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Comment by snailmailman | Hacker News Reader

I think there are some interesting parallels between what the Cleo account did, and what the large AI companies are doing now with some of the proofs for previously unsolved theorems.

There may be some value in the answers, but for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution.

I wouldn't call myself a mathematician, but I encountered a few problems in my CS classes where I could work through the proof by hand, see that an algorithm works, and even mathematically prove it, but yet still didn't feel like I understood why it worked, or how the algorithm was invented/derived. But for many, the fact that it did work was enough.

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Joe McCann and his audience discovered that Cleo was a ploy at ragebaiting the math forum in order to drive engagement for more useful proofs. A real-world Cunningham's Law social experiment.

So maybe OpenAI's ridiculous approach to mathematics has value in how it's ragebaiting us to scrutinize and/or come up with better proofs!

> for some the value is in the understanding of how to get from the problem to the solution

All of the value is in this understanding.

So many people are still in denial about it, but "AI" really is just a natural language search engine. AI helps organize what has already been written by humans and was technically self-evident from our work.

If we allow ourselves to continue down this anti-intellectual path and stop caring about why proofs work, we've basically entered another dark age.

I'm not saying AI can't possibly help at all with building intuition, but clearly there are a lot of idiots in the class who just gotta raise their hand first to blurt out whatever trash they come up with on impulse. Those people need to be told to sit the fuck down already. Their uncontrolled ADHD is ruining everything. There's nothing intelligent about mindlessly rushing to compute an answer. That is literally what the last few years have felt like for everyone else.

> AI helps organize what has already been written by humans and was technically self-evident from our work.

I am not 100% sure about the "self-evident" part here.

To your point: yes, AI doesn't come up with new axioms. But then we enter the topic of "math is invented or discovered?". Each of the discoveries are logical consequences of the axioms, but that doesn't mean they were "self-evident", especially for humans.

If everything was already self-evident, AI would just be a useless tautological machine. However, I think it is more than just that

I just gave AI the original Cleo integral, and it came with a solution dissimilar to any answer on Math.StackExchange page in question. The answer also differs in presentation from Cleo's answer, being "2π arccos(sqrt(5) − 2)" (the numerical values seem to be the same.)

Ok, where will you shift the goalposts if next year AI will also be superhuman in didactically explaining proofs to humans?

It's a new technology and we're figuring out important distinctions as we go, nothing necessarily intellectually dishonest about that.

AI capabilities keep getting bumpier and bumpier. There's no reason to believe it won't stall out on a front that it is already quite bad at (correctly formalizing in human language)

“LLM progress will stall in some area at some point” — which is my interpretation of what you wrote — feels particularly unfalsifiable

The negated statement --- that LLM progress will never stall in any area --- seems trivially falsifiable, so why is the GP's statement unfalsifiable?

This incorrectly assumes falsifiability survives negation. https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/52015/is-the-...

logic vs wisdom

If shifting goalposts makes AI better, why not shift them?

I don't think that is the thing that makes AI better. In the metaphor the idea is that someone scored a goal and then people retroactively shift the goalpost to say it doesn't count as a goal.

Is there any evidence it does? Without that it simply feels like poor debate.

Because making AI better is orthogonal to making human lives better. We are quite literally racing towards artificial superintelligence without any serious plan or preparation for the societal impacts that will have.

Did people prepare for or ever fully foresaw the downstream impact of any other major technological revolution, such as farming or the industrial revolutions or the Internet?

Has there been any other major technological revolution that underwent exponential recursive self improvement?

If AI development stopped right now, we would see a technological revolution at a scale similar to the Internet. AI development has not slowed down, let alone stopped. This technology demands far more planning than we are allocating.

I don't think we are smart enough with enough foresight of consequences to plan this. If we used AI, however...

AI inherently has misaligned incentives (as do the companies developing them). I don't trust them to outline the consequences of something like this and to develop an appropriate plan, and neither should you. I believe in humans, but we need time.

The point of understanding is to get better at proving new things. Now that humans are obsolete for proving things, human understanding is unnecessary.

This is a bleak view.

One can also say: The point of humans is to produce things for the economy. Now that humans are obsolete for producing things, humans are unnecessary.

Would you agree?

The economy seems to be agreeing.

The economy can show us whether the conclusion holds, but it does not tell us anything about the premise. Do you believe the point of humans is to produce things for the economy?

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