turzmo

Doctors simply don’t treat things well that are not classified as a particular disease. If you want to get stronger or more fit, you may well be better off asking your local bro than your PCP.

Sleep is sadly in the same category. If you don’t have sleep apnea, and you want to get treated for sleep, you will be offered any number of pharmaceuticals, all of which are terrible. Better advice comes from other people dealing with sleep issues in this case.

Same here. Only thing that’s ever worked.

I’ve had a similar experience in physics. Excellent domain knowledge and semantic search, but the intellectual sparkle and reasoning just isn’t there and it still often throws out a lot of wrong ideas. It is very useful for coding.

But there is a discrepancy between (the implication behind) these reports and how I subjectively feel talking to LLMs. Granted, I don’t have access to whatever cutting edge model is out there for as many credits, but I also don’t feel like I’m talking to an IMO silver medallist.

Both impressive and terrifying. But as always, the methodology is buried: how many open problems were tried until they found a success?

If they tried this on 1000 problems and this is the one that succeeded, it still means that there are 999 open problems that an LLM cannot one-shot. It seems likely that this would remain the situation until the next model.

If this is the first one they tried, maybe we’re totally hosed.

The conclusions are so different in these cases that it is impossible to know what to think. Though it is reasonable, I think, to assume that a company is willing to push the maximally misleading narrative —- especially a company known for questionable ethical direction at the top, and one that is still circling an IPO, and one that is in the tech industry, where conjuring an illusion of growth and progress is sufficient for success.

I don’t think that’s always true. Backlash is a real thing. It doesn’t always work, but it doesn’t cost much and it’s a lot better than blindly accepting the situation.

I never understood this perspective. Just because a person's behavior is market-rational, it does not mean they can't be criticized for externalities.

That is, in fact, an important thing to do. It turns those externalities into public perception, which turns into market forces that adjust the behavior, if you want to think purely in market terms.

The analogy with Budweiser is not a good one. This would be the CEO of Budweiser actively pushing more drinking while the nation's drinking was increasing. And yes, people would be right, and effective, to oppose this (see Oxycontin).

(2023)

The valuation is the potential based on what SpaceX could do as the 1st mover in space tech.

It is not.

Would either of you have a recommendation on where to start learning about either?

The author seems too humble to put a giant Patreon link in a popup (it's at the very bottom), but in case anyone wants to know how to support: https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski/membership?vanity=ciech...

Clippy would have been perfect for the role!

I don't think Erdos problems are useless myself, I put "useless" in quotes to emphasize that they are the sort of research that doesn't have an immediate application, and so their automated resolution should be weighed against the sociological cost.

As opposed to, say, drug discovery.

Much of math (or science) research has the strange quality of being mostly curiosity-driven, but having giant benefits that occasionally spin out to the public.

Some questions are more urgent and practical. My feeling is that the more directly practical a question is, the more likely the research community is to support AI usage in that question.

The annoying thing about recent AI advances is that they target questions on the wrong end of the spectrum: Erdos problems are exactly the sort of "useless" questions that people might answer purely for the love of the game. The sort of questions that a young person might cut their teeth on and gain confidence.

Solving questions like these automatically, I think, is not good for the long-term health of research. At least for the foreseeable future you still would like people to become interested and develop skills in these fields. These developments, and especially how they are presented, directly discourage that.

Thanks for elaborating. Can you say more about mysticism?

I’ve heard this said, but why?

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Not OP, but it has to be a walk with no headphones for me. As I walk, thoughts seem to bubble up from my subconscious and present themselves for consideration. This doesn’t happen as often if I’m listening to music.

Won’t be canned for going with the herd. I think it’s that simple, even if the herd is running off a cliff.

Yes, as some of these are being solved by the same person, I think my point is even more relevant: you try 1000 problems and solve a few, and only report the few, and it just seems like a matter of time until the rest are solved. But if you report that it didn’t work on the others, your conclusion is different.

I think it is important to temper expectations in light of the fact that these announcements are coming from a startup company with shady values looking to imminently IPO, and thus represent the most biased and misleading take of the situation possible.

This is true, but I still think the relevant question is, how many did they try before they found one that yielded to LLMs? The conclusion is very different if they tried 100 open problems and succeeded at one.

Not denying that these advances are impressive, but it is important to consider that this is a cherry-picked result. This doesn’t mean that AI can now be expected to do problems of similar or lower difficulty, but that it happened to work well on one problem. What you won’t see is how many others they had to try to get this result.

Genuine question: how is working for Anthropic selling your soul?

How do you mean politicizing and prioritizing foreigners?

Investors are rarely boycotted, deposed, or otherwise held accountable for their actions. It is advantageous to adopt whatever philosophical position absolves them of any guilt or responsibility since there is no benefit to having morals, or even signaling them. Of course he thinks this.

I also disagree with the other poster, the manifesto he wrote is remarkably repetitive and not insightful at all.

How much money would you need to stand to gain in exchange for your brain being atrophied this much? I don’t think there’s any amount where it makes sense…

Like I said originally, I think the rise of ChatGPT is a partly a consequence of this. It’s not that people are choosing a different search engine, they’re not searching at all because LLMs will give a better answer faster.

Also, whether it’s ChatGPT or something else, five years is really not that long. Time will tell, but does it really seem like decreasing quality in the name of profits is such a good long-term strategy?

Google has succeeded in enshittifying their search in a way that the vast majority of users (not customers -- those are the advertisers) have not noticed.

I would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.

"Be yourself" and "be polarizing" are the author's two suggestions to... avoid boring her, specifically? Or to avoid boring everybody? I'm not sure she quite understands what makes people tick.

I see, so no substance behind your argument.

Do you have any more substance behind your arguments? Feel free to open up the preprint and read it -- it doesn't bite.