gorgolo

I think he was referring to us pheasants.

> Classic slavic attitude (judging by your username). Worst software colleagues I ever had (you always have to be like binary with them: either you are right or wrong, either you provide something “valuable” or not… never something in between, never sympathy)

Didn’t like their comment either but what in the world kind of racist response is this. Where did this come from?

Problem is that the type of person that leans towards collaboration and likes to explain things may be getting burned out right now or may be among the first to be replaced.

Think you mean it the other way? More flexible languages require more complex morphology

Dont think this is the right way of looking at it.

Two things were happening at the same time: deindustrialization and electrification. Industries and the economy used to depend more on machines and oil. That was getting replaced by reliance on electricity. If electricity generation was cheap enough, we might have seen the total energy usage get transformed one for one into electricity usage. But that didn’t happen and energy usage overall went down. That’s deindustrialization.

Of course it could have other reasons like labour costs and so on.

People can indeed change their consumption patterns. You don’t hear about it with electricity as often, but with natural gas spike after the Ukraine war, it was all over the news that many couldn’t afford heating and were leaving their houses cold in the winter. But it’s not just poor people.

Low margin industries probably contribute a lot and are more likely to change electricity usage patterns (by moving to a different country or being outcompeted).

This goes back to the pre-print question then, which you just dismissed

> in many fields it is (was?) normal to post a preprint and leave it up for the next year while the handful of other people working on the topic digest it and agree on whether it’s right or not, before even submitting to a journal. Sometimes the others would find an isssue in an argument and you hopefully manage to fix it or potentially retract / not submit to a journal.

A pre-print has a chance to be incorrect. Pre-prints do sometimes end up incorrect and need adjustments or even retraction. It sounds like you define "confirming it before you publish" as being 100% certain it's correct. Nobody is 100% sure their pre-print is correct. If it was 100% correct and never retracted there'd be no need for this process of sharing and digesting it before actually submitting. You do your best and maybe someone else thinks about it in a new light you missed and it's suddenly wrong.

Is the rate of retraction and/or correction going to be worse for OpenAI than it would be in normal circumstances for a normal human author? Only time will tell, it's only been a few days.

But all these complaints really just look like pulling at whatever straw to deny what's happening.

They could've instead hired a select group of mathematicians to spend then next 6 months checking these works, trying to understand and refine them, build on them etc... You and the others here would have 100% complained. Even more bitterly. And then you would've perhaps been right: it would have looked like there's a select in-group of mathematicians that get to see and work on the new breakthroughs while the rest of the field is kept in the dark. Instead of now where it's public, anyone can do that. Maybe that's what will happen in the next release. It's not gonna be good though.

> Paraphrasing Hardy, 'exposition is for second-rate minds'.

Forgive me if I have no sympathy for current mathematicians who think this way. It's a pretty ugly kind of arrogance.

Some people told themselves they were the pinnacle, the first-rate mind, as opposed to all the second-rater. Well guess what, now your first-rate mind is a commodity and exposition is more valuable. They'd better learn to live with it.

I guess the point of publishing breakthrough research is that by definition, it’s not just regurgitating human output, because there is no human output to these unsolved problems.

There was a bunch public literature on these topics. They were major unsolved problems. Lots of humans would want to have solved them and tried. But here’s it an llm that has solved them.

They follow journal templates once they are accepted. Not for preprints. Which these essentially are.

What would’ve made you not complain about OpenAI’s papers?

They had over a hundred papers, they basically did a GitHub dump and a pretty bare blog post that mentions they have a retraction policy. Should they have done it anonymously? Is the blog post the problem? Is it that it’s on GitHub? Or what?

Yes they would, in many fields it is (was?) normal to post a preprint and leave it up for the next year while the handful of other people working on the topic digest it and agree on whether it’s right or not, before even submitting to a journal. Sometimes the others would find an isssue in an argument and you hopefully manage to fix it or potentially retract / not submit to a journal.

For what it’s worth I’ve heard from several different ex mathematician colleagues that found papers in the stack that was adjacent to their work or solved a problem they were acquainted with in their career, and they all said the results are actually quite readable.

Maybe there’s some variance or it depends on the reader. That said, like with a lot of other complaints about AI: human papers can be poorly written and poorly explained too. That’s always been the case. And sometimes a proof is just complicated and hard to expose nicely.

> Also glancing at the repo. Such an advanced machine, yet failing to output results with a common template. Every pdf is entirely different from the one before, making the work of the poor humans trying to find a sense in it even more difficult.

I don’t think it helps your argument if this is half of your post. The fact that the pdfs don’t follow a common template? That’s the complaint? Human papers also don’t follow a template.

Especially here. If there ever was such a thing as an expected norm in how a multibillion dollar company handles its finance and taxes (a pretty complicated topic that’s quite far removed from normal life), it’s probably exactly what FB is doing.

You are the CFO of Meta and you have have a choice to make in your tax reporting: option A and option B. Both are esoteric and don’t relate much to how a normal person pays tax or thinks about finance, both are legal, but option B leads to billions of dollars less in your bill. Would HN posters really choose option A?

If there’s a problem it’s that there is so much complexity and so many legal but complicated choices you can make that change how much tax you pay, and only the very rich, and very large corporations, have the ability to explore those options (of course the law is also skewed towards giving them loopholes and tax breaks that don’t apply to a normal person)