ComplexSystems

I think that it'd be funny if the polynomial time SAT solver was just "send your SAT instance to Astra and have it try to solve it for a few hours."

I know, it's awful. How do we get OpenAI to stop before they ruin math forever? /s

The idea that a US company is allowed to publicly talk about and release these bugs is a very new thing.

I agree he wants that, but also don't think it's that far fetched that there exist unpatchable hardware bugs that AI can learn to exploit.

Roughly speaking, O(n log n) means "grows no faster than k(n log n) for some k", whereas o(n log n) means grows strictly more slowly* than k(n log n) for all* choices of k.

"The psych had told me nothing of the nightmare that dependence on those meds can create"

I hear this all the time and never get it. Didn't these people go to school? People talk about this every day on the internet. It's right there on Wikipedia, even.

None of it is ridiculous in principle, but where do you draw the line? Is Google an AI company whose products I shouldn't use? What about Microsoft, where Vi worked for many years? Or is it specifically OpenAI and Anthropic? What about open source companies?

> History judges researchers who work with the bad guys ... To them I say: learn from history and get out now. You’ll still be ahead of the curve. The current backlash against AI may seem huge, but it’s nothing compared to what I think the backlash will be in coming years.

> I chose 7 years because I see certain parallels between the situation with researchers and Big AI today and the relationship between researchers and Epstein in 2019.

Look, I absolutely love Vi Hart's stuff. And I mean love love, and I have for almost 20 years.

But do people really believe this? That associating with AI companies, using their product, etc, is similar to taking money from a child sex trafficker?

I thought the original Mathathon sounded like a great idea. They shut that down, and I think the revised one seems like a half decent idea. But if I get involved in it, in 7 years it'll be the same as if I had been involved with Jeffrey Epstein?

I feel like the discourse on this is starting to get way out of control. I say that with no less love for Vi Hart's ideas than I have always had. But surely this technology can be used for some good?

This is a very loaded blog post. A unit-cost RAM is a fairly standard model of computation when working with algorithms. When we say that comparison sorting of strings takes O(n log n) time, for instance, we are also implicitly assuming a unit cost for comparing two strings. In real life, comparing two strings scales linearly with string length. Maybe that's silly, but it's par for the course. The original FFT is also assuming unit cost multiplication when we say it is O(n log n) time - we mean O(n log n) multiplies.

Similarly, yes, it's a galactic algorithm, but these things are still viewed as meaningful. The fact that it is even possible at all with a unit cost RAM asymptotically is an incredible result that nobody expected.

There are plenty of mathematicians who think the results are interesting. Not only do they have the "patience" you speak of, some even seem to be enjoying exploring the new results.

Yes, they should. They have invented a magic button that can tell you the long-awaited answers to the burning mathematical questions that you've spent your life researching. The caveat is that the technology is still new, so the explanations "are not fun to read" like set theory papers usually are (lol). If you don't think that's a worthwhile tradeoff, that's your call, but it sure as hell isn't everyone's.

I can't relate to this at all. AI models will surely get better at writing "enjoyable proofs," but for now the situation is what it is. You're passionate about this problem, right? But you don't want to do the work to understand the result? Fine. There's a new generation of younger, hungry mathematicians that are highly interested in figuring out why the result is true and I am sure they'd be happy to wade through it and spoon-feed you the answer instead. Maybe they should be running things.

It would have stayed broken assuming AI models never improve.