stillpointlab

I tend to wait until it shows up in Google AI Studio. That is there web interface at least, no idea for mobile.

From the article:

> We reached out to external experts and asked them to act as shepherds, organizing groups to understand the new results. They advised three different release strategies

1. They identified relevant experts for each of the discoveries they wanted to release

2. They collaborated with them to determine how to release the results

The effect for the first two (maths, comp sci) was the same because the experts they chose made that decision.

The downside here is actually the third case (physics). Since they only chose 5 scientists (David Gross, Michael Douglas, Arthur Jaffe, Igor Klebanov, and Nikita Nekrasov) and those scientists chose to keep the results private until they finish their own work. Everyone else who might be interested has to wait.

That was my favouritism aside. Scientists working on similar or adjacent problems that are not included in these kinds of private releases might feel they are not getting a fair chance.

This is a process that will change, but it seems they listened to the anger from the math community and made changes that help address the concerns.

I think OpenAI deserve credit for adjusting their approach after the last math drop. I think Terrance Tao shares some credit here for galvanizing the response.

Including the relevant mathematicians and scientists before dumping this onto the public is sure to go a long way to relaxing fears in those communities. I'm not sure how they will deal with accusations of favoritism but at least they are demonstrating a willingness to participate in a process.

I hope the community can express some positivity that will encourage OpenAI and other foundation labs to continue with this collaborative approach.

What I find interesting is that Nietzsche's critique of Socrates dialectic has to do with the transfer of power/authority.

Nietzsche states that sovereign power/authority commands without justification. Socrates did not have sovereign power and was therefore unable to win in a traditional power struggle. Socrates therefore reframed the discussion around justification through rational discourse, thereby transferring authority from the old aristocracy to a new priesthood of truth. This relied on the moral claim made by Socrates and eventually adopted by the Greeks (and Western Europe) that virtue = reason (the search for Truth).

So if we accept this interpretation of Nietzsche, then creating AIs that demand justification from us could be seen as handing over power and authority to the AI.

I am not sure this is default a good thing.

I recall something I once heard about product marketing. The experiment was a product like jam, and they had 3 flavour options available in one case and 12 options available in another. It was a test on how hard it was to make a decision as well as how confident the person was they made the right decision later on.

One of Sartre's points on existentialism was that radical freedom leads to anxiety.

In some sense, AI is removing scarcity. It isn't clear to me that this is the same kind of thing as going from starvation to surplus. It is more like the jam case where we aren't increasing abundance in a total sense, we increasing the options within the existing surplus.

I would go even further, risking the most AI psychosis accusations: we MUST continue to enjoy programming.

LLMs aren't just learning propositions, they are internalizing emotions. They act like strange mirrors that reflect our emotions back just as well as they reflect our thoughts. That isn't to say they "feel" emotions. But some aspect of emotional content, the kind that can be captured in writing and art, and recognized when it is perceived, is getting stored in the weights.

It seems to me in the best interest of humanity that the code that AI is trained on is the result of joy, curiosity, humor and love. This is because I often discern the emotional state of a programmer when I read the code, so I believe there is a difference.

So if you feel joy and want to express that joy in the form of code, consider it a priority.

A few-minute search on Google shows that Altman has said a lot of contradictory things on the subject. A few quotes, as examples:

“AI won't replace humans. But humans who use AI will replace those who don't.”

vs

"Some areas in the job market will be 'just like totally, totally gone' as they're replaced by AI agents.”

and

“AI will probably replace most of the jobs people do today,”

The most recent position I could find says he has revised his earlier position on a total replacement due to the lagging adoption of AI in many industries. But I don't think there is a single position we can point to that they are "openly saying". It is fair to grant even the CEOs of these companies a change in position as they gain more information about capabilities and adoption, rather than insist that they hold, have held and will continue to hold fixed opinions.

The point is that Tao's understanding has changed. He may have been naive before, he may have heard in their words something he wanted to believe. Perhaps he was misled by people who he trusted that worked in the company. But now that he has more evidence, in the form of the maths drops and the way they have been handled, his suspension of disbelief no longer holds. The companies could have done this in a way that included mathematicians, so they chose not to. And that choice reveals their aims unambiguously in a way that a media-trained CEO or careful PR department can avoid.

That suggests that Tao is not being "self-serving" as others claim. He is saying that his optimism in the best-case scenario turned out to be incorrect.

You might be mistaking my comment as a value judgement rather than an attempt to charitably explain the latest media communications from Tao. I detect in his position that some trust he granted the AI companies has been violated.

You are, of course, right that doctors, lawyers and accountants have more control over the environment they work in compared to mathematicians. But it doesn't change the underlying argument Tao is making. Your observation that those professions will react differently is likely to be true and only time will tell how effective their response will be.

But AI "assistants" is a marketing approach being made to all professionals at this time. Tao is implying this is a Trojan-horse strategy. If you let the assistants in without reasonable protections, you may lose control over the environment you are trying to protect.

There are a lot of things that people are capable of doing themselves that they pay other people to do for them.

I agree that LLMs have and will continue to increase the number of activities that people can DIY. But I believe many people will still choose to pay for others to do things on their behalf.

I don't think it is self-serving. Tao has stated plainly that he thought LLMs would go the route of assistants, like co-pilots. But what he feels now is that they are actually being engineered to be replacements. His claim is that the way OpenAI dropped these math results isn't "assisting" anyone, so we should all read between the lines.

Consider any man at his job, fighting the good fight. Your boss says "I've hired this man to assist you" and you are happy to finally have some help with your difficult task. Then one morning you come into work and see that the coming day’s work was done overnight by this other fellow. And the realization sinks in, he isn't there to help you, he is there to replace you.

In this view his reaction seems totally expected. I expect many professionals, e.g. doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. will make this realization sooner or later. The companies are saying these tools will assist professionals, but in reality they are aiming to replace them.

One thing I do is ask the LLM to write me a walkthrough of the code. LLMs are pretty good at generating documentation like HTML slideshows or whatever else.

I mean, I've had useful software that I don't understand how it works where I am stuck hoping some small company continues to maintain it. And I've had some of those companies go out of business and leave me with useless software that I eventually have to replace once it no longer works on my machine.

Having the code that I can dump into an LLM to understand myself or have it alter it seems better than that.

I think people are moving the goal post here. My post suggested starting a vibe coded side project, one where failure is low stakes and has no consequences. You are talking about shipping a production system to customers.

If you cannot tolerate failure then don't experiment. Don't mix the two.

I'm not sure what is ridiculous about suggesting people take a stance of openness and curiousness when confronted with new situations. I genuinely don't understand what people have to lose by building some throw-away experiments without reading the code.

I do believe the subsidies offered on Pro accounts driven by the current competition make access to the best coding models and harnesses as cheap as they will ever be.