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Comment by 1dom | Hacker News Reader

> AI needs a lot of power, and AI can only (theoretically) breach & control what it can access through the internet.

"AI needs a lot of power" depends on where you draw your lines. I can say a lightbulb needs a lot of power if I include all the power needed to generate all the surrounding infrastructure and make the lightbulb itself. Sincere question: I wonder how much power was consumed in the 88 hours required for the Navier-Stokes problem.

It took 88 hours and who knows how many kwh to solve a problem that no other human has solved, and Humans have already solved breaching and destroying systems that can't be accessed over the internet (see Stuxnet).

It feels like you're suggesting the solution to keeping on top of this thing that can outsmart smart humans is to just keep doing smart human things.

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> It took 88 hours and who knows how many kwh to solve a problem that no other human has solved, and Humans have already solved breaching and destroying systems that can't be accessed over the internet (see Stuxnet).

> that can outsmart

Just to reframe slightly: out-remember and out-persist, not outsmart. As far as I understand, the math problems have been cracked by combining stuff that humans originally developed, but hadn't been able to put together yet. We still have no evidence of AGI, nor is it guaranteed that LLMs or diffusion gets us there.

The nature of the problem is not infinite. It's solvable with some manageable coordination. It is definitely urgent. It is very unfortunate that we have clowns running the US right now, but other countries might coordinate themselves much better.

I guess the issue is we don't have a solid definition of intelligence or AGI. If we did, there would be no reframing possible. It'd be nice to be able to say "being smart is x, the computers can do more x and faster than humans, therefore the computers can outsmart the humans".

I don't really understand what value reframing brings here, other than give some sense of comfort that maybe we're still able to outsmart AI (based on a reframed definition of outsmarting.)

I'm not sure. Coming up with solutions to maths problems that humans haven't yet, finding and utilising multiple zero day exploits to form message boards to then hack other companies without being noticed.... I think accepting that AI can outsmart humans here seems to be less mental gymnastics than "lets just reframe this".

Reframing the problem as more of what we already know will lead us to doing more of what we've always done, but it's the things we've always had and done now that are starting to fall to AI.

> required for the Navier-Stokes problem.

Is that the one they stole?

What are you on about? I'm not a mathematician, but I did a bit more Googling based on your comment, so happy to be corrected here.

From what I understand, the solution OpenAI came out with might or might not have been informed or shaped by work from humans. This is how research, science and knowledge generally works, basically no new knowledge or discoveries are made in a vacuum.

Whether or not OpenAI should have had access to that extra bit of work from other humans is a totally fair discussion about research ethics and attribution and such, and OpenAI should be dressed down for that accordingly.

But I don't see the relevance to the point I was making.

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