omnicognate

Not Back to the Future? In Event Horizon they weren't going to need eyes to see. Whatever, I'm going to rewatch both!

Underestimate of the century.

> the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans

(I assume you mean explain itself to humans here.)

I keep seeing people saying this as fact. It might, but it might not, and there are various reasons one might be skeptical that it will, using current techniques. Not least among these is that explaining something well to a human requires a degree of empathy and sophisticated theory-of-mind that LLMs have not yet exhibited yet*, and that is an area where humans are uniquely advantaged by being humans.

Someone will almost certainly reply by just stating as fact that they will achieve this goal, or pointing out that past predictions that LLMs wouldn't be able to do particular things have failed, and that's all very well. I certainly wouldn't be rash enough to claim it's impossible, but there are still models of all this available that are consistent with all the successes so far but don't predict "LLMs can do anything and will do everything". We'll find out in due course.

(I should clarify that the benchmark here is good human explanations. Of course many humans are capable of producing "explanations" worse than Markov chain text, let alone LLM output.)

* My idle speculation is that a lack of decent theory-of-mind is why LLMs still suck at using the "it's not X it's Y" construct. I doubt they actually use it any more frequently than humans when writing on the same topics, but they use it wrong and it's jarring. This particular rhetorical flourish works when there's some reason to think that X is an idea that might actually be present or forming in the mind of someone reading the passage (or in some other mind that they in turn might be imagining, eg. a fictional character), and that explicitly calling it out and negating it will have a particular dramatic effect. LLMs probably use it with about the expected frequency, but they use it for that reason (frequency) and then come up with something to put in the X and Y slots. The result often jars because the X it uses isn't something pertinent to the reader's thought process and/or the Y isn't a convincing, persuasive or relevant counterpoint to it. I suspect the result is that they stick out and seem more frequent than they are.

For sure, I just wanted to correct the impression that it has been solved. There are a lot of people going around pretending LLMs have solved everything and human maths is over, but what has been achieved with them so far, while impressive, is a very, very long way short of that.

If I were a mathematician working on the Riemann Hypothesis, I'd probably be rather pissed off right now but continuing my work, i.e. the same as I am as a software developer.

The fame from solving the Riemann Hypothesis has not been taken away. It's still open.

I'm not disagreeing with the post. My personal opinion is that LLM "thinking" is qualitatively different to human thinking, that the "convex hull of ideas" idea is probably right in some sense, that the social structures we have built to allow and encourage human intellectual exploration are not obsolete and that there is a high risk of catastrophic damage being done to them by those who fail to see this.

I happen to be (re)reading Strogatz' book "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos" right now. It's beautiful thing, and nothing in the "age of AI" threatens to equal it or in any way diminish my enjoyment of it.

And then sanctioned the ICC.

If you asked me I'd say the pelican is nowhere in particular, it's no particular time of day, it's not facing in any particular direction, the bike isn't any particular colour and the pelican isn't wearing or carrying anything in particular. I'm imagining a pelican on a bicycle. That is all.

That's why I'm not an artist.

Yeah, not saying the proof was worthless, and the technique is indeed a genuine insight. However, there's likely to be a proof that explains why all the cases work out rather than it just being a crazy coincidence, and the existence of the proof did stifle further research into the now "solved" problem.

In hindsight, along with illustrating the potential of computers as a bicycle for the mind it also gave the first indication that if such proofs were to become very easy to produce they could also be used as a bulldozer to bury the mind.

Indeed, and the computer aided proof discouraged research into the insightful proof a lot of mathematicians think is probably out there to find. "Proved but not insightfully" is a problem status some mathematicians are starting to think of as closer to "open" than "closed", which is a good thing IMO. (I am not a mathematician, though)

Having had a wonderful 4 hours of sleep, here's the free lesson I couldn't be bothered with last night:

Grocery store owner A's revenue last year was €500,000. Its profit was €0. It does not have an IT department because it's a corner shop that employs 2 people and has one computer.

Grocery store owner B's revenue last year was €50,000,000,000. Its profit was €0. It has an IT department because it's a huge fucking corporation with a thousand massive stores, multiple office blocks, 150,000 employees and all of the networking and IT infrastructure an operation of that size needs. It's considering opening a bank.

The number that tells you the difference between the scales of these two companies is the revenue, not the profit.

I need to stop wasting my time on the pit of ignorance this site has become.

Revenue and profit are indeed different, and revenue is the relevant number here. If you need an explanation of why, perhaps someone else can furnish it. It's 2am here and I'm going to bed.

> Companies try to cheap out all the time, in incredibly stupid ways.

Yeah, and sometimes that results in someone turning their freezers into ovens. I don't think we disagree on this bit.

I have literally no idea what you're on about. All I said was we haven't seen LLMs produce any new conjectures/problems of a similar level to the ones they've been solving (and I even said "yet"). Have you seen any? What does this rant about "elites" have to do with my comment?