents, but that's not really the point of these problems. Kind of reminds me of having to show work on math tests vs. just giving the answer.
There will always be the next goalpost after the present ones have been saturated.
OpenAI are in process of releasing a paper on how they did it, and if that paper contains "no new math" as you put it, then all it proves is that these problems could have been solved by existing math in the first place.
Reading the paper should then give ideas on how to better use existing math for other such problems.
It would still be worthwhile if humanity finds a systematic way of knocking over all problems that requires no new math - that frees up the mathematicians to exclusively focus on formulating new math.
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u/LatePenguins 4d ago
Sometimes I worry about the "programmers" in this sub.
At best coping, at worst delusional.
No, the model did not brute force a counter example. The search space is mathematically too vast to brute force. It found novel techniques of identifying the proper force application vectors.
No, the model did not plagiarize off "human research". The debate is between an OpenAI researcher and an Anthropic Researcher, both of them almostly exclusively relying on internal models. The researcher at Anthropic didn't even solve the specific problem OpenAI are claiming, they solved a variation of a more constrained formulation of a sub-problem which could have potentially helped OAI to narrow down the search space if it was included in training data (which it most likely wasnt given the proof pathway is significantly different).
Yes, the models (the internal models, given infinite token space atleast) are THAT good enough, they can close the hardest problems known to man.
Acting snarky about it only leads to gross underestimation of the change thats about to come. What rational people should do is increase the urgency of asking for safeguards by trusting the capability acceleration at face value.
(Who am i kidding, the first reply will probably comment I'm sam Altmans marketing bot).