pegasus

Were we discussing legality?

Really? What about plagiarism? Have you looked into the Navier-Stokes proof? It gets very murky.

Really? What about plagiarism? Have you looked into the Navier-Stokes proof? It gets very murky.

There's plenty of sense of entitlement, yes, but it's on the other side. Look at the N-S debacle. The model most likely used the conversation text of a mathematician which had discovered and was pursuing a new avenue towards the goal, then pumped millions upon millions to hurry up ahead to an opaque solution which leaves no-one the wiser, beyond just settling a theoretical question. The only impact on science is to deflate the potential minds who might have been motivated to join the effort.

Now people ask why AI labs, whose technology is only even possible because of the contribution of the math community, should give a fig about that community. Arrogantly imagining that after having ripped them off, we can just dispose of them. The mind boggles...

They are not advancing the field. At least they didn't in the case of the N-S debacle. The model most likely used the conversation text of a mathematician which had discovered and was pursuing a new avenue towards the goal, then pumped millions upon millions to hurry up ahead to an opaque solution which leaves no-one the wiser, beyond just settling a theoretical question. The only impact on science is to deflate the potential minds who might have been motivated to join the effort.

Simple. Because they are benefiting from output of the math community, in fact they were required for creating these models in the first place.

This would be true if Chinese models would be strictly distillations of frontier models, but in fact they also train on Chinese data Western models don't have access to.

That's when one is supposed to employ their common sense for semantic disambiguation. Spoken languages are not programming languages. I for one found it easy to parse.

Kind of. First of all, reasoning LLMs can also do (a form of) reasoning. Second, yes you could say LLMs form a sort of intuition, but its domain is the space of human-produced text. It only translates to real world intuition to the degree that those intuitions make their way into the corpus the model has been trained on. You could say that, when it comes to anything other than textual prediction, their intuition is secondary, a reflection of a reflection, so it will always lag behind that of humans.

Intuition also takes effort, just of a different type and quality. It's the difference from mindlessly applying memorization and simple inference/recombinations (basically delegating to our own internal LLM) versus deeply contemplating the meaning of certain mathematical objects, looking for intuitive analogues etc. I would say the second takes more effort and seriousness. The first is more like brute-forcing a problem.

You're right. I knew language is not necessary for cognition, but I always thought of thought as just internal monologue, i.e. "trains of thought". It turns out the definition they use in cognitive science is "the manipulation of internal mental representations to guide behavior, solve problems, and model the world in the absence of direct sensory input". Which doesn't require language either.

Probably it's this linguistic component, together withs shared intentionality/cooperation, that makes all of the difference when it comes to the power of human cognition, so I wouldn't say animals merely lack this component, but it's true that they appear to have pretty much everything else we do.

Sounds like you weren't paying attention. A lot of dog owners don't, so it's not at all unusual in my experience. The only thing I'd push back on is of dogs having thoughts, everything else checks out.

All you get is a new, likely to be useless fact, together with the opaque proof of that fact. There are no known or forseeable applications to the finding that there are singularities in the idealized flow. What you lose OTOH, are the many deep mathematical insights humans motivated by the search would have stumbled upon on the way to that fact and which are much more likely to lead to real-world applications. It's these insights that are truly productive, not settling mathematical points, however iconic these might be.

I think the error you're making is that you're assuming these systems have the same mathematical capability as humans (or better). But that's not the case, nor would an informed prediction be that they surely will get there soon enough if technological evolution keeps apace. That would be akin to believing a hiker will reach the moon if they will just keep ascending the mountain. "But look, they are making such good progress!"

You don't seem to have grasped Terry Tao's (and others') criticisms. Basically they are saying that the advancement you get is illusory. Most of the time, it doesn't give you any new capabilities or deep understanding, instead you get an inhibiting of human exploration and ensuing expansion of our real understanding in that particular (sub)field. It's non-intuitive, since from a purely logical standpoint you've only added another set of known truths to the ones we already knew about before. The issue only becomes apparent when one considers the larger context of human collective truth and meaning making.

