His end goal was one of the things released in the recent OpenAI publications. It took a model 3.5 hours to do.
Things are wild now on math and theoretical faculties now.
And for theoretical fields labs don’t need human data - synthetic one works well if not better.
The best thing you can do if you’re a scientist, imho - wrapup whatever grant you have now asap with ai, use ai to get more grants if possible, and spend the rest od the year learning what new science you can do with the new tools and participate in creating the new paradigm in your field.
That’s when you’re an established scientist. If you’re new in the field then this is the most exciting time you could wish for - an opportunity to make a name for yourself.
How could that be true? I am a mathematical rube, but surely data that works "better" than real data should be extremely suspect?
> That’s when you’re an established scientist. If you’re new in the field then this is the most exciting time you could wish for - an opportunity to make a name for yourself.
s/scientist/mathematician/g
There are plenty of fields of research where AI is not nearly as destructive as this, currently. Most experimental science is pretty safe for a while.
I've wondered about that myself. Does the fact that LLM's were able to solve these problems so easily indicate that most of the solution already existed, scattered in the training data, and the LLM was simply able to put together the pieces?
I think it's an interesting conjecture but nothing more without proof.
Sometimes HN is crazy and out of touch.
Most vote-based forums like Reddit end up like that
To not bury your head in the sand hoping this will go away, because it won't.
The student you're copying from won't be sitting next to you for the rest of your career. The LLM probably will be, and you'll be probably expected to use it, so why not use it here as well?
All your peers are doing it too, and look at all the cool things they're doing while you're struggling with the basics. And what if the LLMs keep improving at a high rate? What if being able to use them efficiently turns out to be a more important skill than what you're being taught anyways?
Because you're paying a lot of money and opportunity cost to learn how to do something. No one needs the assignment. It's there for you to learn. You were given the assignment for you. Any adult should be able to understand this. We're not talking about 7 year olds asking why they need to learn to multiply when a calculator can do it better than them. These are 20 year olds. If they don't have the maturity for this, a university should not be accepting them.
Being able to use LLMs efficiently isn't a specific skill. It's a reflection of your ability to articulate what you want, which is a reflection of your understanding of the world, which is what you're in school to build. Terence Tao can get an LLM to do math better than I can. I can probably get one to build software better than he can.
And you can still use one to do cool things like your peers. Just not your assignments, the purpose of which is literally to teach you the basics that you're struggling with and that you're there to learn in the first place.
This is like why don't you copy out of the back of the book or look up proofs on the internet. It's all there, but doing that completely misses the point of why you're there.
You want adults to be very disciplined and rational. That sounds great but are most of the adults in your own life experience at this level? They certainly aren't for me (I'm not sure I am at this level).
And it's not even about discipline; it's lying. If you're not going to do the work, just don't do the work. Don't turn it in. Pretty much every syllabus ever says that turning in work you did not do is grounds for failing the class and possibly expulsion.
And why would we want to pass these people through? Then when they come interview with someone like me, I'm still going to find out within like a minute of talking to them that they didn't actually learn anything, and they won't get hired. Do I want to work with somebody incompetent? No. Do I want to work with somebody dishonest? Definitely no. Those both make my job more difficult to have around. So then they end up with a bunch of debt complaining about how they don't have a job.
remove them from schools that test and reward students like this.
Eh? As Greg K-H mentioned in that video from a few days back about how very disappointing Fable was when compared to its astronomical hype, LLMs that one can run locally are quite good enough for a great many tasks... including bug hunting in the Linux kernel. And -as LLM boosters keep saying- they're only keep getting better, right?
We absolutely should be telling people to stop using the LLMs from the major LLM manufacturers. Those manufacturers have spent so many billions of dollars on this project, made so many promises that they're going to have no way to keep, and now that they're running into resistance, [0] they're holding all of humanity hostage unless they're permitted to get intimately involved in the creation of new laws and regulations especially for them. [2]
Even if one only considers their recent threats to humanity, it's clear that these are not companies that deserve any of our hard-earned money.
[0] Some of that resistance comes from their ever-more-sharply-increasing cost to produce the next performance increment, some from folks asking the probing questions about their promises, claims, and business practices that should have been asked years ago, some from ongoing State AG's court cases in regards to their illegal conduct, and some from folks who -unsurprisingly- don't want enormous warehouses that suck up quite notable amounts of power [1] but provide dreadfully little revenue to the areas that house them in their communities, and still others who are starting to realize that benefits of cloud LLMs aren't worth the tradeoff of being unable to afford a new personal computer.
[1] Note carefully that I made no reference to water usage. The only counterargument you can make here is that 500MW -> 2GW is not a quite notable amount of power.
At this point; I see no other scenario than having LLM doctors, LLM judges, etc. No matter the quality. We will get replaced. And if they do a worse job, nobody cares. If they do a better job, also nobody cares. Maybe you can pay more and get high effort model as your doctor.
These companies might not be the ones, my expectation is that they will be scrapped for their pieces, the losses distributed to the bagholders/taxpayers. But some version of them will.
This might be pure cyncisism with no positive value, but really I think we have no mechanisms left to stop going down on this trajectory.
I am afraid that ship has already sailed ... These companies might not be the ones, my expectation is that they will be scrapped for their pieces ...
We *absolutely* should be telling people to stop using the LLMs from the major LLM manufacturers.
...homeboy here is behaving as if there aren't experts in this world who are paid to do and publish research and other experts who are paid to collate, analyze, vet, and publish that research for other domain experts to learn from. [0]
I'm fine with my doctor reading from expert-vetted documents. Hell, I'm more than fine with my doctor going through expert-vetted checklists; most of the time what's wrong with you can be easily figured by going through a few good checklists. I'm not fine with my doctor relying on a lossy-compressed database with a absentminded librarian that has a penchant for people-pleasing bolted on top.
I'm absolutely not against the use of ML systems in safety-critical domains like medicine, but I am absolutely against the use of LLMs in those domains.
[0] One might choose to retort with some variant of "But all that expert work is so expensive!". I would retort: "First, without that work the data fed into the LLM is catastrophically unreliable. Second, have you bothered to look at how much the major LLM manufacturers have spent over the past five years or so? I suspect that it's more money than has been spent on medical research 'meta analysis' over the past fifty years."
What I meant is different though. I fully expect to no longer have access to human doctors in a decade or two. Instead, LLMs will be the doctors. Likely government accredited ones. And my point is that in time, whether the LLM doctor is better or worse will not matter. Same with judges, same with the surveillance camera evaluators and private message examiners. I am saying we no longer have any mechanisms to stop these things from happening.
Why should any of us pay more for reduced performance just so some capitalist can feel good about replacing a human with a machine? You know, the traditional premise of automation in manufacturing was that the outputs might be 80% as good as hand-crafted but 20% the price. Make that 120% the price and the whole equation changes!
At first, you provide the services for 20% the price and price out the competition. Also, human doctors also make mistakes, no? Do this long enough so that the long and costly process of educating physicians is no longer sustainable anymore. Then you regulate hard, after all, it is healthcare. Not anyone can and should just do it.
Then, once you are the only option left, jack up prices. We have seen this exact scenario play out many many times. This is just another version of it. And since trillions have already been burned, you can be sure that there will be a lot of desperation to make it happen.
Maybe there should be a class on how how to use LLMs too.
But learning computer science using LLMs all the time will be like learning to ride a bike using training wheels, and never taking them off.
I expect people that read things here to be literate. i choose optimism.
Or like learning to add fractions by looking up the answer key instead of actually struggling to figure it out.
Similarly, in a computer science curriculum, you could use LLMs to visualize various cache invalidation strategies, sorting algorithms, etc. As I've said here before, when I was at university, I would have Tuesday and Thursday classes that were 80 minutes long. I attended a research university, so the professors were not big on teaching what things were for. They would just sort of dive in and start talking while they were writing on the board. This led to a situation where we'd get 10 or 15 minutes into an 80-minute lecture, and I would have lost the thread, missed some step in how they'd proceeded with the proof, etc. Having an LLM there to ask for the missing piece so that I could keep up with the lecture would have been invaluable to my education.
All the LLM hate feels a lot like "screen time", where, for some reason, it took decades for people to realize it was what you were doing on the screen that mattered, not the fact that you were looking at a screen. Similarly, it's what we do with the LLMs that matters, not the fact that we're using one.
In a way it's on the student to make sure whatever they're doing, they actually understand it, or come exam season the gaps in their knowledge sans Claude will become quite obvious.
I don't think homework load has adjusted in some classes. it was hard to do the homework and learn honestly, it was just copying and finding previous answers. it actually detracted from the learning experience.
it would be nice to have something that could explain it to me, like a tutor. My mom paid for me to have a private tutor to get me through a compressed calc 3 summer class. Best I scored in a math class other than diffy-q.
so I think it's, like everything, on the student. but fuck the homework load at some places, it's not a good solution.
Maybe "people who need to be able to make decisions about rocket use should understand them deeply not just ride on them"
- Can get you somewhere very quickly.
- Requires technical knowledge and ability to use correctly.
- If you're not careful, you will get to the wrong place, and will probably blow up by the time you arrive (if not before).
P.S. Your analogy is dumb. (Just arguing at your level here.)
However, to say they "should never use an LLM" entirely is going to make them unemployable.
Being the greatest [anything] alive probably puts you at an extreme risk of being "out of touch". Is LeBron James out of touch?
> Undoubtedly, LLMs are already an incredibly powerful tool. If used correctly, and if we set up sensible academic conduct expectations around the use of LLMs, these tools can accelerate progress in our discipline unlike in any previous era. I fully expect that we, the community, will adapt and adjust to this new period, and we will harness these tools to achieve truly great things that just a few months ago seemed far out of reach. And I fully expect that human mathematicians will be front and center in these wonderful achievements to come. I will add reasons that support my optimism below.
This seems like a reasonable take.
One natural step of AI usage, the way I see it, is that even mediocre researchers can use AI as a harness to become prolific researchers.
So if you're part of a pure "human only" researchers that publish 1/10th of what the rest are doing, how are you going to survive?
The more prolific researchers will eat your grants for lunch.
This is exactly the same thing a lot of software devs are going through now. AI models have lifted up EVERYONES ability to produce code, so there's simply no premium anymore for those that will only code by hand. And the people paying their salary are asking why they aren't more productive, when even business analyst Joe is pumping out new products left and right.
It's just stubbornness, in the end, that is manifesting as a kind of gatekeeping Luddism. I see the same thing in my Mastodon feed from folks in the software engineering world, particularly people who have a great love for writing code and hold it as a core part of their identities. I understand being irritated at a machine having been trained on (potentially, inter alia) your work with no compensation to you, and now it is perhaps better at (some of) what you do than you are; or maybe companies are now making a lot of money off of something that benefited from your contributions; but I find it extremely improbable that we will be able to refuse our way out of further progress now that so much money has been invested and so much momentum has been gathered.
I don't think I feel any discomfort about a machine being better at anything that I can do than I am at it. Maybe it's because I'm a mediocre person. I personally think that if there's something that I'm better at than a machine, then we need to build a better machine. Imagine what I'd be able to do if I used that machine!
You can't really swear off looking at problems solved by AI, or keep moving away from fields whenever AI starts contributing, and have a viable career.
Today's frontier models, are everybody's local models in the near future.
If this were a change that had expected stalls or reprieves it would be different.
Doing mathematics looks to be the next chess, er, I mean protein folding challenge. The latter's computation demands have dropped significantly.
When things really start going downhill, if we are still in the current mess, it will grease the the wheels, and the brakes.
Yes. The problem isn't that there won't be any problems. The problem will be the rate of general progress and solutions that at least some awareness is required of, to reliably identify a good new unsolved problem will just keep getting more challenging. And then an attempt needs to be make, to solve it in a very short time.
There is always another race to run too, but increasingly slow runners don't find that translates to winning.
This change is not going to slow down, it is going to speed up. Machines will be doing math systematically, checking off the meta-math theorems that ensure axiom combinations are covered, that the search does not stop where theorems are not exhausted, and does stop where it can be proven they are. Humans will never operate at that level.
Why do we ever use PCs, smartphones, Internet, electricity, medicine and so on? Why do we live? For what?