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Comment by GPerson | Hacker News Reader

Nobody said it was one-shotted? It was mindlessly “continue-shotted” except for the brilliant idea of upgrading the model. Obviously the models are going to be improved to the point where typing continue continue, how ya feeling, continue continue, okay let’s double check this, upgrade model, continue continue, will be less necessary.

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The direction of continue shotting will develop a new culture that lead to a much more wider understanding for humans in the field of math. Find a way to accept this new culture and you'll thrive.

It won’t. It will lead to a culture which makes it impossible to actually spend a life learning mathematics deeply.

It will. you just lack imagination.

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It will. you lack imagination, and have a unnecessary high opinion of yourself.

It won’t. I don’t.

I apologize to GPerson for needlessly trying to convince him to my point of view. He seems to be an smart person deeply affected by how LLM are affecting his vocation and work. It was wrong of me to do this and I will take a break from this website for one week.

I was not "mindlessly continue-shotting". The way you describe it is literally the same as "one-shotting" and, as I explained in the article, it simply doesn't work. You are welcome to try it yourself on this problem to verify that.

Yes, I was not doing any mathematical work in curating the output, but the article makes it quite clear that pivots and constraints the LLM would not impose on itself were critical to actually making progress.

Also:

>He doesn’t even know any mathematics and has never cared to learn

While I don't know enough mathematics to work on this problem, claiming something like this is preposterous. As I link in the first paragraph of the article, I've been learning mathematics on my own by going through Terence Tao's Analysis book and solving exercises. I'm familiar with the concepts of mathematical definitions, proofs, etc. I've gotten about halfway through the book solving them on paper before abandoning it (and later got through the first few chapters in Lean, also solving every exercise — by hand, mind you). Sure, this doesn't make me a mathematician, but I'm closer to a dropout first-year student than to someone who has "never cared to learn".

You’re a guy who benefited from easy choices which led to you a life of luxury and now you use your high perch to shit on people who were stupid enough to work hard to do something more meaningful with their lives than attain wealth and social status.

Edit I apologize to Dan Abramov for venting my frustrations about things outside of either of our control and unfairly using him as a punching bag. He seems to be an intelligent person and I hope he continues learning mathematics using whatever tools he sees fit, including AI. It was wrong of me to do this and I will take a break from this website for one week. I won’t hide this comment though it is shameful.

I read your blog and nothing in it indicates you did anything besides mindless continue shotting. You don’t know this because you don’t know anything about the culture you’re stomping on.

I invite you to continue-shot this result. I haven’t been able to do that with the current models in a separate control session.

It might be possible to plainly continue-shot it with more powerful models in the future. I agree that whatever I did is probably automatable.

A distinction without a difference. I can’t believe you’re actually trying to take some kind of credit for this. That’s just so shameless.

What does "taking credit" even mean here? I am not saying that I contributed to the mathematical work in the proof. I am simply disagreeing with you that the process is fair to describe as plain continue-shotting. You saying "without a difference" does not actually make your claim true. There clearly is a difference between a specific technique getting to the result and that technique not getting to the result. Whether or not you like the technique, and whether or not you consider a result obtained through that technique of any value. I thought there is some value in sharing both the technique and the result, and that's why I published a post about it. I think it's slightly different from "an AI company threw 50,000 agents on it" and it's also slightly different from "I just said Claude to work hard and it got me a solution", and that makes it worth sharing with other people.

I am not saying that my work constitutes a mathematical contribution on its own. Not any more than stumbling upon an anonymous manuscript with the solution would constitute a mathematical contribution. I do, however, think that it can lead to a mathematical contribution if any mathematicians consider it worthwhile to do something with it. Whether or not they consider it worthwhile is not up to me.

There is no value in your technique when 2 months, or 6 months, or 2 years from now the model will improve. There is no skill in suggesting to double check work. Everything you did could be trivially automated with today’s models anyway, as you are aware. Taking credit is trying to pretend you had some meaningful role here.

It is a distinction without a difference because I want to live in a world where people get to fill their lives with meaningful things, and are not forced into Uber delivery driving jobs just because rich people like you think it’s fun to put their name next to something other people made prestigious.

I'm not sure it is trivially automatable with today's models since they get "carried away" too much, and I'm not sure there's a good way to prevent the supervisor from drifting. But I would like somebody to attempt that, which is part of the reason for my posting. If someone can automate whatever I was doing, it should be possible to get to deeper results than current models allow. Or maybe the next models would just be that good, I don't know.

Re: "rich", I've essentially spent $400 on this (in subsidized subscriptions), plus my free time being a mindless drone. Given that you assume my role is automatable, it sounds like this is relatively accessible to anyone with $400 (as long as AI companies continue subsidizing the frontier models). I don't think I've had some kind of an unfair advantage beyond that. If anything, a proper mathematician would probably be able to derive the result much faster with the same tools.

I don't know how the broad availability of these tools (to mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike) will change the field, what is considered prestigious, what work gets funding, how it affects the pipeline, etc. You seem to be implying that even testing the limits of these tools, or at least publishing the results obtained with them, is unethical in itself, even though it is broadly accessible now. I can understand this point of view.

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