There can't be that many math museums in Paris...

And yet you terminated. Which would be the correct thing to do if Marxist philosophy would be wrong on all counts, as you explicitly state. Which of course, it isn't.

They're probably referring to tech like reasoning models, or agent harnesses for example, which are arguably slowly moving things towards the symbolic end of the spectrum.

Sure, but the same must be true for these models as well. They must be doing some form of reasoning, even if it's not formally correct and it relies instead on all kind of half-assed heuristics which only work inside certain unexamined boundaries, which leads to wrong conclusions when those boundaries are being trespassed, etc. And even if it's not the reasoning they report when asked. But all this can't be that different to how humans reason most of the time either.

I suspect humans have other ways that help with error correction and guiding the reasoning effort, but that's another story.

Human languages aren't just a set of more or less arbitrary conventions relating groups of sounds with meanings. Language is probably humanity's greatest and most advanced technology, making most of the other ones possible. And it's also art and play, a repository of original wisdom encoded in the various etymologies. It steers thinking down certain pathways in ways which are hard to even point to - because it would be a bit like the finger trying to point at itself. They are collectively created artifacts which encode the wisdom of generations. The deeper, wider and more diverse that pool, the more powerful the product. A human language invented by one person or by a group of people cannot ever compare in depth and richness to the languages most people use to communicate and think.

Indeed.

Sure, I'm all for opening the whole enchilada. But at least Chinese AI development is more open than the US one. And not just on the weights front, but AFAIK also more open when it comes to the techniques used and lessons learned in the process (DeepSeek at least is). Which is in a sense even more valuable and laudable.

Regardless of the motivations behind the paper, the fact is that they are right. It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens, and I hope it gets corrected soon.

And besides, it seems to me like the ethical choice. Given how these models are, in some very real sense, mechanical plagiators, built on the generosity of creators past and present, some of them now in danger of being replaced by the machine. I think the least the labs can do is open these models up. These and other such considerations were the reason OpenAI started with that name. Of course, it was questionable that those ideals would survive the encounter with generational wealth. Just look up what the founders of Google were saying about advertising when they were two students tinkering at an as of yet unproven tech. Same thing for OpenAI, self-interest speaks that much louder when there's real money on the table.

It just boggles the mind that people now make excuses for their all-too-predictable about-turn.

I guess the question of why counterexamples are so rare and/or hard to find is still left to be investigated.

I feel the same. When those large datacenter projects were being considered, the necessity for building new power lines should have been included in the ask. Instead they built the centers, then "notice" the system is straining and stick the public with the bill and local communities with the consequences. Classic "privatize profits and socialize risks".

> What I'd really wish for is an EU browser that 'just works'.

Have you tried Zen Browser? It's entirely open source but the core team and sponsor are European, and it's actively positioning itself as the European alternative. I've been giving it a go lately. So far, so good, and I like most of their UI/UX choices.

That difference is not essential to the question at hand. An open book test based on an erroneous book would give the same results as this test, even if it wouldn't penalize blank answers.

Yep, a possibility that has found support with Roger Penrose, who wrote two books about it.

I don't see how stealing IP is inconsistent with a sympathy for openness. If anything, it's the opposite. "Information wants to be free" and all that. They were just liberating those secrets ;)

That's just one surface feature of how fascism manifests at the level of economic policy, it doesn't capture the essence of the movement. You wouldn't expect Mussolini to have the introspective capacity to actually understand those murky depths, let alone the intellectual honesty to put that capacity to work, would you?...

I recommend Umberto Ecco's essay "Ur-Fascism" [1] if you want to get a more accurate picture of what fascism is. It might make you reconsider which of these two countries fits the pattern better, at least at the moment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

"Mussolini's model"...

Wikipedia has a whole page on the definition of Fascism [1]. Also worth reading is Umberto Eco's article on this subject, which also has its own wikipedia page [2].

Spoiler alert: it's not as simple as you imagine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism