Ask HN: Why is HN focusing a lot on human drama and not AI solving ME problem?

2 points·aurareturn··3 comments

Title length restricted.

Why is HN focusing so much on the human drama of OpenAI and Anthropic and not the fact that AI just solved a millennium problem in a single week? The fact that AI did this means we should see more unsolved problems in all fields rapidly soon.

View on HN

The mystery is whether AI solved it on its own or just took the final step using a lot of novel work done by a small number of mathematicians who were using AI to test their ideas incrementally. there's a big difference between oneshotting something that performs a very complex task autonomously and doing that very complex task by making hundreds of small iterations.

Mathematician here.

1) People love soap operas.

2) They used a lot of computing power, i.e. a lot of money. I care more about what I or my coworkers can get paying a few bucks per month.

3) For short delimited math problems, LLM are amazing, better than me, even the cheap versions. For long fuzzy problems, we still have to steer a boat. I think we still have a few year of centaur math until it's cheap enough.

4) If Magnus still can play chess, I still can do math.

Because normal people sympathise more with normal people being ripped off by corporation than they do with privileged people chasing grandeur problems

Reply on news.ycombinator.com