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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

The parent's absolutely nonsensical post highlights how polarized AI (as everything else) is today. I can understand someone being opposed to AI on moral, cost-benefit or productivity grounds. But we're seeing a lot of extremist "AI is good for nothing" posts out there nowadays.

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I don't think it is nonsensical at all. The author and his collaborator both appear to be bright people, so there's a good chance they had to offer non-trivial insights to guide the LLM, yet it's clearly in the interest of his employer to downplay whatever personal contribution they provided.

Edit: Now the OP is flagged/dead for some reason. You could disagree on their take (calling it a marketing stunt is maybe a bit much), but I think the argument is sound, so flagging seems counterproductive to the discussion.

I'm sure they had plenty of time to think about these insights without the LLM, as well as the many other mathematicians who tried to crack it over the years. Wether the LLM was simply an assistant or solved the problem entirely isn't as important as accepting than the LLM was the essential, previously missing piece in the solution.

> I think the argument is sound

They got flagged because it is a literal conspiracy theory that assumes bad faith.

> literal conspiracy theory

The strongest words they used were “marketing stunt”. Calling that a conspiracy theory is quite the stretch.

That doesn't really even diminish the contribution from Fable, if true. Droves of grad students have been provided the same sorts of non-trivial insights and turned up no results.

Believing that AI played a very small role while we know this problem was open for decades with at least a few people taking serious cracks at it is just not a coherent logical position.

That's HN. No criticism allowed of llm whatsoever

If you can call it polarized when a majority of people are just happily using the technology while a minority keeps spreading delusions and hatred.

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