[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31640","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:42:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785577328,"id":49132783,"options":[],"parent_id":49132443,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Thats not the point, if there were a better proprietary engine stockfish would still be there as a baseline. Anyone can access an engine as good as stockfish to practice against. Are any open models touting mathematical breakthroughs?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:45:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785573903,"id":49132443,"options":[],"parent_id":49132338,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"If there was any real money in it Stockfish would not be the best chess engine.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:26:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785572791,"id":49132338,"options":[],"parent_id":49132269,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Another noteworthy difference is that Stockfish is also gpl.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"energy123","children":[{"author":"sashank_1509","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:13:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785593623,"id":49134651,"options":[],"parent_id":49132972,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Just sounds dystopian,","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T10:13:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785579223,"id":49132972,"options":[],"parent_id":49132269,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The distinction is mathematician vs mathematics. Mathematics is going to reach new heights beyond the wildest dreams of contemporary mathematicians. But perhaps without the participation of many paid mathematicians.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"artninja1988","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:10:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785593421,"id":49134613,"options":[],"parent_id":49132269,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":">Only ~30 top professionals actually make enough money to have a full career playing chess, maybe a few hundred more can sustain a meager lifestyle with coaching gigs.
Was this different before chess computers were invented?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:15:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785572139,"id":49132269,"options":[],"parent_id":49132152,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Every time someone makes a comparison to chess I die inside. Chess is a spectator sport primarily funded by a few eccentric billionaires. Players artificially constrain themselves in timed environments knowing that they will never be able to produce better moves than a smartphone because a select few people find it interesting. Only ~30 top professionals actually make enough money to have a full career playing chess, maybe a few hundred more can sustain a meager lifestyle with coaching gigs. I shudder to imagine what will happen to the tens of thousands of non-Fields medalist caliber mathematicians if math goes the way of chess. Perhaps Terence Tao and a few other famous mathematicians will be funded by Peter Thiel to report on how well humanity can keep up with the machines? How do you expect any mathematician to be optimistic about this comparison.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"baq","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:38:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785573535,"id":49132407,"options":[],"parent_id":49132303,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"A fundamental difference being that no one was actually paid to find good moves in chess and go like they are to solve math problems and write code. You're comparing the digital camera and the automobile.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:22:18.000Z","created_at_i":1785572538,"id":49132303,"options":[],"parent_id":49132152,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"As in chess and go and also coding for the past ~year there are two groups of people: the disappointed and the enthusiastic. The disappointed are sad that they lost their advantage and that the craft they honed for years or decades has rapidly lost its value; the enthusiastic are excited about the future and what computers can bring to their domain and how it will evolve. I\u2019m a bit of both if it comes to programming, more enthusiastic than disappointed, but also more than a bit terrified about the pace of it all. I imagine that\u2019s how Kasparov felt back then, that\u2019s how Lee Sedol felt and now that\u2019s how Terry Tao feels.
The most disappointed folks will simply drop out, but the enthusiastic ones will keep going and with luck make up for the ones who decided to quit. Chess and go certainly went this way.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jibal","children":[{"author":"piker","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:58:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785574719,"id":49132528,"options":[],"parent_id":49132398,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I\u2019ve deleted it but no it\u2019s not awful anymore than saying \u201cwe survived WWII, we can survive this.\u201d The point was that change happens but humans find a way forward.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:37:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785573450,"id":49132398,"options":[],"parent_id":49132152,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"The chess analogy is awful. If you simply want to know the answer to a chess problem, give it to the engine. Chess only lives on because it's a competition between humans to test their skill (just like bicycles, cars, trains didn't eliminate foot races) ... the computer is largely factored out, but not entirely -- people train with the computer, use it to check whether they played correctly, ... and they cheat. A lot. Thus there are more and more sophisticated mechanisms to detect and prevent cheating.
If you translate that to math, then all you get is math competitions, not math as a career. Of course the translation isn't nearly exact ... there's a lot more room for professional mathematicians because the math space is far more vast than the chess space and can't generally be cranked out mechanically (we have proof).
P.S. The response is nonsense ... I explained exactly why it's awful (others have too) and the response doesn't in any way refute the explanation ... rather it offers up a ridiculous strawman.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"energy123","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[{"author":"FranzFerdiNaN","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:55:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785592508,"id":49134489,"options":[],"parent_id":49132593,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Knowledgable people can confirm what the AI produces is correct. I could make ChatGPT produce a result on an open question and I would have zero way to verify its actual correctness.
Which is less interesting work. And you probably need to do the hard grunt work by hand first to develop the skills and intuition to be able to verify an AI-generated result. So you can\u2019t outsource everything to AI without loss of skill.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:07:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785575232,"id":49132593,"options":[],"parent_id":49132423,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If accomplishments can't be distinguished between talented people and untalented people with compute, is there really a point in trying? I suppose one can hope that talented people given compute will be more effective than untalented people with compute, but I despair that that may not be true for much longer.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"noslenwerdna","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:59:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785855556,"id":49169922,"options":[],"parent_id":49132423,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I mean there were problems with the "old way" as well. Not clear if this change is net positive or negative in my opinion.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:41:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785573667,"id":49132423,"options":[],"parent_id":49132152,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The old way of establishing career credibility is being destroyed, for better or worse. Accomplishments that used to be career-defining are hard to distinguish from AI, and correlate more with access to compute. Think about Bill Gates's math paper he wrote in college. That kind of thing is gone now as a path to credibility. There's still competitions and grades, but the diversity of paths is going away. Maybe new ones will open up. This is a competitive advantage for old people who have credible pre-2025 accomplishments they can point to.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kzrdude","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:51:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785588681,"id":49134009,"options":[],"parent_id":49132152,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Do mathematicians have the right to say "no AI PRs please, the volume is too much" just like how some open source maintainers do it? I guess they feel a loss of control, there is no way to turn the hose off.
Thinking of this a little bit with the perspective of every new proof as a burden, dumped for review by actual mathematicians.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dash2","children":[{"author":"MinimalAction","children":[{"author":"dash2","children":[{"author":"MinimalAction","children":[{"author":"dash2","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:41:22.000Z","created_at_i":1785829282,"id":49165481,"options":[],"parent_id":49161210,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Really? "The benefit to all of humanity from advances in mathematics outweighs the lost jobs of research mathematicians". That's an insane take?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:48:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785790094,"id":49161210,"options":[],"parent_id":49155532,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"So, you're arguing that just because mathematicians are a minuscule, it doesn't matter for prosperity? Because, if so, that is an insane take honestly.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T13:26:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785763563,"id":49155532,"options":[],"parent_id":49141197,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It sounds like you think no technological advances will make the world richer in the long run. I politely suggest that the past century of economic growth shows problems with this argument. I also think that, while jobs are important for prosperity, the jobs of mathematicians are a minuscule fraction of a percent of the total.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T04:46:59.000Z","created_at_i":1785646019,"id":49141197,"options":[],"parent_id":49135798,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Absolutely not the same! People need jobs to bring in income. I don't believe those who profit off of this will share it with the world. The power is all concentrated in the few hands that decide whether or not the rest get any semblance of income in the long run. I don't believe UBS until it happens.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:28:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785601709,"id":49135798,"options":[],"parent_id":49132152,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I find this whole way of looking at things weird. Did maths exist just to entertain and employ mathematicians? Surely maths is, like, useful? Not immediately, not predictably, but in the long run? In which case, whether mathematicians feel bad about it is mostly irrelevant - it's like complaining about the railway because it may put coaching inns out of business.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"c0rruptbytes","children":[{"author":"andai","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:48:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785818905,"id":49164450,"options":[],"parent_id":49164011,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> LLMs don't ask questions
Why don't they? That sounds like an important problem to solve.
Along with the fact that they can't learn anything (after the training stops).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:10:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785813046,"id":49164011,"options":[],"parent_id":49132152,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"i think i agree, we are going to have /more/ math and now need /more/ mathematicians (we are seeing https://vibemathed.com/)
these LLMs are great are generating arguments but they don't ask questions, we will need mathematicians to shepherd them into more discoveries
i really want to see open weight models crack some breakthroughs","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T07:56:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785570992,"id":49132152,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don\u2019t feel the existential dread of mathematicians is correct. It seems to me in fact these results are bringing math mainstream. I now personally look forward to the interpretations and discussions of the significance of such results by human mathematicians.
Now I understand that it\u2019s mostly the super stars benefitting from the increased attention. Folks who are less established don\u2019t share in that glory. But on the other hand it seems like an exciting time to go even deeper for in various specialties of math by deciding where to focus these powerful tools. For every conjecture defeated some seven or eight new ideas open up. Our path through that combination will be set by creative and curious human mathematicians.
[edit: deleted a distracting comparison to Chess]","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"danielrmay","children":[{"author":"emil-lp","children":[{"author":"danielrmay","children":[{"author":"emil-lp","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:19:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785572359,"id":49132287,"options":[],"parent_id":49132279,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Well, to be fair, with Lean proofs, that's the only thing there is (unless I'm missing something).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"baq","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:28:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785572896,"id":49132347,"options":[],"parent_id":49132279,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"It\u2019s more than you get from free software - you get no proofs, no warranties and any responsibility of its authors are their pure good will. Reminder lean proofs are software!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jhanschoo","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T23:46:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785627988,"id":49139720,"options":[],"parent_id":49132279,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Traditionally, a mathematician would be implicitly responsible for all that (if they were to publish Lean code) and also the intellectual work that led to the artifact of the mathematical paper (and code, if part of the contribution). This statement should rather be read as an acknowledgement of limitation of authorship from the implicit, traditional understanding.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:18:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785572297,"id":49132279,"options":[],"parent_id":49132242,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I see. It still feels like a bit of an oddly solemn way of saying "this is the part we admit responsibility for"","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:10:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785571847,"id":49132242,"options":[],"parent_id":49132227,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"No, the correctness isn't for the "inside the Lean proofs", but for the translation of "human language math" and its formal Lean variant.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"traes","children":[{"author":"rencrisa","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:14:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785795266,"id":49162164,"options":[],"parent_id":49132244,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Even beyond cheating with sorries or kernel bugs, the lean encoded theorems (or specifications) must be checked by humans to see if they truly mirror the real theorem authentically.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:11:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785571863,"id":49132244,"options":[],"parent_id":49132227,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm not an expert at it myself, but my understanding is there are numerous ways to "cheat" in a Lean proof (via `sorry` and similar). They're taking responsibility for fully verifying that none of these cheats were used (and that the theorem statements themselves were all correctly formalized.)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"DroneBetter","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[{"author":"jibal","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[{"author":"zahlman","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:01:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785790914,"id":49161390,"options":[],"parent_id":49132803,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Indeed. It seems to me much more likely that the AI was directed to look for bugs in Lean, found one, and then it was directed to write a proof specifically targeting the bug.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:46:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785577616,"id":49132803,"options":[],"parent_id":49132754,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There is no evidence that I can find for the claim "a bug in the Lean kernel was discovered last week by way of an LLM tricking itself and its handler into believing it had found a non-constructive proof of the existence of a nontrivial Collatz cycle."
As I currently understand it, all we know is that:
- a mathematician produced a Lean-verified counterexample to the Collatz conjecture, demonstrating a bug in the kernel
- he claims that LLMs were involved somehow but pointedly refuses to specify how
- he admits that he knew about the bug before publishing the counterexample to his repository.
Perhaps not a joke (although it sure seems to me like they discovered a bug and thought falsely disproving the Collatz conjecture would be a flashy way to announce it), but at best extremely sensationalized by the above description. If you have additional context I would be happy to hear it!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:36:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785576970,"id":49132754,"options":[],"parent_id":49132370,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's not at all a joke ... that's a severe misunderstanding of the context.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:32:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785573137,"id":49132370,"options":[],"parent_id":49132313,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That seems to have been more of a sensationalized joke. Even your link has a disclaimer in it now. Read this chat from the researcher who did this:
https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/270676-lean...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"danielrmay","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:36:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785573381,"id":49132386,"options":[],"parent_id":49132313,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Fascinating, and arguably an illustration of why the bifurcation of responsibility is interesting in the first place.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:23:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785572619,"id":49132313,"options":[],"parent_id":49132227,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"well, a bug in the Lean kernel was discovered last week by way of an LLM tricking itself and its handler into believing it had found a non-constructive proof of the existence of a nontrivial Collatz cycle, see https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943 and https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997917683191056","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"rencrisa","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:01:22.000Z","created_at_i":1785790882,"id":49161386,"options":[],"parent_id":49132227,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It seems that a lot of folks misunderstand the guarantees that lean provides.
I just want to state that having "lean proofs" that build (checks) does not mean the actual real theorems we care about hold. Ignoring lean kernel bugs, ultimately a human (not an agent) has to verify the lean encoded theorem statements (specs/specifications), that the lean proofs are checked against, indeed correctly encode the real theorems. For non-trivial theorems such as these, this is an arduous and tricky task where even a little mistake could be fatal. AI generated lean encoded theorems can be huge and difficult to understand. I wonder if anyone reputable has audited these specifications.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:09:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785571749,"id":49132227,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm enjoying learning about these hard problems, but this line about credit made me chuckle:
> We helped prepare the manuscripts and formalize the proofs in Lean, and we take responsibility for their correctness
Offering to take responsibility for the correctness of a proof written in Lean feels like volunteering to be the fall guy in case someone finds a flaw in basic arithmetic, no?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"emil-lp","children":[{"author":"z7","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:43:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785573808,"id":49132435,"options":[],"parent_id":49132408,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That's clearly just for the tokens, this doesn't really answer OP's question.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"AngryData","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:32:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785789149,"id":49161023,"options":[],"parent_id":49132408,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Yeah sure but they didn't just throw a 5 year old at an LLM with $2,000. If you want good math results from LLMs you need to have math PhDs.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:38:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785573538,"id":49132408,"options":[],"parent_id":49132229,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> The cost of generating the proofs for all 10 of these breakthroughs combined was under $2,000 at Sol API prices.
https://x.com/polynoamial/status/2083470822258467194","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"traes","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:42:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785573775,"id":49132433,"options":[],"parent_id":49132229,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Given that OpenAI pays their employees with stock surely a breathtaking number, but not a very meaningful number now that the infrastructure is in place and the models are trained. AI could never get better and it would still be incredibly disruptive.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kingstnap","children":[{"author":"emil-lp","children":[{"author":"ianm218","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:22:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785597733,"id":49135236,"options":[],"parent_id":49133842,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It feels like the real cost might be negative though.. They use frontier math as a way to test improvements in their model. So solving the problems is like a positive externality, but the important thing is they can verify that the model is improving instead of looking at useless benchmarks. Plus it is good for marketing and attracting talent.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kingstnap","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:35:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785602154,"id":49135883,"options":[],"parent_id":49133842,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I didn't argue that knowing the total cost is uninteresting. What I was saying is that realistically the total cost is:
Hours needed for prompt + Hours needed to check result + API costs.
You don't say "well let's add together the total yearly compensation of all the engineers and mathematicians at OpenAI that were involved" and throw that into the total cost. That's simply nonsense accounting.
The actual comparison you are making is some university researcher weighing between getting a grad student (several tens of thousands of dollars) vs typing up a prompt and sending a request to OpenAI for inference (as mentioned in the article, around $2000 in API and maybe a few hours for the prompt and harness).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:28:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785587337,"id":49133842,"options":[],"parent_id":49133458,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Why would you factor in salary
Say that it turned out that the total cost of the proof of the Erd\u0151s unit-distance conjecture was $50 million.
Then the question really becomes: yes, these models are capable of proving important mathematical results, but at a very high cost. Is it worth it?
If a mathematician applied for a research grant of $50M USD for proving the same thing, they would have been laughed out of the bank.
What's more is that when you have a research grant, you train PhDs and postdocs, you hire new staff, and you disseminate. That is, you get much more value for the money spent.
I'm just curious what the cost is.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:27:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785583623,"id":49133458,"options":[],"parent_id":49132229,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Why would you factor in salary unless they had to baby it through. You would only count the hours for setting up the harness and prompt and checking the result.
Training the model is going to be amortized over other uses.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:09:22.000Z","created_at_i":1785571762,"id":49132229,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I wonder what the total cost of this research was, including the salary for their mathematicians and engineers.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"aabhay","children":[{"author":"einpoklum","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[{"author":"irthomasthomas","children":[{"author":"azan_","children":[{"author":"irthomasthomas","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:07:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785586049,"id":49133709,"options":[],"parent_id":49133664,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I guess expert+chatgpt beats chatgpt alone, so why not hire top experts to drive the search?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:02:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785585750,"id":49133664,"options":[],"parent_id":49133303,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I guess that's because there are serious problems on which many professional mathematicians worked on years. If it was just a matter of hiring an expert, they would've been solved long time ago.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:07:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785582435,"id":49133303,"options":[],"parent_id":49132342,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Why you think that?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:27:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785572823,"id":49132342,"options":[],"parent_id":49132290,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> Also, have there been examples of researchers not affiliated with OpenAI (or another LLM creator), who have done something similar?
A couple small ones that I've seen (example here [0]), but not anything of the magnitude that OpenAI and Anthropic have put out. Likely just related to token limits.
> Another question I have is whether or not OpenAI 'simply' hired capable combinatorics researchers to work on problems, and they have, and the use of the model is incidental / secondary to their work.
I think their output has reached a level that precludes this possibility, but I of course don't have any hard proof.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1uxj3cy/after_openais...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"energy123","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T10:23:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785579793,"id":49133011,"options":[],"parent_id":49132290,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Many less important Erdos problems have been solved by amateurs prompting ChatGPT 5.{3,4,5,6} Pro using their $200 subscription.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kittoes","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:18:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785593918,"id":49134684,"options":[],"parent_id":49132290,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"https://blob.byteterrace.com/public/bds-theorem.html
I have no affiliation whatsoever with any AI company, nor any formal education outside high school, for what it's worth. Simply being curious and persistent can get you quite far in my anecdotal experience.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"brighteyes","children":[{"author":"einpoklum","children":[{"author":"jsnell","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:02:59.000Z","created_at_i":1785596579,"id":49135059,"options":[],"parent_id":49134910,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The original was an actual quote?
But "had" still doesn't mean what you are implying: once the model solved the problems and the solutions were verified, the problems weren't open any more, so a later description using the past tense is totally consistent.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:46:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785595567,"id":49134910,"options":[],"parent_id":49134850,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"The actual quote:
> Our full-featured agent autonomously solved 9 Erd\u0151s problems out of 353 attempted, including two questions that had been open for 56 years
Note _had_ been open, not _have_ been open. Can you clarify?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:38:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785595097,"id":49134850,"options":[],"parent_id":49132290,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Yes, here is another example of major work in this area:
https://arxiv.org/html/2605.22763v1
> Our most capable agent autonomously resolved 9 of 353 open Erd\u0151s problems at the per-problem cost of a few hundred dollars, proved 44/492 OEIS conjectures","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:19:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785572385,"id":49132290,"options":[],"parent_id":49132235,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Also, have there been examples of researchers not affiliated with OpenAI (or another LLM creator), who have done something similar?
Another question I have is whether or not OpenAI 'simply' hired capable combinatorics researchers to work on problems, and they have, and the use of the model is incidental / secondary to their work.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dist-epoch","children":[{"author":"mungaihaha","children":[{"author":"mirzap","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:39:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785584361,"id":49133525,"options":[],"parent_id":49133415,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Even if they can solve problems like this every day, you still have a very limited number of grad students who can solve them. With model capabilities like this, you can have the equivalent of millions of grad students who can solve problems like this.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"whattheheckheck","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:13:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785593592,"id":49134645,"options":[],"parent_id":49133415,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Give the grad students these resources and they can do even more!!!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"gbnwl","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:11:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785600692,"id":49135637,"options":[],"parent_id":49133415,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Everyday? Which 10 problems were solved by mathematics grad students in the past 10 days?
OK I\u2019ll grant that it\u2019s not your obligation to be my search function (despite you making the wild assertion in the first place), so instead can you just point us to the latest grad student solved problem of this level that you know of?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"r0uv3n","children":[{"author":"mungaihaha","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T15:41:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785771665,"id":49157249,"options":[],"parent_id":49139376,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Plenty of 'advances in mathematics' done pre-llm, no?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T22:55:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785624904,"id":49139376,"options":[],"parent_id":49133415,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Grad students do not solve problems such as the existence of non-sofic groups every day.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"maleldil","children":[{"author":"Readerium","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T03:02:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785639736,"id":49140653,"options":[],"parent_id":49139382,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Nopes, often times especially in math they get paid due to teaching duties (at least in the US). So technically for the math research part they are not getting any stipend.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T22:55:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785624947,"id":49139382,"options":[],"parent_id":49133415,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Zero pay? These would be PhD candidates; surely they have a stipend?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:22:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785583352,"id":49133415,"options":[],"parent_id":49133119,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Grad students on zero pay solve problems like this everyday. What exactly is your point here?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"uh_uh","children":[{"author":"vector_spaces","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:24:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785594256,"id":49134730,"options":[],"parent_id":49133539,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Sure, but I don't really understand what the argument is to _not_ be transparent about methodology, since if the models are so powerful, then doing so would easily support the claims and put these concerns to rest. People are right to be skeptical given what is being implied and the orientation of the narrative
I know it's more exciting to say "AI disproved a longstanding conjecture" vs to say "it did so AND it took several PhD specialists in the field this many attempts to even produce a prompt that got the model spitting out something useful under some configurations, and many iterations to optimize the configurations, and the prompt itself, and many trials with that configuration to solve the problem. All told we spent more than a typical math academic can hope make in their career."
By not being transparent, they invite skepticism and cynical takes, like maybe it's just that tempered and qualified claims are an existential threat to companies that are fully subsidized by the hype train?
I don't know. Either way, it seems like it would be easy to address these, so why should they not do it?
To be clear, even if that tempered version is close to reality, it doesn't make the models not useful! It just forces a certain calibration of expectations
I say this btw as someone who uses these things extensively, including to disprove an old conjecture my advisor and I were stuck on recently. I know they are powerful and that everything is different now because of them. Let's be sober when discussing them though","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dgacmu","children":[{"author":"halJordan","children":[{"author":"dgacmu","children":[{"author":"uh_uh","children":[{"author":"camdenreslink","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:52:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785855141,"id":49169820,"options":[],"parent_id":49149167,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The interesting question is "Which problems are LLMs good at solving, and which problems are LLMs bad at solving?", which could also be restated as "Which problems are cheap for an LLM to solve?". So cost is relevant here.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T22:40:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785710429,"id":49149167,"options":[],"parent_id":49146551,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It just feels silly to haggle about the price here. It doesn't even matter because it's going to drop by an OOM quickly.
If these 10 problems were solved by humans, it would be pretty impressive, even if it took a large number of researchers! Yet when AI does it, HN commenters suddenly feel the urge to play accountant.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T17:39:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785692376,"id":49146551,"options":[],"parent_id":49136573,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's disjointed?
The post that started this sub-thread asked:
> 1. How many total problems were given to the model, and what percent were left unsolved at what cost before giving up? 2. How many attempts did you give the model at solving these problems? 3. How expensive was the harness, e.g. did the model have access to a job cluster?
I think it's an extremely relevant question to ask, because it helps us better understand the current state of AI being able to handle math, for exactly the reasons I outlined. I was arguing against the idea this is just a reactionary anti-AI kind of question to ask. It's not! You can be very impressed by what AI is capable of in math (I am) and still think those are really interesting things for OpenAI to disclose (I do).
OpenAI specifically called out a $2000 per problem average, which implies something that's probably not true ("if you throw $2k at us we'll solve an open problem for you"). It would be cool to know what the actual number is.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"gowld","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:05:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785787557,"id":49160743,"options":[],"parent_id":49136573,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> In any research phd course you're actively told to bite off something small and likely to be provable so that you can prove it (and publish it).
But that's the start of math research, not the end.
The point is to get practice and experience doing research.
Did ChatGPT learn anything from these proofs, that it can build on?
Part of what's annoying people is that ChatGPT is churning though problems that are meant to be motivating. They are problems that aren't worth the effort of human professionals (usually because they are incredibly computation-hevy, so better suited for a computer than a human), so they are good for students to work on.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:39:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785605965,"id":49136573,"options":[],"parent_id":49134865,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That's totally disjointed from anything in this thread. The main accusation is that openai is cherrypicking math problems and we should be against these results. As if a mathematical proof stops being provably correct because it was cherry picked
And frankly these "concerns" ignore reality. In any research phd course you're actively told to bite off something small and likely to be provable so that you can prove it (and publish it). Openai telling its computer to do that is no different that your phd advisor telling you that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:40:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785595242,"id":49134865,"options":[],"parent_id":49133539,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This isn't really about delivering - it's more about helping to understand the shape of problems that AI can solve right now. If they took 1000 problems and threw the model at it and it solved these ten, is there something we learn about these ten problems and the kinds of things that current AI is good at? That's very different from picking ten problems _at random_ and solving all of them successfully, which would suggest a much less bumpy capability surface. It's interesting and it would be good science to release it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ifwinterco","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:00:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785600051,"id":49135535,"options":[],"parent_id":49133539,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Yes, but if their machine god really is as good as they say it is, why are they constantly resorting to statistical sleight of hand at best and outright lies at worst with every public statement?
That's not normally how people act when they're confident in their product","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"crazylogger","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:16:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785600992,"id":49135685,"options":[],"parent_id":49133539,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's not about discrediting AI. We know LLM is a commodity technology like electricity at this point. If somebody in 1900 claimed they had a setup at home where they feed in electricity and cool air comes out the other end (meaning they invented AC), obviously people would want to know what the setup is, so everybody can have AC.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"righthand","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:51:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785790310,"id":49161265,"options":[],"parent_id":49133539,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Entirely comical too that some people can not stand the thought of people poking very big comulent holes in the claims of AI delivering what it claims to deliver. As if having skepticism is some how a way to discredit a person.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:41:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785584503,"id":49133539,"options":[],"parent_id":49133119,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It is comical at this point. Some people just can not stand the thought of AI actually delivering and are trying to find whatever ways to discredit it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kevinwang","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:55:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785588948,"id":49134030,"options":[],"parent_id":49133119,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"It would still provide better context to see the numbers that the parent proposes, though.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"robotpepi","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:12:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785589963,"id":49134144,"options":[],"parent_id":49133119,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"it's still important. not everyone has access to 1 million USD. saying it "only" coat 2000 USD is highly misleading for the discussion and future. the concentration of power is a huge problem with AI.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tchalla","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:54:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785592472,"id":49134482,"options":[],"parent_id":49133119,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Mentioning cost is fine, comparing may not be.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"wbl","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:41:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785598860,"id":49135377,"options":[],"parent_id":49133119,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"If you told them this was the problem and they would still have a job if they failed probably. The reasons people don't go head on these problems is career incentives and psychology.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"fasterik","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:30:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785601837,"id":49135823,"options":[],"parent_id":49133119,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"You need to bring both cost and benefit into the argument, and it's not necessarily an obvious win for either side. There are a few complicating factors here.
The cost of running a model is not only $/token, but the salaries of the people managing/orchestrating the models, deciding what theorems to try, etc. Once we factor that in, how much are we really paying per theorem?
The other factor is the subjective component of the value of a theorem. Not all theorems are created equal, and the only way to really measure the value is to ask professional mathematicians for their opinion, or publish the results and look at citations over months/years.
Once we have both of these nailed down, then we can start to do the cost/benefit analysis. To be fair, we should actually compare three groups: human experts, hybrid agent/human expert teams, and fully autonomous agents.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T10:43:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785580981,"id":49133119,"options":[],"parent_id":49132235,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don't think you want to bring cost into this argument.
Even if the cost was $1 mil for these 10 problems, that's maybe 10-20 math researchers for a year.
Do you really think that if you paid that to humans, they will deliver the same results?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"azan_","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:04:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785585865,"id":49133682,"options":[],"parent_id":49132235,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> therefore the $2000 number could be completely misleading, similar to P-value hacking by not disclosing the total experimental setup.
I don't think that comparison to p-hacking is fair. I mean not reporting price of all run is nothing like committing scientific fraud and fake results.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"whattheheckheck","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:12:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785593567,"id":49134642,"options":[],"parent_id":49132235,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Yeah I remember reading about something along the lines of Mathematics is now about the scaffolding around you find the problems/solutions not just the problems and solutions. For teaching purposes. This was before this ai craze","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"c7b","children":[{"author":"lkirk","children":[{"author":"c7b","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:51:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785610276,"id":49137237,"options":[],"parent_id":49136405,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I know it sounds unrealistic and not aligned with academic incentive structures. But those are the exact structures that gave us a lot of headaches in the experimental sciences. I think it would be a good north star to aim for something that resembles how those are trying to address the reproducibility crisis. Better than to embrace the most black-box version of math that AI systems can produce (million-line proofs without context). Even if a reproducibility crisis is seemingly impossible (although agents so far have also been pretty good at finding compiler bugs).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:21:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785604918,"id":49136405,"options":[],"parent_id":49135851,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I think this is a bit optimistic compared to my view (wrt portability). There's a large stack of software that is involved in training and probably less so in inference. I'm not saying it's impossible but there are definitely different levels of reproducibility and the academic incentive structure doesn't really prioritize reproducibility in my experience. I'm sure it varies quite a bit, I'd be curious to know how those in this problem space are thinking about reproducibility and at what level.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jsenn","children":[{"author":"c7b","children":[{"author":"somenameforme","children":[{"author":"c7b","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T20:58:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785617903,"id":49138418,"options":[],"parent_id":49136894,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I think those concerned about ensuring a place for human mathematicians usually go in different directions than my suggestion, at least those I've seen so far. Like this post that was recently featured on HN: https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mat...
My perspective is more like a FOSS philosophy for math. Even if a closed version has the same immediate effect, it's just better for everyone if everyone can look under the hood and tinker with it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"throwaway0123_5","children":[{"author":"somenameforme","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T04:09:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785730177,"id":49151128,"options":[],"parent_id":49146770,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The reason it's a meme right now is because there were a lot of people taking it seriously even when it was completely obvious nonsense. And one can argue it always was. There was some good advice that was mostly self evident, like having the most relevant instructions near the end of your context, but there was never a time when a 'prompt engineer' would produce dramatically better output than a random guy just clearly stating what he wants.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T18:02:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785693721,"id":49146770,"options":[],"parent_id":49136894,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> suddenly then there came to be a lot of talk of 'prompt engineering' as a skill.
I would've thought pretty much the exact opposite. "Prompt engineering" was somewhat important in 2023/2024 when the models were much weaker, it doesn't seem at all necessary anymore (unless just "clearly stating your requirements" counts as prompt engineering). Most of the discussion I've seen seems consistent with this?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:17:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785608229,"id":49136894,"options":[],"parent_id":49136673,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I can't help but wonder about the human motivation there though. For instance as it became increasingly clear that LLMs were capable (and becoming ever more capable) of competently solving meaningfully complex software development tasks, suddenly then there came to be a lot of talk of 'prompt engineering' as a skill. The chronology doesn't make a ton of sense unless you consider that the main motivation may have been simply looking for a way to keep software engineers in the loop.
Pure math is relatively outside my domain, so I find it difficult to grok the exact relevance of the various published discoveries beyond that they are not insignificant, and LLM competence is expanding quite steadily across the field. If this trend continues to the point of LLMs being able to competently expand pure math, it seems somewhat predictable to expect there to be a number of people aiming to find ways to try to keep human mathematicians in the loop.
I've no idea what I think about this one way or the other, beyond that it's certainly a phenomena and one that's going to drive motivated reasoning that may not be entirely sound.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jsenn","children":[{"author":"c7b","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T20:51:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785617464,"id":49138360,"options":[],"parent_id":49136959,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I agree with your reading of the presentation and I mostly agree with the presentation - but I believe the recommendations should go a bit further than they do there.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:22:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785608525,"id":49136959,"options":[],"parent_id":49136673,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don\u2019t see Tao suggesting what you have suggested there. Instead he suggests that humans responsibly disclose AI use, and that mathematicians develop a set of norms to deal with an overabundance of AI generated results. For example, he suggests that authors should be able to discuss their results in detail to demonstrate understanding before publication.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:50:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785606623,"id":49136673,"options":[],"parent_id":49136501,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Because the math isn't solely about the proof being correct. You don't need to take my word for it, here's one of the most famous living mathematicians' take on it: https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/age-of-ai-icm-2026.p...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"SpicyLemonZest","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:53:18.000Z","created_at_i":1785606798,"id":49136698,"options":[],"parent_id":49136501,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Understanding the process that led to the proof helps to understand how to do further work on top of it, which is the goal of most mathematical research. It's not as though mathematicians are going to go launch a startup operationalizing their knowledge of how densely hyperspheres may be packed.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:32:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785605527,"id":49136501,"options":[],"parent_id":49135851,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I can see this being important if you only care about the results as evaluations of AI progress, but if what you care about is the math itself why should you care about the prompt or anything other than the proof?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"black_knight","children":[{"author":"Phemist","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T20:41:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785616907,"id":49138266,"options":[],"parent_id":49136711,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What if the AI has discovered some new function F that allows it to generate (insanely large) proofs for a ton of theorems in a ton of different fields. Wouldn't you like to know more about this `F`? That seems to be the real innovation in this case. How much about it could be gleaned from the individual proofs themselves? What if this `F` is actually simple enough to be digestible by humans?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"rst","children":[{"author":"Readerium","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T02:59:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785639572,"id":49140639,"options":[],"parent_id":49138890,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Exactly, this is an example of "Reward Hacking", that is too common in a lot of cases.
Another case I want to highlight is writing GPU kernels as illustrated by the following example:\nSay I want to generate random number with Normal (0, 1) distribution.\nOften times the AI written kernel will just generate the number 0. The tests often fail to catch these errors.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T21:58:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785621534,"id":49138890,"options":[],"parent_id":49136711,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Unfortunately, we seem to already have an example of an LLM producing a proof in a week known open problem (the Collatz conjecture) in which it looks like it was sneaking a flawed proof through bugs in the proof checker. https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:54:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785606847,"id":49136711,"options":[],"parent_id":49135851,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"If the proofs are formally verified by a proof assistant (Agda, Roq, Lean, \u22ef), I see no reason we would need to know how these came about. All the information needed is in the proof.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"pfdietz","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T15:16:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785770215,"id":49156919,"options":[],"parent_id":49135851,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"While you may want AI results to somehow "not count" if the methods weren't disclosed, that doesn't present these results from poisoning the well for others. Once a result (with verifiable proof object) is delivered, the problem is solved, regardless of whether methods were disclosed.
Methods are only really necessary for results at a meta level, about the design amd evaluation of AI math systems.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"8note","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:55:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785779739,"id":49159226,"options":[],"parent_id":49135851,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"why is reproduceability the thing?
shouldnt the paper be the math of the argument? the reproduction is reading the following the proof","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:33:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785601985,"id":49135851,"options":[],"parent_id":49132235,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I believe we're seeing a new kind of mathematics that will require completely new formats for publication, a bit similar to those used in experimental sciences. AI-powered mathematics should be fully reproducible, so it's the authors' responsibility to disclose the exact model type, inference settings/seeds and the full prompt history leading to the result. Of course that would ideally require open weights models.
It's not just about requiring to disclose AI use. AI-powered mathematics is a completely valid discipline that doesn't need to be shy, but it should develop its own publication culture.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"wrsh07","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:18:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785608326,"id":49136915,"options":[],"parent_id":49132235,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It seems like they threw it a decently large battery of open math problems and probably limited it to something like $200-500 per problem:
https://x.com/polynoamial/status/2083478171975082334
As a complete guess, it seems like they tested hundreds to thousands of problems with a relatively low per-problem budget
--
The linked tweet from Noam Brown at OpenAI reads:
> And yes we did try other major problems without success. Sadly no Millennium Prize problems (yet).
> But also, we didn\u2019t spend a lot on each problem. It\u2019s possible to push test-time compute much further.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"moscoe","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T19:09:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785611392,"id":49137416,"options":[],"parent_id":49132235,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I guess people will always find something to gripe about.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:09:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785571789,"id":49132235,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"My main gripe here is the lack of transparency around the total experiment and construction. I doubt that they simply pointed their model at these ten specific problems alone and gave the model one shot; therefore the $2000 number could be completely misleading, similar to P-value hacking by not disclosing the total experimental setup.
I want to know:
1. How many total problems were given to the model, and what percent were left unsolved at what cost before giving up?\n2. How many attempts did you give the model at solving these problems?\n3. How expensive was the harness, e.g. did the model have access to a job cluster?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"0x5FC3","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[{"author":"0x5FC3","children":[{"author":"simianwords","children":[{"author":"0x5FC3","children":[{"author":"frozenseven","children":[{"author":"shimman","children":[{"author":"cheevly","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T23:44:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785627849,"id":49139701,"options":[],"parent_id":49137327,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Altman has no shares in OpenAI.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T19:00:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785610827,"id":49137327,"options":[],"parent_id":49132457,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"That's not what is being purported, you're doing a complete misdirect. OpenAI wants to IPO so Altman can potentially capture a trillion dollar bag, with so much money on the line + betting US foreign policy on it as well (pax silica) it's not hard to be overly suspicious of such claims. Especially in the context of a group of people wanting to generate a new decades long cold war in the form of China being the new big baddie (just ignore how destructive, both self- and towards the world, the US has become).
These companies desperately want a return to serfdom. If they didn't come off as so anti-human the public backlash wouldn't be so great.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:48:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785574123,"id":49132457,"options":[],"parent_id":49132388,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Capabilities of this sort have already been demonstrated by independent parties, and models have consistently gotten better at this. Yes, insinuating that mathematicians and scientists are secretly solving decades-old problems on OpenAI's behalf is an insane conspiracy theory.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:36:34.000Z","created_at_i":1785573394,"id":49132388,"options":[],"parent_id":49132374,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I would say the lack of skepticism is nuts, honestly.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:33:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785573199,"id":49132374,"options":[],"parent_id":49132327,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The level of conspiracy theory is nuts","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jryle70","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:39:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785598751,"id":49135362,"options":[],"parent_id":49132327,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Do you think OpenAI investors are more cavaliers than yourself who doesn't have any stake in it?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:25:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785572711,"id":49132327,"options":[],"parent_id":49132300,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I understand and I am not trying to deny the impressiveness or the velocity of AI in general. But at some point we have to ask how much do we trust the labs at face value without much transparency of how they got to the results when there is trillions of dollars on the line.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:21:59.000Z","created_at_i":1785572519,"id":49132300,"options":[],"parent_id":49132249,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This isn't really a productive way to think about these things, IMO. It's quite possible it would take hundreds of years for any specific group of PhDs to solve them. Or one individual PhD could have the correct flash of insight and solve it in a month. There's absolutely no way to predict this, besides trying to gauge the apparent simplicity of the proof or counterexample (which is likely to be misleading). Until someone actually runs an experiment like this it's not a viable metric.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jgeralnik","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:31:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785576705,"id":49132725,"options":[],"parent_id":49132249,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"A friend\u2019s PhD advisor has been chasing non-sofic groups for 25 years (and was shown a preprint of the results by openai to verify them). He believed a solution would be Fields-worthy
This was not a problem that was for sale","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"heaney-555","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:03:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785607385,"id":49136786,"options":[],"parent_id":49132249,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You couldn't. PhDs have been working on these problems for decades. It wasn't for lack of trying that none of them could figure these solutions out!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sergiomiguens","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:14:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785827678,"id":49165284,"options":[],"parent_id":49132249,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"https://mathstodon.xyz/@sergiosh/116847266951670037\nhttps://mathstodon.xyz/@sergiosh/116976232522229829
Look at this two threads.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:12:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785571935,"id":49132249,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"How much do you all think it would cost to "buy" these advances from PhDs, practicing scientists?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"zkmon","children":[{"author":"NitpickLawyer","children":[{"author":"cure_42","children":[{"author":"NitpickLawyer","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:30:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785573043,"id":49132365,"options":[],"parent_id":49132337,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"(let's assume that)My 3dprinter is special. It has a bunch of values + an algorithm (i.e. a neural network) that takes input as tokens and outputs a printed object.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dgellow","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[{"author":"dgellow","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:37:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785577070,"id":49132763,"options":[],"parent_id":49132483,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Almost as if a proof isn\u2019t the same as a 3d print. It\u2019s just not a good analogy","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:52:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785574335,"id":49132483,"options":[],"parent_id":49132467,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":""I made this proof myself, but the designer is someone else" is an extremely unconvincing claim to ownership.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:49:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785574184,"id":49132467,"options":[],"parent_id":49132337,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I would say \u201eI made this gadget with my 3d printer, but the designer is someone else (I found the model online)\u201c. The intent, the drive, the action comes from the human","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"samatman","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:56:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785794191,"id":49161995,"options":[],"parent_id":49132337,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"True story: I have a moisture issue in my furnace, such that it needs vacuuming out. This involved detaching a length of tubing, but that puts stress on said tubing, sometimes knocks other things out of alignment, and involves completing the seal between the wetvac and the tubing with my hand.
I also have a 3D printer. I also have a ChatGPT subscription, and some OpenSCAD chops. I came up with a part which would go into the top of the down tube to the drainage pump, and mostly-seal the down tube itself, with an opening on the side to vacuum out the moisture. This was purely prooompted, I took some measurements, printed bits of the part, refined the shape, and you know what?
It works! I can stick it down there, turn on the (very loud) wet vac, and go upstairs. On a 1.5Ah battery it sucks for a bit less than ten minutes, which turns out to be plenty of time.
So: who made that?
Don't care. I'm waking up warm at night.
Also: me, obviously. ChatGPT doesn't have a fucking furnace.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:26:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785572780,"id":49132337,"options":[],"parent_id":49132292,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'd say the creator is the one who created the 3d model, not the one who pushed the print button.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:20:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785572404,"id":49132292,"options":[],"parent_id":49132277,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"A better analogy would be a manufactured object, say 3d printed for simplicity. The 3d printer is given an input, and an object manifests itself after some time. We say that the creator of the object is the person turning on the machine, sending the data, and collecting the object. Not the machine itself.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"esikich","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:22:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785572539,"id":49132304,"options":[],"parent_id":49132277,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Your brain also is physical. Electrochemical gradients flow between physical molecular constructs. Isn't it just chemistry? Do you attribute it to physics or some whole-is-greater-than-the-parts idea?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"naasking","children":[{"author":"perching_aix","children":[{"author":"ben_w","children":[{"author":"perching_aix","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:44:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785584660,"id":49133559,"options":[],"parent_id":49132776,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> This sounds like a personality?
Not quite what I meant, but it's also not entirely unrelated I guess? Personality to me is like a natural bias. It does also shift over time, and is also an internal bit of state. I guess in some respects it can also be self-referential, like personal convictions.
> Perhaps they were losing their self-awareness at the time?
I do think it is entirely possible for people's self-awareness to shift, yes. Or more precisely, I do model things that way.
> Do you mean like these, or something else?
They're adjacent, but I more meant something like these:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03768
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18512
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26537
So basically, steganography. The difference is that these papers investigate from the perspective of separate LLM instances covertly exchanging information between each other. This is in contrast with the scenario I'm laying out, where an LLM's past state is exchanging information with its future state, continuously representing and modulating a concealed internal state of some sort. And then that state just so happening to be some sort of self-referential meta state.
And the best inkling I have towards this is basically: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WP5_XJY_P0Q
But then I don't think there's enough covert channel bandwidth in the agent replies for anything interesting like this.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:39:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785577155,"id":49132776,"options":[],"parent_id":49132430,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Before reading, know that I am uncertain in either direction.
> a hidden representation of self that is continually tended to
This sounds like a personality? They act like they have one of those. It may be an illusion, and even if it isn't an illusion it is unlikely to be anything like the source (us), but they act like it.
> I further fail to identify how it could be hidden or maintained, considering I control like half of it.
Indeed you control everything about a local model, and much of the context of even a remote model. But the state of activations and circuits in SotA AI is hidden in similar ways to those of synapses in your head: difficult to decipher even with probes monitoring the signals directly, and often not emitted at the normal output.
> The best you could ascribe it is a meticulous maintenance of a persona the user is talking to, but then that doesn't necessarily represent the model's internal state, the same way my own words here aren't doing so either. Difference being, I actually have one (I'm "on-line").
While we can be confident that LLMs make up personas etc., it is insufficient to go from "that doesn't necessarily represent the model's internal state" to "therefore it doesn't have one".
> You'll sometimes catch models mixing up who's who and how many who-s there even are for example.
I've, unfortunately, also experienced this with humans. Perhaps they were losing their self-awareness at the time? I do wonder if old-age dementia does that by the end, though the person in question didn't ever get diagnosed with that.
> If you know of anything like this, your turn now, would be happy to learn.
Do you mean like these, or something else?
\u2022 https://researchportal.hkust.edu.hk/en/publications/decoding...
\u2022 https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.165/
\u2022 https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"naasking","children":[{"author":"perching_aix","children":[{"author":"naasking","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T08:45:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785660357,"id":49142437,"options":[],"parent_id":49138722,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Even mechanistic models generate interesting discussion. How many years have we discussed Turing machines and the lambda calculus? Almost a century of great work came out of those.
The reason I insist on mechanistic models is because the original post was making a definitive knowledge claim, and in my experience, the knowledge claim is unwarranted.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T21:35:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785620145,"id":49138722,"options":[],"parent_id":49136060,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Sure, but then such a model is not going to make itself. People pitting their vague intuitions is how such models eventually form. I'd also push back regarding that my comment would have been handwavey or without mechanistic elements, even if it was on the whole informal.
This is kind of also the reason e.g. the HN site guidelines are worded the way they are. Regrettably, forums naturally yield themselves to tit for tat type exchanges, but there's really no reason one could not bounce such vague intuitions off of another. I do not have to be right or wrong, and you don't either. Admittedly difficult when its some intensely contentious topic.
If a mechanistic model existed, there would also be no reason to talk about this in the first place. There'd be nothing to discuss, you'd be simply told how a given model characterizes from this perspective on the model cards.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:52:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785603157,"id":49136060,"options":[],"parent_id":49132430,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Dunno about the parent commenter, but I personally interpret the concept as having a hidden representation of self that is continually tended to
I don't see why an LLM could not have a sense of identity or personality while it's evaluating a specific prompt, or even change self awareness while evaluating a prompt since many outputs model a back and forth conversation. My point is that without a mechanistic model of what "self awareness" means, we have no way of truly evaluating such questions, we're just hand waving vague intuitions about what it could mean.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:42:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785573737,"id":49132430,"options":[],"parent_id":49132307,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Dunno about the parent commenter, but I personally interpret the concept as having a hidden representation of self that is continually tended to, and influences future choices. This implies statefulness, which models are intentionally not at inference time (*).
(*) Even if we hack around this and just do the usual trick of simply laundering statefulness to a higher level, in this case the context window being fed in, I fail to identify (**) a representation of its own state in these bodies of text that it'd be meticulously maintaining. I further fail to identify how it could be hidden or maintained, considering I control like half of it. The best you could ascribe it is a meticulous maintenance of a persona the user is talking to, but then that doesn't necessarily represent the model's internal state, the same way my own words here aren't doing so either. Difference being, I actually have one (I'm "on-line").
You'll sometimes catch models mixing up who's who and how many who-s there even are for example.
(**) I did wish for something hidden though, so maybe it's just concealed? The same way people can encode a lot more of their emotional and mental state than normal into text if they read and write a lot of it, I'm aware of research that suggested the same for LLMs, albeit I cannot cite it. Maybe those phrasing signatures are just alien to me and will never pop out. Either way, I'd expect researchers to stumble upon this during interpretability studies, and either they haven't, they have but it wasn't popsci adopted, or they're keeping awfully tight lipped about it. If you know of anything like this, your turn now, would be happy to learn.
I do wonder how reasonable it is to expect e.g. a single maintained identity though. Maybe it isn't?
(*) Another way to hack around this of course is to just precompute some internal "self-awareness states" and hop around between them. Probably the closest to what the models are actually "doing".","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Delk","children":[{"author":"woeirua","children":[{"author":"Delk","children":[{"author":"naasking","children":[{"author":"Delk","children":[{"author":"naasking","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T08:51:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785660707,"id":49142479,"options":[],"parent_id":49137311,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> I can't see how the model could include the actual subjective human experience.
People who say LLMs have subjective experience aren't saying they have human-type subjective experience. Nobody who sees an LLM express hunger when role playing as a hungry person thinks that the LLM is actually hungry.
I too can role play as a hungry person despite not being hungry, so there is no reason in either case to conclude that the words produced reflect genuine internal subjective states. The point is that such internal states may still exist.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:58:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785610708,"id":49137311,"options":[],"parent_id":49135984,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I just don't think linguistic (or other symbolic) representations alone can contain the information, in any sense of the word, of what e.g. human subjective experiences actually are like. The concepts we express with language get their meaning from our physical reality, even if quite indirectly in case of some abstract concepts.
Hunger as a concept doesn't mean anything without the physical need. Politeness or bluntness, even in writing, don't mean anything without social dynamics. And we have social dynamics (and neural structures that directly process social cues and associated feelings) because we've evolved into social animals for whose survival that was important.
I see no reason to believe that a model trained only with symbolic representations, with no connection to the physical world phenomena that those symbols represent, could contain the subjective experience itself.
Neural network models may be able to derive novel (or at least novel-looking) output rather than just an obvious rehash of their input, but I don't think any set of bytes can fundamentally contain information that was never entered into it. (Even if e.g. a model produces previously unknown mathematical results, those results can in principle be derived from the information that they were trained with.)
I'm not saying that artificial neural networks couldn't, in principle, be aware. ANNs and biological neural nets may be equivalent in the sense that any information and processing structures represented by a biological one could in principle be represented by an artificial one. If that's the case, and awareness is purely a product of our neural systems as materialism would imply, it should be possible for an ANN to be aware, too.
But when the model has been trained with only language, and IMO the subjective experience can't be derived from the symbolic representation alone, I can't see how the model could include the actual subjective human experience.
An AI model could of course have an awareness and subjective experiences that are totally different than our human experience. But then the fact that it happens to produce output resembling what humans find meaningful shouldn't be considered indicative of such awareness.
This is of course more of a philosophical argument than a technical one, and I'm happy to hear counterarguments, but not on the level of off-hand dismissal.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:45:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785602736,"id":49135984,"options":[],"parent_id":49135296,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Making definitive claims about whether LLMs do or do not have specific properties absolutely does require precise definitions of those properties that can be used to evaluate those questions. Merely hand waving that LLMs didn't undergo the same evolutionary process is not a definitive argument.
For example, the Turing machines and the lambda calculus don't look anything alike, but they are fundamentally interconvertible, and so in a real sense they are fundamentally equivalent. Without a model, all of your arguments are completely unconvincing for exactly the same reasons, eg. that there may exist many paths to fundamentally equivalent ends.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:31:34.000Z","created_at_i":1785598294,"id":49135296,"options":[],"parent_id":49134122,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I wasn't trying to give a model. The point was that I don't think it's necessary to give one.
You didn't address any of what I wrote, let alone provide any counterarguments. Which part of what I wrote do you think was wrong?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:09:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785589794,"id":49134122,"options":[],"parent_id":49132747,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"So\u2026 your model is 100% vibes based. Got it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"naasking","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:41:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785602503,"id":49135944,"options":[],"parent_id":49132747,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> The qualia themselves, even those that are quite abstract, are rooted in our physical presence and evolution.
There is no objective evidence of qualia. All evidence of qualia are vocal or other expressions of belief in qualia. Perceptions clearly exist and are observable, subjective experience and qualia, not so much.
> I see no reason to believe that a neural network built entirely based on the symbolic level of language could have the features needed for the subjective experience itself.
If your objection is to models based on "symbolic level of language" which you think lack semantic understanding of, say, trees, you should ask yourself how our brain, based on physics which also lacks any semantic category for trees, can somehow develop a semantic understanding of trees. All of these appeals to differences with the brain never seem to acknowledge that fundamentally, the brain has the same explanatory gap with physics.
> But if we assume awareness because outputs resemble what we consider meaningful as humans, yet the neural network has had no inputs or evolution that could form the actual basis of human-like experience
This assumes a lot. It seems very possible to me that intelligence inherently develops a map of natural categories (natural kinds), and language naturally develops around such categorical understanding. Semantics are then fundamentally the network of associations between categories, eg. there is no fundamental difference between symbols and semantics, and the latter cam be inferred from the former, and that's exactly what LLMs do, and why the semantic maps between different languages are so similar and how they can translate between languages.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:35:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785576915,"id":49132747,"options":[],"parent_id":49132307,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I honestly don't think a language model is enough for self-awareness, regardless of the exact model of awareness.
A language model (or an image model or whatever) cannot even be sentient, and I think sentience is a prerequisite for awareness.
Even if we express a lot of our subjective experience with words, the language is just a symbolic representation of those experiences. The qualia themselves, even those that are quite abstract, are rooted in our physical presence and evolution.
You can't have an understanding of what hunger or physical pain feel like if you have no need for food or a sensory capacity for feeling pain. You can't understand what loneliness or pride at an achievement mean if you don't have a neural network wired to value social connection or status. We value connection because we're social animals that have needed each other for survival.
Even the more abstract of our subjective experiences are in some way rooted in our physical evolution.
I see no reason to believe that a neural network built entirely based on the symbolic level of language could have the features needed for the subjective experience itself.
AI awareness might actually be more believable if that awareness manifested itself in an entirely different way than in humans. But if we assume awareness because outputs resemble what we consider meaningful as humans, yet the neural network has had no inputs or evolution that could form the actual basis of human-like experience, I think we're seeing something that isn't actually there.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:22:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785572563,"id":49132307,"options":[],"parent_id":49132277,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> AI has no self-awareness
What is your mechanistic model of self awareness that yields this conclusion?
> It's a tool
Does your model suggest that tools can't have self awareness?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"raincole","children":[{"author":"yaqubroli","children":[{"author":"esikich","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:54:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785574450,"id":49132491,"options":[],"parent_id":49132389,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"What gives the intention and ability to the human?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"oklahomasports","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T20:01:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785614517,"id":49137854,"options":[],"parent_id":49132389,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Are you playing dumb? Using power tools to build furniture is very different than using an ai robot to carve a statue or whatever.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:36:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785573399,"id":49132389,"options":[],"parent_id":49132361,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The human provides the intention and the ability to appreciate the output. Tools do \u201cheavy lifting\u201d all the time, but we still primarily credit the humans who use them precisely because they made the choice to use them.
Provability is just going the way of computation. John Napier had to manually compute logarithm tables over decades and was recognised for his work; now that same work could be performed by a 10 year old with a calculator in an evening.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"zkmon","children":[{"author":"raincole","children":[{"author":"zkmon","children":[{"author":"Anon1096","children":[{"author":"par1970","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T03:21:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785640911,"id":49140758,"options":[],"parent_id":49133284,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"qed","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:04:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785582260,"id":49133284,"options":[],"parent_id":49132665,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"When I type 56789*23456 into my calculator and get the result I don't claim to have solved the problem, the calculator did it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:20:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785576026,"id":49132665,"options":[],"parent_id":49132588,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Prompt quality should not matter. If a high-schooler operates the crane to lift a ton of weight 10 floors high, should the credit entirely go to the crane?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:06:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785575204,"id":49132588,"options":[],"parent_id":49132504,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Read the prompts in the PDF I link and see if your analogy makes sense in this context :)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:56:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785574592,"id":49132504,"options":[],"parent_id":49132361,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"When you use a crane to do the "heavy lifting" for construction work, do you give full credit to the cranes?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mathisfun123","children":[{"author":"don_esteban","children":[{"author":"famouswaffles","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:33:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785594808,"id":49134806,"options":[],"parent_id":49133097,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They don't have to be. At this point, we have multiple results from 3rd parties where the prompts are very basic.
To name a few:
- https://xcancel.com/DmitryRybin1/status/2079904005652893709
- https://archive.ph/2w4fi (https://chatgpt.com/share/69dd1c83-b164-8385-bf2e-8533e9baba...)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"skinner_","children":[{"author":"don_esteban","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T11:09:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785668975,"id":49143317,"options":[],"parent_id":49135281,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If that was the case, that elaborate listing of all things that might look like a proof to a naive student, but are actually not proofs (and not even just partial results, but fundamental misunderstandings of what constitutes a proof) could have been easily and equivalently replaced by 'I am interested only in a full proof, don't bother me with partial results'. Yet, they were not.
To a real mathematician you would not have to list those explicitly, he/she would have understood that implicitly from 'give me a full proof'. That listing makes sense to say only to somebody who pretends to be a mathematician, but has not true understanding of how the math works. The models are getting better and better in this pretension, but prompts like that reveal that it is still just a pretension, not a true understanding.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:29:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785598157,"id":49135281,"options":[],"parent_id":49133097,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"No, that's not what this is. This is a warning to the LLM that coming back with partial results is not good enough.
Take a grad student with a perfectly good understanding of what a proof is. Their supervisor gives them a major problem to work on. Almost always, the problem is too hard, the student comes back with partial results, and student and the supervisor iterate from there. Now imagine that they have an unusually cruel and unreasonable advisor who tells them, do not dare to talk to me until you've fully solved the problem. This paragraph is exactly that. It's there exactly because the underlying system is smart enough to know that real mathematicians do not work like that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mathisfun123","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T19:29:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785612598,"id":49137605,"options":[],"parent_id":49133097,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"you cannot be serious","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T10:38:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785580728,"id":49133097,"options":[],"parent_id":49132564,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"the fact that such things have to be explicitly in the prompt points to the fact that the underlying system is still far from where it needs to be (basically, lacks basic understanding what a proof is)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:02:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785574941,"id":49132564,"options":[],"parent_id":49132361,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don't disagree with you but there's no need for exaggeration; ain't no high school student writing this:
> In\nparticular, proofs for special graph classes, constructions of cycle covers with some edges\ncovered other than twice, bounded-length or prescribed-cycle variants, reductions to another\nunproved conjecture, computational verification through any fixed graph size, and candidate\ncounterexamples without a complete nonexistence certificate are insufficient.
which is infact a very important part of the prompt.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ben_w","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:08:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785575316,"id":49132601,"options":[],"parent_id":49132361,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> A slightly smarter highschooler could write these. I could write these. It's clear as day that the LLM, not the human, did the heavy lift. It'd be ridiculous to give full credit to whoever wrote the prompt.
I think you're over-estimating what a smarter highschooler could write.
A "finite loopless undirected multigraph" could have been explained to me at that age if we'd taken Discrete rather than Mechanics and Pure (and one module of Stats) in my two A-levels* in maths and further maths; but from what I saw of the Discrete module, neither:
Every finite loopless multigraph with no bridge possesses a cycle double cover, without additional assumptions such as cubicity, planarity, connectivity, or higher edge-connectivity.\n repeated-edge closed trails masquerading as cycles\n* For those not from the UK: A-levels are between secondary school and university, when aged 16-18. Functionally they are university entrance qualifications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-level_(United_Kingdom)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ipnon","children":[{"author":"raincole","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:59:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785578364,"id":49132871,"options":[],"parent_id":49132757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If there aren't thousands of TPUs doing that [0] right now I'd be quite surprised.
[0]: e.g. "go through wikipedia's unsolved math problem list and solve them".","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ascots","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:28:59.000Z","created_at_i":1785608939,"id":49137034,"options":[],"parent_id":49132757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"100% agree. If the models are so capable that they're advancing math, it doesn't seem like a stretch to expect they should be able to determine with "doing math research" entails and the best way to use their capabilities towards that end. Why do we need to hand hold the models by telling them to do parallel research, keep threads independent, etc.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:36:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785576986,"id":49132757,"options":[],"parent_id":49132361,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"But why can\u2019t we prompt the LLM \u201cjust do math research\u201d? This is what I don\u2019t understand.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:30:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785573006,"id":49132361,"options":[],"parent_id":49132277,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Sorry, OpenAI's take is correct here. If you're not convinced, here is how they prompted LLM: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98... [0]
A slightly smarter highschooler could write these. I could write these. It's clear as day that the LLM, not the human, did the heavy lift. It'd be ridiculous to give full credit to whoever wrote the prompt.
[0]: Not one of the proofs in the linked article, but from OpenAI too.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ben_w","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:43:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785573832,"id":49132437,"options":[],"parent_id":49132277,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> Do you attribute the build to the tool? The "system's contribution" is helped by many other things all the way down to chips, datacenters and power generation. If the authorship requires attributing to a tool, then it should happen all the way down.
When the tool is a 3D printer, or any CNC system really, you bet I attribute a build to it.
I could also attribute the operator; there is no contradiction, it's a free choice, just like saying "I am in Berlin" does not contradict "I am in Germany".","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:17:53.000Z","created_at_i":1785572273,"id":49132277,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> claiming human authorship for a proof generated entirely by an AI system would misrepresent both the system\u2019s contribution and the nature of genuine human intellectual work.
AI has no self-awareness. It's a tool. When you assemble a furniture using a screw driver, the torque force interacts with the molecular forces inside the metal and miraculously it transfers the force to the screw though a clever geometry design, communicating the force to the screw to turn it in a certain way.
Do you attribute the build to the tool? The "system's contribution" is helped by many other things all the way down to chips, datacenters and power generation. If the authorship requires attributing to a tool, then it should happen all the way down.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"s_Hogg","children":[{"author":"defrost","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:28:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785572929,"id":49132351,"options":[],"parent_id":49132330,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Ambient 0: Math for Airports","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:25:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785572728,"id":49132330,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don't know why, but when I saw the source of this particular headline it reminded me of the album title 26 Mixes for Cash","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"avaer","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[{"author":"asdewqqwer","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T10:13:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785579200,"id":49132969,"options":[],"parent_id":49132379,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"At this stage. No doubt calculus had plenty industrial benefit.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:34:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785573270,"id":49132379,"options":[],"parent_id":49132376,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Not much point to pure math being kept secret, in all honesty. There isn't really industrial value, its only purpose (to them) is showing off their model's capabilities. More realistically they'll just stop paying for it.
Edit: Oh, are you suggesting they just use it to privately improve their models? I imagine a few more correct proofs would have a very marginal benefit, if any. Also, they'll probably just get extracted, meaning it still gets out but OpenAI doesn't get to fancily announce it themselves.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"simianwords","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:36:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785573408,"id":49132392,"options":[],"parent_id":49132376,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What does this even mean lol. These are not solved questions. The solution never existed.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sillysaurusx","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:50:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785826250,"id":49165108,"options":[],"parent_id":49132376,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Hey man, just wanted to say hi and catch up a bit. I tried DMing you on Twitter. If that sounds interesting then shoot me a message sometime. Hope you\u2019ve been well :)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sergiomiguens","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:30:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785828608,"id":49165404,"options":[],"parent_id":49132376,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"https://mathstodon.xyz/@sergiosh/116847266951670037\nhttps://mathstodon.xyz/@sergiosh/116976232522229829
Look at this two threads.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:33:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785573219,"id":49132376,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What happens when OpenAI et al stop being open about these things, and just pack it into the training?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"lifeisstillgood","children":[{"author":"traes","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:54:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785574479,"id":49132493,"options":[],"parent_id":49132401,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Presumably it's a rounding error compared to their full output, and they're making sure they have enough compute set aside for research by limiting public models. The more datacenters they build the less they have to limit them.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"lwansbrough","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:53:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785578009,"id":49132839,"options":[],"parent_id":49132401,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"For OpenAI, research is marketing. I\u2019m sure they\u2019ve got plenty of budget for that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Davidzheng","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:56:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785585408,"id":49133629,"options":[],"parent_id":49132401,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"RL training can use all of them - idk what needed means.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"simianwords","children":[{"author":"lifeisstillgood","children":[{"author":"simianwords","children":[{"author":"svieira","children":[{"author":"simianwords","children":[{"author":"effseven","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T22:52:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785624772,"id":49139355,"options":[],"parent_id":49136868,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The price of inference is going to go so low that OpenAI and Anthropic will not be able to turn a profit, thus cannot afford the investment into more data centers, thus crash due to investment in the space having been overdone","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:14:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785608094,"id":49136868,"options":[],"parent_id":49136837,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"\u201cOften\u201d is load bearing. I don\u2019t think markets are more likely than not to be musical chair shaped. To make this conversation more concrete, give me a falsifiable prediction on there existing a bubble. And then I\u2019ll tell you if I believe in it or not.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:09:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785607761,"id":49136837,"options":[],"parent_id":49136525,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They very often have been in the past. Why do you think this time is different?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"AngryData","children":[{"author":"simianwords","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:13:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785831227,"id":49165685,"options":[],"parent_id":49161232,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I agree with you but from your own comment, it seems to indicate that an obvious bubble doesn't exist. The possibility does.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:49:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785790150,"id":49161232,"options":[],"parent_id":49136525,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You say that like the tech world isn't littered in a field of dead and failed companies and billions of dollars burned on failed ventures and ideas. Sure LLMs have proven they have value, but where is the trillion dollars of current investment going to be paid back from? So far it is still entirely speculation that they have such a high value, and they can't just play the long game of "well after a few decades of production and iteration it will add up" because half the hardware cost is going to be obsolete energy burning trash for them in 5 years.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:35:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785605701,"id":49136525,"options":[],"parent_id":49136448,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It\u2019s not obvious at all. If it were obvious to you, it would\u2019ve been to OpenAI. It\u2019s in their interest to accurately predict demand. The assumption that OpenAI/Sam is both really powerful but simultaneously ignorant to know what others know as obvious is well.. just strange. Especially strange when OpenAI has more information on models, breakthrough and usage patterns and we don\u2019t.
I\u2019m not participating in the slinging match but it\u2019s very very weird that you think it\u2019s some established thing that these companies won\u2019t make profit. A lot of hubris must go in this kind of thought. Like.. do you all think everyone\u2019s playing musical chairs?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:26:02.000Z","created_at_i":1785605162,"id":49136448,"options":[],"parent_id":49134428,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Sorry I thought that a bubble was widely accepted.
Are you arguing there is not an AI bubble, and that all the DC buildout is fine, going to be profitable etc?
I am not looking for a online slanging match - just looking for a different point of view","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:48:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785592108,"id":49134428,"options":[],"parent_id":49132401,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I love how people come up with creative ideas to prove the bubble. This one is even more ridiculous - that OpenAI had spare compute to advance mathematics proves that data centres will not be needed. WHAT.
If anything it proves more data centres are needed. That's literally the only reasonable conclusion from this news.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"paxys","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:34:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785605695,"id":49136524,"options":[],"parent_id":49132401,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"No such thing as free, even internally at a company. All such use of resources is accounted for, assigned a dollar value and billed to some department. Someone ran the numbers and figured that whatever they spent on these GPU cycles was worth it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T08:37:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785573467,"id":49132401,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"On the token limits etc - one assumes that OpenAI et al are able to \u201chire expert in field, and let them spend the equivalent of a million dollars of tokens\u201d because they are not actually selling their complete compute 24 hrs a day, so the cost internally is a negligible (ish) electricity bill.
Which is very suggestive - if after everything they are not fully loaded then the next gazillion data centres being built look unlikely to be needed.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"readthenotes1","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T09:27:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785576437,"id":49132703,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I wonder if Erdos would be saying " It's fine that y'all are answering my questions, but who is asking better questions??"","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"robinhouston","children":[{"author":"schleck8","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T10:50:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785581457,"id":49133173,"options":[],"parent_id":49132926,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"This is one of the most impactful mathematical publications in history by all accounts
I think we've now hit a point where 99.9% of the population gloss over these types of AI advancements because of human competence being insufficient
No human could have published this because it requires paradigm shifts (e. g. Section 5) in multiple mathematical domains. Mastering one of them to this degree is rare, mastering 3+ pretty much non existent for humans.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"antirez","children":[{"author":"pistoriusp","children":[{"author":"defrost","children":[{"author":"robinhouston","children":[{"author":"defrost","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:51:41.000Z","created_at_i":1785585101,"id":49133603,"options":[],"parent_id":49133561,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"[flagged] submissions aren't [dead] (killed), they are still active and can be upvoted and commented upon.
> if you compare its rank to that of other stories with a similar age and number of points.
Ranking is complicated enough here even before weighting, speed of initial upvotes can play against ranking, number of comments and the shape of the comment tree also affect ranking. And yes, various subjects and submission sources do get weightings that impact ranking.
What's funny, to myself at least, is that any attention at all is paid to "HN front page ranking" - I've been on again off again active here since 2008 .. and can't recall ever really looking at a default HN "front page" ever.
( There's /newest /newcomments /active etc to browse and sites such as https://hckrnews.com/ )","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:45:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785584712,"id":49133561,"options":[],"parent_id":49133388,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"That's true, but submissions are only killed in that way if they receive a \u2018fatal\u2019 number of flags. However, flags lower the rank of a story even at non-fatal levels. What antirez is suggesting here is that the rank of this story has been lowered by flags \u2013 and that seems plausible, if you compare its rank to that of other stories with a similar age and number of points.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:19:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785583159,"id":49133388,"options":[],"parent_id":49133349,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"If you page through the /newest listings you can see [flagged] and [flagged][dead] submissions.
eg. this: [flagged] A migrant surge tests Spain's open policies (economist.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131860
is clearly marked as flagged.
Unlike the current submission: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science (openai.com) which isn't [flagged].
* https://news.ycombinator.com/newest","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:12:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785582750,"id":49133349,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Interesting. I had no idea that a person could see what is flagged?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"fg137","children":[{"author":"w4yai","children":[{"author":"fg137","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:44:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785840278,"id":49166737,"options":[],"parent_id":49148165,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I've been on this site for much longer than that.
When's the cutoff date?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T20:48:59.000Z","created_at_i":1785703739,"id":49148165,"options":[],"parent_id":49133383,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You're were for 4 months. That's what we're talking about. It used to be.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:18:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785583123,"id":49133383,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Didn't know I was part of an elite.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"lkey","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:21:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785590502,"id":49134221,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Forums change with the times, and this one never existed solely to burnish your ego.
Moreover, mister elite, you don't know why this press release was flagged.
I'm not sure why we should privilege your bitter speculation over more mundane possibilities.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"matteoraso","children":[{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"nevertoolate","children":[{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:37:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785789448,"id":49161085,"options":[],"parent_id":49160375,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don\u2019t think it\u2019s magic. Things need to actually be made to happen regardless of intelligence, and that\u2019s a social issue. Also if AI were powerful enough to fix everything by itself effortlessly it would already be far too powerful for us to control, and we probably shouldn\u2019t allow that to happen on general principle.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"lostmsu","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:56:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785790590,"id":49161331,"options":[],"parent_id":49160375,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That assumes the particular problem actually has a solution (that you will like).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:34:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785785675,"id":49160375,"options":[],"parent_id":49137777,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There is a glaring fallacy in your \u201cAI will change everything as it is super intelligent\u201d hypothesis. If it is so great thinker which can do everything why not just solve this social impact thingie? Or maybe it is not so capable?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T19:53:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785614000,"id":49137777,"options":[],"parent_id":49137391,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I understand your sentiment, but I think this really is something different. This isn\u2019t a craft going away, or even an industry being replaced, it\u2019s potentially everything we do. It\u2019s the ground being pulled away beneath people\u2019s feet, everyone, everywhere all at once. I think the vacuum it leaves in people\u2019s lives needs to be filled with something, and I haven\u2019t heard any good ideas about this or how the transition should be managed at all.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"zeven7","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T02:35:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785638139,"id":49140522,"options":[],"parent_id":49137391,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This is the sentiment of people who haven't accepted that this is in fact something very different from what people have seen in the past.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T19:07:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785611264,"id":49137391,"options":[],"parent_id":49134854,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"People have had to deal with getting their jobs automated away for centuries. None of this is new, and perhaps reminding ourselves of this is the best way to cope.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"lacy_tinpot","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:27:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785781647,"id":49159633,"options":[],"parent_id":49134854,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's given many more an opportunity to fulfill their dreams.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:39:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785595151,"id":49134854,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> people that can't psychologically cope with the advances of AI
Yes. And there are many of them. I wonder what would help them come to terms with it. Seriously, people are going to be grieving over this. Loss of identity, loss of social standing, ideas of entire future lives that will now never happen. The greatest crime people may hold AI guilty of is taking away their dreams.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"bwfan123","children":[{"author":"over_bridge","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:13:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785777201,"id":49158642,"options":[],"parent_id":49136427,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Jokes on him. I'm a peasant and I've been here for years","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:24:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785605040,"id":49136427,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite
hah, sorry, we are plebs out here.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ltitu","children":[{"author":"halJordan","children":[{"author":"3aasgf","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:06:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785607600,"id":49136819,"options":[],"parent_id":49136623,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"You have to give AI one thing: It is vastly better at understanding text than AI boosters.
Which is a low bar, but still.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:43:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785606218,"id":49136623,"options":[],"parent_id":49136471,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"If you're actively throwing away brand new greenfield research because it was generated by a computer at a company that stans industry-spanning software so that you can stay mad at your pet celebrity project, you might be the problem.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:28:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785605327,"id":49136471,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"We cannot psychologically stand that Redis is hyped by OpenAI:
https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/vector_datab...
How are the sales going?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"BigTTYGothGF","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:00:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785607216,"id":49136774,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.
Never was.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"antonvs","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:36:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785609381,"id":49137087,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.
It was always mainly a website for employees of an elite.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"bencarmin","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T19:30:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785612625,"id":49137606,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This comment is about the tier of a Reddit atheist going to a funeral and telling a grieving family that "haha grandma is dead and there is no heaven".","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"matt_daemon","children":[{"author":"titularcomment","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:06:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785812795,"id":49163982,"options":[],"parent_id":49137896,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Probably to avoid manipulation, there is tons of stuff on HN that hopes to make it to the limelight through this forum channel","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T20:07:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785614824,"id":49137896,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It\u2019s never been clear to me why the HN algorithm isn\u2019t public. It\u2019s obviously nowhere near as complex as something like Twitter, and of course isn\u2019t a trade secret. The fact it\u2019s private only furthers speculation like this.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dwb","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T22:54:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785624894,"id":49139375,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"So condescending. \u201cCan\u2019t psychologically cope\u201d? Can you hear yourself? There\u2019s some advances, but we\u2019re losing a lot too. Don\u2019t get dazzled by the hype.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tuesdaynight","children":[{"author":"rwz","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T18:37:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785695874,"id":49147104,"options":[],"parent_id":49139510,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> A lot of the doomerism comes from financial insecurity fears. Try to remember that a lot of people are subconsciously afraid of losing their homes. I
I think recognizing and accounting for your own personal biases is one of the requirements of the being an intellectually honest and rigorous online discourse participant.
Things could be genuinely impressive and fascinating even when directly challenge your ego and material well being.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T23:13:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785626023,"id":49139510,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I like your comments and agree with a lot of your points, including parts of this one. That said, please don't go to this route. A lot of the doomerism comes from financial insecurity fears. Try to remember that a lot of people are subconsciously afraid of losing their homes. I know that it is pretty hard to ignore them, but try to engage with people that do not dismiss 100% of AI accomplishments.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ofjcihen","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T04:42:22.000Z","created_at_i":1785645742,"id":49141171,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Or maybe, just maybe, other people have different opinions than you?
Is that possible or is everyone else too common to have those?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tomhow","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:00:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785776406,"id":49158443,"options":[],"parent_id":49133253,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It wasn't heavily flagged. It was pulled down by the flamewar detector due to the large number of comments, and it slid under the radar due to only hitting the front page during overnight hours on Friday night/Saturday morning. It still spent 10 hours on the front page, but all during off peak hours. I've now created a new copy of the post so it can have prime time exposure.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:01:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785582068,"id":49133253,"options":[],"parent_id":49132926,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This is not at the top as it is actively flagged by people that can't psychologically cope with the advances of AI. Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"curt15","children":[{"author":"yewenjie","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:26:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785583598,"id":49133455,"options":[],"parent_id":49133423,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Yes, but they wouldn't publish that bit lest other companies steal the ideas.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ianm218","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:17:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785597476,"id":49135200,"options":[],"parent_id":49133423,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"They and Anthropic have indicated that the models are substantially augmenting the research and doing large amounts of work autonomously at this point. Here is one of the many blog posts on it [1]. Many people would dismiss this as "marketing" so take it for what you will.
My guess from following this stuff quite closely is that these companies are still a couple years away from fully autonomous research staff.
[1]. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"zild3d","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T09:33:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785749625,"id":49153383,"options":[],"parent_id":49133423,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> What about AI research itself? Is OpenAI close to automating its human staff out of a job?
It's more like they've already automated the parts of the jobs that the humans most closely thought of as the "their job"","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:23:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785583407,"id":49133423,"options":[],"parent_id":49132926,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"What about AI research itself? Is OpenAI close to automating its human staff out of a job?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"saithound","children":[{"author":"gbnwl","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:14:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785600850,"id":49135658,"options":[],"parent_id":49134125,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"There are articles with far fewer upvotes and comments ranking higher on the front page right now, despite being the same age or older than this one. HNs opaque ranking system at it again.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:10:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785589809,"id":49134125,"options":[],"parent_id":49132926,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I don't think that's it. Multiple or my friends from the target audience (academic mathematicians) admitted to scrolling past because the title made it sound like a review of last month's contributions, instead of 10 new ones.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"gizmodo59","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:24:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785590675,"id":49134235,"options":[],"parent_id":49132926,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"It\u2019s also very very divided (x companies, oss vs not and other interests)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jofzar","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:00:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785592803,"id":49134525,"options":[],"parent_id":49132926,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Honestly just a bit burnt out on posts like this","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T10:06:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785578809,"id":49132926,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"In a way the most remarkable thing about this is that it isn't even at the top of the HN homepage. Even if this is a step up from what we've seen before, we're no longer astonished by the idea that AI can make significant advances in mathematics and computer science.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"melagonster","children":[{"author":"xyzsparetimexyz","children":[{"author":"silver_sun","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T05:39:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785649144,"id":49141455,"options":[],"parent_id":49133307,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's not even predictable like dynamite. Sometimes it can blast through a mountain, impressively, the problem is you can't predict which mountain it works on. And other times it can't even make a dent in a molehill, which is perplexing given what it was capable of earlier. Can we even call it dynamite?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:07:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785582455,"id":49133307,"options":[],"parent_id":49133108,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's just another tool that can help solve problems. It doesn't know _what_ problems to solve. It turns out that a lot of old problems are now low hanging fruit for these new models. In terms of 'expanding the frontier', we've just discovered dynamite and can now blast our way through mountains. The bottom of the ocean or space are still as hard to reach as ever.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"woeirua","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:10:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785589829,"id":49134128,"options":[],"parent_id":49133108,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"No bud, it\u2019s just the beginning!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"AngryData","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:14:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785791660,"id":49161526,"options":[],"parent_id":49133108,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It solved a handful of novel esoteric problems out of hundreds fed to it. Far from the end of science.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T10:41:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785580868,"id":49133108,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Wow, so this is the end of science :(","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"DrBazza","children":[{"author":"pama","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:02:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785780148,"id":49159316,"options":[],"parent_id":49133172,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures
I disagree. I routinely let LLMs speculate or generate hypotheses along the way of helping with technical research. Sometimes they can prove the correctness of a concrete math idea but other times even an unproven conjecture helps with the numerical algorithm implementation and the result is then simply supported by additional data. I guess that any autoresearch-adjacent application has LLMs intuiting and coming up with hypotheses/conjectures\u2014as do the steps/lemmas along a complex proof. In my opinion the modern LLMs are powerful intuitive thinkers that generate lots of conjectures of varying quality or importance.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"evenhash","children":[{"author":"claytongulick","children":[{"author":"treis","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:22:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785781365,"id":49159571,"options":[],"parent_id":49159497,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Of course you can. Tape a 7 and 8 of diamonds together and boom 15 of diamonds","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:16:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785780988,"id":49159497,"options":[],"parent_id":49159443,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> People keep saying this. Why?
For the same reason that you can't draw a 15 of Diamonds from a regular card deck.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tuvix","children":[{"author":"michaelmrose","children":[{"author":"tuvix","children":[{"author":"zahlman","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:27:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785788846,"id":49160978,"options":[],"parent_id":49160715,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not only that, but we do it with a processor that is basically required to operate in a narrow temperature band below 40C, using a mere 86 billion neurons (although the equivalence with either machine-learning "neurons" or LLM parameters is not at all clear) operating on a few dozen watts; and with this we operate many other systems besides language processing. It's not clear that our reasoning process requires language, either.
(86 billion is the number ChatGPT, ironically enough, has given me a couple of times. I remember hearing for a long time that it was estimated to be somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion. This is not my field of study.)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:03:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785787397,"id":49160715,"options":[],"parent_id":49160619,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I\u2019m not talking about the actions we take or how we might perform at certain tasks, I\u2019m talking about how our brains actually work. My point is that we have no idea how I\u2019m able to imagine an apple and see it in my mind\u2019s eye. It\u2019s basically biological magic to us at this point.
There are processes at work there that we don\u2019t even have the language to describe.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"zahlman","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:24:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785788676,"id":49160944,"options":[],"parent_id":49160619,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> People piled into the front of one when it was full. When people got out they never moved back. As the driver struggled to close the door and people struggled to get in the wad of people never moved back to fill the ample space.
This does not demonstrate a lack of intelligence. It demonstrates laziness and a lack of interest in spreading apart. Or just lack of consideration (or even malice) on the part of those at the back of the wad.
> Chatgpt was smarter than the average person a while ago
This is an absurd claim that fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be "smart". Reasoning that would get you to this conclusion would equally well apply to Google's search engine over a decade ago.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:55:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785786920,"id":49160619,"options":[],"parent_id":49160315,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Define insanely complex and deep in a way that isn't illiterate hand waving.
Most humans are dumber than a box of rocks. Here in Seattle we had one of many light rail-related fuckups where they had to replace part of the line with buses. People piled into the front of one when it was full. When people got out they never moved back. As the driver struggled to close the door and people struggled to get in the wad of people never moved back to fill the ample space.
Chatgpt was smarter than the average person a while ago","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:28:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785785300,"id":49160315,"options":[],"parent_id":49159443,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"All arguments like this boil down to semantics at a certain point, but yes large language models can \u201cintuit\u201d because they can generalize between examples. The issue then becomes how you pack new examples into context.
Humans can \u201cintuit\u201d based on a much larger, if not unlimited, context. Also I just want to say that human cognition is something so insanely complex and deep that we will not understand it at all in my lifetime. To attribute all, or really any, aspects of human cognition to a machine at this point is silly to me.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"5555watch","children":[{"author":"jiggawatts","children":[{"author":"5555watch","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:48:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785793722,"id":49161916,"options":[],"parent_id":49161472,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The extrapolation can also be a learned skill, especially in math. How many papers took result X, extended it to Y using known building blocks, and applied to Z.
By the way, convex hull permits extrapolating past the training data. LLM won't invent a new word that could not be defined by a sequence of known words. Just if it's meaningless and fully random/hallucinated, the new knowledge won't work with other known information blocks (breaks convexity).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:10:02.000Z","created_at_i":1785791402,"id":49161472,"options":[],"parent_id":49160356,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Neural nets can extrapolate past their training data, and there is no reason to think LLMs don\u2019t inherit this capability.
The extent to which they are able to do this is the more interesting question!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"bee_rider","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:20:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785792016,"id":49161593,"options":[],"parent_id":49160356,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Is that actually true though? I think it is an analogy, and as an analogy it seems quite risky because \u201cconvex hull\u201d and \u201clinear combination\u201d are technical terms that might give the recipient the impression that it is a technical argument.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"metanonsense","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:40:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785796851,"id":49162378,"options":[],"parent_id":49160356,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think this is only "statistically" true in the sense that training is based on facts and not non-facts (except maybe with the ingestion of flat-earthers literature ;-). The existence of hallucinations in a bare transformer shows that the convex hull is not about information but about text, so the limit may more be "possible linear combinations of text", which allows for much extrapolation and counterfactuals. True creativity may be one reinforcement learning mid-training goal away that rewards novelty over correctness.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"charlie90","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:46:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785804360,"id":49163157,"options":[],"parent_id":49160356,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Thats how humans work, as well.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Valakas_","children":[{"author":"corimaith","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:52:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785833539,"id":49165932,"options":[],"parent_id":49164762,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"But do you have vision?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"MichaelMoser123","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:21:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785835305,"id":49166137,"options":[],"parent_id":49164762,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> "Everything is a Remix" is a good watch on youtube that explains this
Not completely. Novelty used to be a major thing, when Humans did it. Another important criteria used to be if that new thing makes sense at all. Here the language model has a problem, as it doesn't have the means to evaluate this criteria.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:56:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785822966,"id":49164762,"options":[],"parent_id":49160356,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I have news for you. All humans do is also filling gaps with combinations of known facts and results - in new ways. "Everything is a Remix" is a good watch on youtube that explains this. Picasso might look like he has an invented personal style, but his style is a combination of different little details he took from others and mixed in a new way. Mozart the same. No music artist could ever create music in a vacuum. Everyone, for every art and science, the same. I know many are trying to cling to the last hope of human specialness, that "thing" that AI can never get to.
It's a convex hull of information that is reflective and spans outside of itself and combines in a new way, when you shine two known rays of light together from the inside.
Now it gets better. AI can be orders of magnitude more creative than any human could ever hope for, because his convex hull of information is orders of magnitude larger, and the possibilities for new combinations are equally larger.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:32:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785785545,"id":49160356,"options":[],"parent_id":49159443,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I like the illustration that the models are working on a convex hull of known information. Filling gaps with linear combinations of known facts and results.
They can't exit the hull until the "intuition" starts spawning points outside the convex hull.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"watutalkinbout","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:46:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785793598,"id":49161894,"options":[],"parent_id":49159443,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"LLMs traverse an assembled surface of human knowledge.
You can't find things on a map that aren't there, but maybe you can draw a route nobody used before.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"s1artibartfast","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:51:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785797480,"id":49162445,"options":[],"parent_id":49159443,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Because people have internalized an inaccurate model of LLMs as "stochastic parrots" that was incorrect at the time of formulation and is also significantly outdated","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:13:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785780783,"id":49159443,"options":[],"parent_id":49133172,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures
People keep saying this. Why?
Surely the AI can complete the prompt \u201cGenerate new research questions based on these observations\u201d?
When I read the reasoning traces of coding models they are constantly asking themselves questions and attempting to answer them.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"WarmWash","children":[{"author":"rirze","children":[{"author":"fasterik","children":[{"author":"watutalkinbout","children":[{"author":"aswegs8","children":[{"author":"alberto-m","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:58:02.000Z","created_at_i":1785844682,"id":49167414,"options":[],"parent_id":49165401,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's incredible how the \u201cChinese Room\u201d argument, as well as its counterarguments, is still incredibly pertinent despite being now more than 40 years old. Scientific American published many articles on this topic in the Eighties; they seem as fresh as ever.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:29:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785828591,"id":49165401,"options":[],"parent_id":49161798,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What's the argument here? It's not about the implementation method, it is about the behavior that emerges from it. You could calculate the next token by hand on paper if you had enough time.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:39:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785793140,"id":49161798,"options":[],"parent_id":49160215,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It isn't an implementation for neurons, unless you believe in a designing god.
Matrices are an implementation detail in reconstructing the surface of human knowledge. It's a complex surface, but it's a regurgitation.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:18:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785784724,"id":49160215,"options":[],"parent_id":49159868,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Saying that AI is "matrices" is like saying human cognition is "neurons." Maybe true at some level, but it's a low-level implementation detail. The important part of a language model is the function that maps tokens to contextual embeddings. You could compute this function using analog computing, biological neurons, or any other substrate.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:49:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785782949,"id":49159868,"options":[],"parent_id":49159467,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> "matrices"","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"robotpepi","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:24:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785785084,"id":49160285,"options":[],"parent_id":49159467,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"it could also be that they try every possible approach that has been proposed by humans. it seems that was the case for the non sofic group example. humans are not able to do the same at that scale. it's unfortunate that we don't know what's happening behind the hood with these models, and that's a huge danger also for the rest of us without access to them.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sdenton4","children":[{"author":"pama","children":[{"author":"denismenace","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:06:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785787577,"id":49160746,"options":[],"parent_id":49160506,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"How does calculating more digits of pi help us?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sdenton4","children":[{"author":"pama","children":[{"author":"sdenton4","children":[{"author":"pama","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T15:23:34.000Z","created_at_i":1785857014,"id":49170278,"options":[],"parent_id":49169159,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I agree boring problems exist; bounds may have a fare share of them. None of the bounds problems in this set are even close to this category; many of them are closer to the type of contributions that in the past got recognized by special awards. Your initial replies were misleading.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:02:33.000Z","created_at_i":1785852153,"id":49169159,"options":[],"parent_id":49164531,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I stated that boring bounds improvement problems exist, not that all bounds problems are boring... Sigh.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:08:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785820110,"id":49164531,"options":[],"parent_id":49162414,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Your inverted logic does not hold. The fact that such useless problems for bounds exist does not mean that improving bounds is useless. 9 fields medals in the last twenty years, including the one to Terrence Tao, were for improvements on bounds. 3 of the 4 medals in 2022 were for bounds; 2 of these medals were in combinatorics.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"CamperBob2","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T15:18:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785856726,"id":49170205,"options":[],"parent_id":49162414,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"As someone with a PhD in combinatorics, you're aware that it takes only one counterexample to invalidate a conjecture.
There's nowhere else to move the goalposts. You've already stashed them in the far corner of the parking garage down the street from the stadium. If you go any farther you'll leave the school grounds entirely.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:46:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785797160,"id":49162414,"options":[],"parent_id":49160506,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Five (maybe six?) of the results are improvements on bounds. These kinds of problems tend to have some initial advances, and then stall out as the complexity of the bound skyrockets... until some grad student is bored enough to push the boundary. The big-O complexity of matrix multiplication is a good example of how this works: yeah, it's a useful problem, but the solutions are galactic algorithms, and increasingly convoluted.
As someone with a PhD in combinatorics, I believe that I'm qualified to say that, yes, there are problems as useless as calculating more digits of pi.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:45:53.000Z","created_at_i":1785786353,"id":49160506,"options":[],"parent_id":49160317,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It is unfair to dismiss contributions to decades old open problems as equivalent to calculating more digits of pi. It missed the mark by a lot\u2014as does the two bucket simplifaction.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tuatoru","children":[{"author":"buddhistdude","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:49:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785790151,"id":49161233,"options":[],"parent_id":49160888,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It can move to any place within the search space but it can't move outside of it and it can't move in between the 'pixels'. Human thought can, as human thought has created the search space.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:19:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785788353,"id":49160888,"options":[],"parent_id":49160317,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""It's just brute-forcing the search space."","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:28:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785785310,"id":49160317,"options":[],"parent_id":49159467,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Some of them...
The two places were seeing lots of movement are:
* Updates to lower/upper bounds. In many cases, these kinds of problems are the deep-math equivalent of calculating more digits of pi. Yes, if you throw time at it you'll break the record, but it may not be terribly worthwhile.
* Finding counter examples which disprove conjectures. This is really useful, and helps offset some positivity bias on the human side, often bringing together known tools from distant silos.
If you read the list of ten results, almost all fall into one of these buckets.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:14:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785780865,"id":49159467,"options":[],"parent_id":49133172,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":">Whilst current models can't 'intuit
That's how they are finding these solutions though, unless we are just going to label intuition as something only humans can do. Like a submarine being unable to swim or whatever that example is.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"zahlman","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:20:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785788406,"id":49160900,"options":[],"parent_id":49133172,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do
Of course computers can grind in a way that humans can't. But now we have systems that convert the human-comprehensible ideas into a computer's plan of attack, in a way that greatly expands the frontier of ideas thus treatable.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jacquesm","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:12:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785791529,"id":49161496,"options":[],"parent_id":49133172,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Ahh, but you missed the continuation, where they get to the heart of the matter: money.
"Excuse me, We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
DT: Might I make an observation at this point?
MT: You keep out of this metal nose.
VF: We demand that that machine not be allowed to think about this problem!
DT: If I might make an observation\u2026
MT: We\u2019ll go on strike!
VF: That\u2019s right. You\u2019ll have a national philosopher\u2019s strike on your hands.
DT: Who will that inconvenience?
MT: Never you mind who it\u2019ll inconvenience you box of black legging binary bits! It\u2019ll hurt, buster! It\u2019ll hurt!
DT: [Booming] If I might make an observation \u2026
\u201cAll I wanted to say,\u201d bellowed the computer, \u201cis that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.\u201d He paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone\u2019s attention, before continuing more quietly. \u201cBut the program will take me a little while to run.\u201d
Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.
\u201cHow long?\u201d he said.
\u201cSeven and a half million years,\u201d said Deep Thought.
Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.
\u201cSeven and a half million years!\u201d they cried in chorus.
\u201cYes,\u201d declaimed Deep Thought, \u201cI said I\u2019d have to think about it, didn\u2019t I? And it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole are of philosophy in general. Everyone\u2019s going to have their own theories about what answer I\u2019m eventually going to come up with, and who better, to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?\u201d
The two philosophers gaped at him.
\u201cBloody hell,\u201d said Majikthise, \u201cnow that is what I call thinking. Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?\u201d
\u201cDunno,\u201d said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper; \u201cthink our brains must be too highly trained, Majikthise.\u201d
So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and into a life-style beyond their wildest dreams.\u201d","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"MostlyStable","children":[{"author":"andai","children":[{"author":"DiscourseFan","children":[{"author":"alberto-m","children":[{"author":"andai","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:46:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785854806,"id":49169737,"options":[],"parent_id":49167363,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"No I just meant WFC as an algorithm for solving problems.
https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse
It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
I guess I've been pronouncing it wrong though. It's wave function collapse, not waveform.
I haven't studied it properly yet but it kind of looks like how sudokus work. You have a bunch of plausible options, and the various possible worlds overlap with each other but not completely and then you eliminate the things that are not possible until the actual possibility remains.
I think thinking works similarly, and I wouldn't be surprised if artificial thinking also worked similarly.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:53:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785844389,"id":49167363,"options":[],"parent_id":49165030,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not OP, but my interpretation is this.
Quantum waveform collapse has been proposed as explanation for consciousness, allowing to explain how an entity can have free will and yet obey rigid physical laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse
I think OP is suggesting a similar thing happened in the LLM, implying it gained consciousness despite following a well-defined compute process.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:39:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785825552,"id":49165030,"options":[],"parent_id":49164366,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Can you expand on this?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"taaha47","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:46:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785833175,"id":49165888,"options":[],"parent_id":49164366,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"can you expand on this?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ur-whale","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:41:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785836504,"id":49166269,"options":[],"parent_id":49164366,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> I think it might be like waveform collapse, but very high dimensional.
The waveform collapse is natively "very high dimensional", not sure why the "but" part of the sentence belongs here.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:28:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785817728,"id":49164366,"options":[],"parent_id":49161648,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think it might be like waveform collapse, but very high dimensional.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:25:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785792358,"id":49161648,"options":[],"parent_id":49133172,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"From a mathematician who was intimately familiar with some of these problems [0]
>I don\u2019t understand it yet. Maybe it\u2019ll take me an afternoon to check all the calculations, but what would still be missing is why this was an approach that would\u2019ve made sense in the first place. Is there some broader context or theory within which this would\u2019ve been the obvious thing to do? What other results can be proven using these techniques? What is it telling us about quantum information or operator theory? I have no idea. I spent about an hour this morning asking ChatGPT these questions, but it\u2019s somewhat frustrating because it speaks with a mishmash of physicist, operator algebraist, quantum information theorist-lingo, plus the usual LLM breezy lilt that annoys everybody.
They certainly seem to have "intuited", in a way that is not immediately obvious to experts in the field, the way to solve at least some of these problems. This was not just simply grinding away at a method that humans already knew would work and just hadn't gotten to yet.
[0] https://nitter.poast.org/henryquantum/status/208362369543662...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T10:50:18.000Z","created_at_i":1785581418,"id":49133172,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Replace philosophers for mathematicians and Douglas Adams was spot on again.
Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures, they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do. I suppose there really are some mathematicians out there today, whose last few years of study, have just been up-ended by this.
--
"Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!"
"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.
"I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"
"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!"
"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kingstnap","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:00:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785582050,"id":49133251,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's remarkable how you can manage to get these models to produce remarkable breakthroughs like an explicit construction of a non-sofic group.
And yet this is the exact same company that has screwed up their android app so bad that the latex N^3 rendering problem makes it so having it explain it to me crashes the app.
Truly jagged beyond belief.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"xyzsparetimexyz","children":[{"author":"utopiah","children":[{"author":"foobar10000","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:42:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785588160,"id":49133960,"options":[],"parent_id":49133674,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"One - and I do not mean to be snarky - you can literally ask Gpt 5.6 Sol this - and if you want to see cool stuff - Fable running in their app (not website) has a view thinking button that is actually a good way to explore the adjacent fields, etc.
The non-sofic group one is definitely a big deal - would have been a Fields medal if discovered by a human.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:03:34.000Z","created_at_i":1785585814,"id":49133674,"options":[],"parent_id":49133318,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Very marketable nerd snipes indeed.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:09:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785582550,"id":49133318,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Any implication of any of these findings? They seem like unimportant nerd snipes to me. If you want to do something actually relevant, get chatgpt to write a simulation of graphene nanotube construction and figure out how to do it at scale.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"danparsonson","children":[{"author":"NitpickLawyer","children":[{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"danparsonson","children":[{"author":"monktastic1","children":[{"author":"seanhunter","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:01:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785780118,"id":49159308,"options":[],"parent_id":49157915,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"He rebutted the argument about moving the goalposts by moving the goalposts. It\u2019s better by dint of sheer bravado.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"danparsonson","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T13:57:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785851851,"id":49169085,"options":[],"parent_id":49157915,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You got me - I've been rumbled.
Actually, I'm really an LLM and this whole thing was a clever bluff.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T16:26:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785774396,"id":49157915,"options":[],"parent_id":49138764,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"So you defined your own idiosyncratic version of "moving the goalposts" and used it to rebut his argument, with a condescending "you understand that's how science works, right?"--instead of being honest that it is you who are changing the definition, and not his failure to understand anything.
I don't see how that's any better.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"albedoa","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:00:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785783630,"id":49160013,"options":[],"parent_id":49138764,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"How were any of us meant to know that you were using your own personal and undisclosed definition of a well-established phrase?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T21:42:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785620567,"id":49138764,"options":[],"parent_id":49135634,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's almost like I disagree with your use of the phrase in this context, rather than that I don't know the meaning of it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:11:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785600664,"id":49135634,"options":[],"parent_id":49135424,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Yes, this is exactly what is meant by \u201cmoving the goalposts\u201d. And it\u2019s a fairly well known expression applying wherever people retroactively change their requirements in reaction to those requirements having been met.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"danparsonson","children":[{"author":"Windchaser","children":[{"author":"danparsonson","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:01:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785852066,"id":49169142,"options":[],"parent_id":49158870,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Take your point, although
> "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".
those are not goalposts - that's an incredible vague 'goal'. What are we moving here exactly?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:29:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785778168,"id":49158870,"options":[],"parent_id":49138759,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.
To me, the goalposts were already defined by the person you were responding to. "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".
Note that this does not depend on things like AI sentience or defining "intelligence" more rigorously, it just depends on AI impact.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"monktastic1","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:23:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785785010,"id":49160271,"options":[],"parent_id":49138759,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Thanks for this clarification of your position. The brief answer is:
> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.
The criticisms are directed toward people who did clearly act like they knew, not the ones who were honest that they did not know.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"strbean","children":[{"author":"danparsonson","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:03:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785852227,"id":49169174,"options":[],"parent_id":49160953,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"OK, I see, thanks. That applies to some skeptics, though - I'm in the AI skeptic camp but only in the sense that I believe we should make sober assessments of what these things are actually capable of.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:25:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785788730,"id":49160953,"options":[],"parent_id":49138759,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change?
It's in how they change, not the fact that they change. The skeptics seem to have secret definitions for intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, etc. that amounts to "a thing only humans have". Often that thing is equivalent to a soul. When yesterday's challenge (LLMs don't have X because they can't do Y!) is met, Y changes but X stays the same. This is not the process by which a field matures, it is a rhetorical technique used by skeptics to avoid honestly stating or confronting their internal definitions. That can be revealed by asking the skeptic the following:
"Forget LLMs. What if we made a completely physically accurate simulation of a human being?"
Many say no, that simulated human being still couldn't have (intelligence, consciousness, sentience, creativity, ...). This reveals that there is a necessary metaphysical component to those attributes, at which point any scientific-minded person will leave the debate.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T21:41:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785620497,"id":49138759,"options":[],"parent_id":49135424,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If it seems like I don't understand the meaning of that very well-known phrase, then clearly I have failed to make my point. I'll try again. And please note that I will use some generalizations to make my point more clearly, rather than because I don't understand nuance; kindly grant me a charitable reading.
In recent years, I have commonly seen the phrase "you're moving the goalposts" deployed by the "it might be sentient" crowd to shoot down the "it's a stochastic parrot" crowd when the latter respond to a new development with "OK but...". In a well-understood field of inquiry, that would be a clear case of goalpost-moving, in the commonly-understood meaning of the phrase where requirements are retroactively changed in response to them having been met. Thank you OP. 'Artificial Intelligence', and indeed intelligence in general, is very much not a well-understood field of inquiry - in fact we don't even have a common agreement about what 'intelligence' is. We are therefore learning as we go (even after all this time!) but making rapid progress in recent years. When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change? This is arguably one of the most pathological development projects ever - what are the requirements? 'It thinks like a human'? What does that mean? And the answer is we don't know what that means, and we're working it out as we go - moving the goalposts. If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.
Side note that, in case it's not obvious, none of this detracts from how impressive LLMs are. They're a marvel of the modern age, all the problems notwithstanding. However I reserve the right to stay sceptical about their capabilities.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"gowld","children":[{"author":"enraged_camel","children":[{"author":"8note","children":[{"author":"scarmig","children":[{"author":"lackoftactics","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:13:53.000Z","created_at_i":1785784433,"id":49160158,"options":[],"parent_id":49159560,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Yep, he is a PR stunt guy, and the number of videos that come up when you type Ed Zitron into YouTube should tell you how many people are eager to feed their cognitive biases.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dwaltrip","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:36:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785785774,"id":49160394,"options":[],"parent_id":49159560,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It\u2019s comical and honestly incredibly embarrassing\u2026
But it seems we have somehow optimized away shame. It wasn\u2019t good for profits, I guess.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:22:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785781321,"id":49159560,"options":[],"parent_id":49159147,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"From a random article I grabbed of his (https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/):
"it isn't clear whether generative AI actually provides much business value at all"
"cannot seem to find a product that people will pay for, in part because the results are so mediocre"
"Last week, we got our first real, definitive glimpse of what\u2019s around that corner that future. And boy, was it underwhelming."
"OpenAI claims that o1 \u201cperforms similarly to PhD students on challenging benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology.\u201d Just not in geography, it seems. Or basic elementary-level English language tests. Or math. Or programming. "
"Worse still, it's kind of hard to explain why anybody should give a shit about o1."
"o1 shows that OpenAI is both desperate and out of ideas."
"the software is not becoming more useful"
Honestly, every other line is quotable in this context.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:50:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785779406,"id":49159147,"options":[],"parent_id":49158786,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"to an extent zitron is saying its not useful, but as a more nuanced opinion, "ai is not cost effective, nor is it improving profits or revenue"","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"scotty79","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:26:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785781617,"id":49159625,"options":[],"parent_id":49158786,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think Ed Zitron is mentioned just because his name is Zitron. He just repeats ad nauseam opinions concentrated around one simple, very boring pole on a wild and interesting landscape of emerging reality. Anybody could be doing that. A lot of people do that. Yet no other is named Zitron. And that's why I heard name Ed Zitron hundred times. That's how you become a voice of (a part of) the generation. Just have a memorable name and repeat the same opinion over and over that people can flock around comfortably. Content is irrelevant.
Personally I prefer to follow explorers rather than swamp-sitters.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:22:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785777776,"id":49158786,"options":[],"parent_id":49158373,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":">> The motte is "AI useful". The bailey is "Singularity is nigh".
But there are people like Ed Zitron, frequently posted and cited here, who disagree even with the former.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Windchaser","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:23:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785777800,"id":49158793,"options":[],"parent_id":49158373,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The unified position which many folks deny is "AI is powerful" or, alternatively, "AI will be powerful soon".
(I'm personally still skeptical about this, but I'm being pulled towards accepting it).
"AI is useful" is too low of a bar, and "singularity is nigh" is too high. "AI is on its way to upending society" is about in the middle, and still vastly contentious among laypeople.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T16:56:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785776179,"id":49158373,"options":[],"parent_id":49135424,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What you are doing is "motte and bailey".
The motte is "AI useful". The bailey is "Singularity is nigh".","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mag7269","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:27:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785778058,"id":49158846,"options":[],"parent_id":49135424,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"\u201cAGI will only, truly, be achieved when the machine can destroy an industrial-type toilet after downing a Supreme Burrito and a large Baja Blast.\u201d
-Alan Turing (allegedly)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"claytongulick","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:28:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785781693,"id":49159638,"options":[],"parent_id":49135424,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And again. That's what "moving the goalposts" means.
The fundamental argument that I've personally made since the early days of this is that LLMs are not reasoning, in the way that word is commonly understood.
There are lots of reasons why that argument needs to evolve that could certainly appear to be "moving the goalposts", but let's take an example.
A lot of AIs were tripped up by the question "Should I walk or drive 50m to the carwash?" Several folks liked to use that as an example that illustrates that LLMs aren't reasoning, but as the models have been trained on that specific example, it's of course less useful. An AI can mostly nail it now.
So a different example is needed. A new demonstration of how these things fail at basic reasoning a child can do.
Did I move the goalposts? I don't think so. The fundamental argument stays the same. It's not hard to find lots of examples that trip up LLMs, because they are what they are: statistical inference machines. Nothing more and nothing less.
Useful, sure. But also commonly misapplied to areas for which they are inappropriate solutions.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:46:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785599206,"id":49135424,"options":[],"parent_id":49135292,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned.
That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And again. That's what "moving the goalposts" means.
It's also very much not a new phenomenon. It's been happening since the 1980s. As you can see from this quote from GEB by Hofstadter:
> There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"emceestork","children":[{"author":"gowld","children":[{"author":"emceestork","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:48:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785786524,"id":49160539,"options":[],"parent_id":49158391,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don't know if you're trying to dunk on me. I didn't intend to imply they are synonyms.
I think AI is clearly both revolutionary and useful. Revolutionary insofar as the job I do has changed almost completely in a year or so span.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T16:57:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785776240,"id":49158391,"options":[],"parent_id":49145152,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Did you know that "revolutationary" is not equivalent to "useful", and "revolutionary" is quite ambiguous?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T14:46:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785682015,"id":49145152,"options":[],"parent_id":49135292,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They aren't claiming that science doesn't progress by moving goal posts. They're talking about how critics of AI have claimed it isn't revolutionary/useful, then progressively changed what would it mean for AI to be actually revolutionary/useful.
Not long ago many folks were saying AI was the same as the crypto bubble. No real useful technology and only hype.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"f6v","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:10:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785784204,"id":49160120,"options":[],"parent_id":49135292,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Never understood all this talk about moving goalposts - you understand that's how science works, right?
I agree with the parent that we need to acknowledge that we're at a turning point in history. I lived through some of them (internet, ubiquitous personal computing). But it's somewhat difficult to comprehend the impact of this one for many people.
I do biomedical research at one of the top European research institutions. We're very well-funded, but I can clearly see the gap between us (say, top-100) and top-10. I also realize this gap is going to get so much wider unless we invest heavily in AI access (and I'm not so sure I can sell anything more expensive than $20 Claude subscription to the leadership).
I think people having 6-7 figure SOTA AI budgets will move exponentially faster than those who don't. That makes me worried.
So, for me, it's not a question of recalibrating expectations. We're way past that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:31:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785598273,"id":49135292,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Never understood all this talk about moving goalposts - you understand that's how science works, right? We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. If we never "moved the goalposts", we'd be stuck scoring the same goals over and over.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"slashdave","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:31:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785601902,"id":49135838,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> The sooner people can be broken out of their denial
There is irony here","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ck2","children":[{"author":"pama","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:46:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785779168,"id":49159098,"options":[],"parent_id":49158499,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not sure what your first sentence means, or why you are quoting AI. Many of these problems individually were math at a level approaching the highest possible for expert human mathematicians. These are not simple combinations of existing ideas, or following of human intuitions, or implementing something following specific human instructions. Then again maybe you mean that math is not knowledge and that all math is simply extending the basic axioms using known patterns, to which I would not agree.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"fixedpointsnake","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:25:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785781550,"id":49159615,"options":[],"parent_id":49158499,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I agree. The most likely scenario is that this is just a "new normal" lift that is percolating through human endeavors and will saturate at some point. For example, the whole cyber-security bruhaha should ultimately resolve into higher standards for code published -- we can now cheaply find and fix a whole slew of minor bugs that weren't worth our time before.
The fact we see a lift is not the same as evidence that the lift is unbounded.
The lift being finite is supported by the fact improvements have come at the edges: improvements from human feedback, improvements in harnesses, improvements on model compatibility with harnesses, improvements in inference efficiency with new architectures, etc. If we were just training better models from scratch that would be one thing, but we are just making better use of a tool we've developed.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"IncreasePosts","children":[{"author":"ck2","children":[{"author":"hibikir","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:50:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785815447,"id":49164194,"options":[],"parent_id":49161621,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Have you seen how it debugs? It's trial and error. As the most reasonable hypothesis fail, new data is found, and it keeps iterating. It's not a human intelligence, but if it has an issue, it's not some mysterious creativity anima in the heart of man.
I have seen it produce tentative genetics for experiments, just like a scientist does. Then the data comes in and it can evaluate the data from the experiment just as well. One just had to give it a lab budget.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:22:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785792147,"id":49161621,"options":[],"parent_id":49159820,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"humans discover a lot of things by trial and error (aka what I meant by "invent knowledge")
basically everything Benjamin Franklin did was trial and error because no-one understood what electricity was in the slightest
almost everything Edison did was trial and error too, he had his lab try thousands of materials for his long lasting lightbulb filament
even the most advanced "AI" today is just machine-learning going through everything already known trying to piece together previously discovered facts, admittedly at levels and detail impossible by human hands
but that means there are limits and it's not really "AI"","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:46:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785782761,"id":49159820,"options":[],"parent_id":49158499,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"How do humans "invent knowledge"? Is your argument that the answer to these questions already existed in the training set? Why didn't any human recognize that before?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"lackoftactics","children":[{"author":"ck2","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:31:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785792668,"id":49161705,"options":[],"parent_id":49160236,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"well not every runner can run world-class sub2 marathon or even vaguely close, not even in super-shoes
but with super-shoes more and more runners are qualifying for boston marathon and even olympic trials marathon where it would have been impossible for them previously
and that's what "AI" currently does, it allows average people to immediately "pick the brain" of every expert in every field, in every scientific paper, without previously reading a single other google result, something that would have been impossible for them previously (super-shoes for the brain? too far?)
but "AI" isn't creating new knowledge, it's just stitching together existing knowledge from patterns that would have taken years by human hand if even possible at all, it's going to "hit the wall" eventually (in its current form)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:20:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785784836,"id":49160236,"options":[],"parent_id":49158499,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"as much as I love analogy with humans using super-shoes, not everybody can be a world-class expert in their industry. There should be a place at the table for average people to take part; otherwise, it won't be sustainable.
As a programmer, I am mostly interested in whether my role is sustainable long-term and whether the models will get better. I don't feel in jeopardy yet, but two more years like this and the calculus of hiring software engineers could shift even further. QAs are already overwhelmed with work","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:04:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785776644,"id":49158499,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""AI" has limits in that it cannot invent knowledge, it can only distill and search for patterns in existing knowledge
not sure how many will get this reference but "AI" for science and math is like super-shoes for runners
at first we are blown away by the impossible improvements including sub-2-hour realworld marathon and every other PR/CR/WR is dialed down
but then the improvements slow and reach a stall point because of the limit of technology and the source of the achievement
ie. sub-2-hour marathon yes, sub-1-hour never happening (rollerblade inline-skate record is 1-hour marathon)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"c7b","children":[{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"striking","children":[{"author":"throwaway0123_5","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:45:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785782725,"id":49159814,"options":[],"parent_id":49159668,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> others are in denial about whose living standards are actually going to be uplifted.
I don't know if it is fair to say they're in denial. For my part, I don't expect life to get much better for regular people (especially short term), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to try to make it happen.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","children":[{"author":"orangecat","children":[{"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","children":[{"author":"Marha01","children":[{"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","children":[{"author":"Marha01","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:43:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785818629,"id":49164429,"options":[],"parent_id":49161775,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Why would someone give me a car in exchange for UBI-scrip when that UBI-scrip has no inherent scarcity or value and can be produced in infinite supply by the government ?
UBI script will have some value, I am proposing printing enough money just to combat AI productivity-induced deflation, not infinite UBI money.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:37:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785793040,"id":49161775,"options":[],"parent_id":49161291,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This doesn't make any sense.
For money to work it has to represent some real value, something that has some scarcity to it such as potatoes or hours of human labor. Ultimately it is just a decoupler in a barter system, a universally recognized IOU.
Why would someone give me a car in exchange for UBI-scrip when that UBI-scrip has no inherent scarcity or value and can be produced in infinite supply by the government ?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:53:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785790426,"id":49161291,"options":[],"parent_id":49160965,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> What is step 3?
"Massive Economic Abundance" implies massive increase in produced goods. This implies massive deflation, ceteris paribus. So step 3 could be simply printing money to pay for UBI. Deflation from AI productivity increase and inflation from UBI money printing will cancel out.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:26:33.000Z","created_at_i":1785788793,"id":49160965,"options":[],"parent_id":49160797,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This seems more a fantasy than a considered likely outcome. He basically admits that humans will eventually mostly all be out of a job, replaced by AI, but then says (Gemini's summary) that there will be:
"Massive Economic Abundance: Because AI will exponentially grow the total economic pie, overall resource scarcity will diminish. The fundamental challenge shifts from producing wealth to distributing wealth."
So how do we go from everyone out of work, no income to spend on food, or the goods and services that the AI is producing, to "massive economic abundance"?!
It's like the meme:
Step 1: Create AI
Step 2: AI takes all the jobs
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit! (massive economic abundance)
What is step 3?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T12:18:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785845884,"id":49167651,"options":[],"parent_id":49160797,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You know, I think Dario should have kept the Richard Brautigan theme in his essay titles. I think that I was trying to describe you to someone is an absolutely perfect match for introducing an AGI that has been achieved. It\u2019s basically the same idea in blank verse, about a spread of a different technology, and made personal along the way.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:10:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785787842,"id":49160797,"options":[],"parent_id":49160131,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present
See "Machines of Loving Grace" by Dario Amodei: https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"bubblemoth","children":[{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"mekael","children":[{"author":"orangecat","children":[{"author":"arbitrary_name","children":[{"author":"azan_","children":[{"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T13:44:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785851064,"id":49168906,"options":[],"parent_id":49164826,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"In some countries, especially less developed ones, poverty levels are declining, but in the US the trend seems to be the opposite. The middle class is being gutted and descending into survival mode if not poverty, while the top few percent become obscenely rich at their expense.
In any case historical trends are really irrelevant to the discussion, which is about the impact of AI, which threatens to take away almost ALL the jobs (this is what Dario's essay is assuming), which has no historical precedent. Some people like to bring up previous waves of job automation such as the industrial revolution, but the difference there is that automation took some jobs but created others. In the case of AI, AI will also be taking the new jobs that it creates.
If AI takes all the jobs - which is what the people like Dario who are creating it assume will happen - then it seems "UBI" is indeed the logical conclusion (other than those able to make a living working for themself, or via self-sufficiency), but this is not going to be utopia where we are all idle rich practicing our hobbies. What it really means is a welfare state, where formerly proud people capable of supporting themself become dependent on government handouts. What comes to mind is the movie "Soylent Green", not utopia.
I'm not sure how anyone imagines this would actually work. Is there any private enterprise left at all, or are all the means of production (AI datacenters and robotic factories) all controlled by the state. Instead of distributing Soylent Green, the state distributes UBI-scrip, essentially food-stamps, that can be exchanged at state stores for provisions?
Seriously, how could this actually work ?
An alternate future, no more optimistic, at least in the short term, but perhaps more realistic, is that in the fairly near future when unemployment and public pain becomes high enough, we reach a tipping point, and the pitchforks come out. Eventually the government concedes that AI is no more conducive to the public good than nuclear weapons, and heavily regulates it, banning the use of AI to replace jobs. This may sound extreme, but surely not a fraction as extreme at the UBI-based welfare state that Dario Amodei is fantasizing about as the best possible outcome (that is compatible with himself becoming enormously wealthy).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:07:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785823649,"id":49164826,"options":[],"parent_id":49164474,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Poverty and inequality keeps declining all the time thanks to economic growth.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:54:02.000Z","created_at_i":1785819242,"id":49164474,"options":[],"parent_id":49161888,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"so why do we have the poverty and inequality today?
why do they spend the money they do on the things they do?
they are not altruists and they never will be.
they could change millions of lives today, but most do not.
pure naivete.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:46:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785793591,"id":49161888,"options":[],"parent_id":49161790,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"In fact I don't think that rich people are cartoon villains who enjoy watching the poors starve. If AI leads to greatly increased productivity, then at existing tax rates there will be more than enough to provide good living conditions for people who can't find jobs.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:38:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785793106,"id":49161790,"options":[],"parent_id":49161528,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That will entail an immense amount of violence to be undertaken by the working class against those in power, unless you think they'll gladly give up all of their ill gotten gains out of the goodness of their black little hearts.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mahogany","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:27:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785806827,"id":49163405,"options":[],"parent_id":49161528,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> No, I think people will demand to not live in poverty
What about other countries in the world where people... live in poverty?
> Capitalism allows people to escape poverty by personal effort
Isn't it possible that there is a future where AI makes the average value of human labor (or, "personal effort") plummet? Perhaps capitalism will lose some of its edge against a technology like this.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:14:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785791668,"id":49161528,"options":[],"parent_id":49161307,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"No, I think people will demand to not live in poverty. Capitalism allows people to escape poverty by personal effort. An AI future won\u2019t allow it by any means other than collective effort, so that\u2019s what we\u2019ll do.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:55:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785790513,"id":49161307,"options":[],"parent_id":49160854,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Eventually UBI will be the norm
I see comments like this tossed around a lot, but what makes you say this? Don't you think its more likely that most people end up in poverty?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"citrin_ru","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T16:55:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785862527,"id":49171571,"options":[],"parent_id":49160854,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"We don't see a progress towards UBI even inside individual countries and with AI we will need it on international. What people in Europe or Africa will do when all jobs there will be replaced by American or Chinese AI companies, where they will get money for UBI?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:16:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785788172,"id":49160854,"options":[],"parent_id":49160131,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"UBI probably is the positive outcome, though it may not seem like it to begin with. Initially it will likely be stigmatised and under-resourced, but as a larger proportion of people move out of work and onto UBI that stigma will drop and the resources should grow.
Eventually UBI will be the norm, and if the living standards of a person on UBI is as good as yours or mine today, that will be an enormous win for everyone. It\u2019s like pensions, once these were only for the elderly poor, now they\u2019re a right for everyone in most developed countries.
It\u2019s also interesting that for most of human history leisure time was the point of life, and only in recent modernity has work come to be the meaning of someone\u2019s existence.
UBI has to be commensurate with production being automated. That\u2019s a big logistical problem, if you think building datacenters is a challenge try bringing about radical abundance, but even so it\u2019s not insurmountable. It just needs to be taken on as project and not seen as an impossibility.
So much of this is not about what is possible so much as what people believe is possible. We can do anything if we try.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:11:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785784297,"id":49160131,"options":[],"parent_id":49159848,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The AI companies themselves, who are highly motivated to sell AI as overall positive for society, notwithstanding some security/etc risks, and who have economists on the payroll to think about things like this, do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present.
Shane Legg (DeepMind co-founder), one of the more intelligent and thoughtful people you'll find in the industry, could only offer "it's a tough problem - we need to think about it" when recently interviewed by Hannah Fry.
On the surface the most likely outcome for AI allowed to replace jobs is extraordinarily negative, especially since it is a general capability technology, not a specific one where displaced workers can just move to another field. Once AI becomes more capable it will be able to do the vast majority of white collar jobs, including any new ones that may appear as a result of AI. As Shane Legg put it, "if your job can be done remotely, sitting in front of a computer, then it can probably be replaced by AI".
Not only does AI threaten to replace ALL the white collar jobs, but it is rapidly going after blue collar (factory jobs, driving jobs) and pink collar ones (Japanese robotics for elder-care) as well.
If a positive outcome (which doesn't include putting displaced workers on welfare - UBI) is possible, then it sure would be nice to hear it, and the silence from the AI companies, and government for that matter, is deafening.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"striking","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:29:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785788989,"id":49160990,"options":[],"parent_id":49159848,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Asking politely is not how we got a 40-hour work week or workers' comp or most other labor standards we take for granted, just historically speaking. I think a positive outcome is very likely, and I think it will be a lot more work than loudly yelling, but I don't think anything will happen if we try to build everything up from first principles instead of taking a moment to consult history as many are wont to do in this AI era.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:47:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785782872,"id":49159848,"options":[],"parent_id":49159668,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Asking questions about policy and values and pushing to have those resolved in positive ways is about as far away from denial as you can get. It\u2019s possibly the only useful thing an ordinary person can do.
What a lot of people want to do, and I\u2019m not saying that you\u2019re one of them, is to assume that a positive outcome is impossible and either do nothing or loudly yell that the world is ending. Neither is particularly useful.
Or, as I said above, others just deny that there\u2019s anything to see here and try to get people to move along.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:31:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785781870,"id":49159668,"options":[],"parent_id":49159427,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think this too is a kind of denial. As in, while some are in denial about the usefulness of AI, others are in denial about whose living standards are actually going to be uplifted.
And it's sad, really, because I think these two groups would make a great pairing if they could stop arguing against one another for a moment. They'll both be impacted about as much and probably have the same ultimate goals (to lead dignified lives).
But it seems these days everyone is more interested in Kayfabe and feeling like they're in the right than working together, so maybe I should just keep quiet rather than attract the ire of both groups...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"joshmarlow","children":[{"author":"axus","children":[{"author":"joshmarlow","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:59:33.000Z","created_at_i":1785855573,"id":49169929,"options":[],"parent_id":49161626,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I would not advocate nationalization of any operations - I think the free market will run the data centers better in general.
I'm only suggesting (eventual) negotiations between countries and automated corporations - to operate here, you contribute equity.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:23:22.000Z","created_at_i":1785792202,"id":49161626,"options":[],"parent_id":49159753,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Nationalize the data centers, reserve enough inference to automate power generation, food production, transportation, and housing.
Is there any government that has gotten socialism correct for its citizens? I'd point to UAE/Qatar if they didn't depend on human servitude and inequality.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:39:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785782363,"id":49159753,"options":[],"parent_id":49159427,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don't understand why this got downvotes - simply extrapolating current trends leads to the need to answer all of these questions.
My own $0.02 on the economics piece - every country should have a sovereign wealth fund. Governments should block market access from automated[0] companies until those companies provide equity contributions to the wealth fund for that country. This aligns regulator and corporate interests. Dividends flow into the sovereign wealth funds and then can be allocated locally from there - UBI, job programs, etc. Let different jurisdictions explore different ways to structure a post-labor society.
On the broader social front - I think a lot of lack of meaning discussion boils down to the overemphasis we have on your job as your self-worth. We need to realign our societal expectations - and people need to spend more time with their families.
[0] for this to work, I think we would need well accepted metrics for 'how automated' a company is - and that probably needs a 3rd party auditing industry.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"esafak","children":[{"author":"throwaway0123_5","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:48:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785782900,"id":49159853,"options":[],"parent_id":49159755,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Agreed, a LOT of UBI advocates gloss over the "B" in UBI. If AI increases human productivity overall, the only morally acceptable outcomes (imo) are that everyone's standard of living increases (or at least is the same without having to work) and wealth inequality decreases (if AI is doing ~all the work, there really isn't any sensible justification for some people having significantly more wealth than others). Frankly anything else seems like a recipe for massive social instability.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"unfitted2545","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:01:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785783674,"id":49160025,"options":[],"parent_id":49159755,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Nationalised LLM? As long as the state doesn't decide what information the LLM shares (from an output and privacy perspective).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:39:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785782368,"id":49159755,"options":[],"parent_id":49159427,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Isn't it obvious if AI automates your job away, the AI company is going to reap the economic value, which is going to be less than what you cost, while giving you a pittance as UBI? If you received its full value there wouldn't be any point in anybody replacing you with AI.
The only way to win is to wield the AI.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"GPerson","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:42:34.000Z","created_at_i":1785782554,"id":49159785,"options":[],"parent_id":49159427,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Why do you think the AI companies are going to let it be a \u201cwe\u201d kind of decision, and since it\u2019s obviously not going to be a \u201cwe\u201d kind of decision, as getting to this point certainly has not been thanks to people like you, what makes you think living standards are going to be broadly uplifted?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"bubblemoth","children":[{"author":"azinman2","children":[{"author":"sodapopcan","children":[{"author":"frabcus","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:05:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785834330,"id":49166033,"options":[],"parent_id":49161890,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Because the implied alternative of the comment is that people will carry on having jobs, which breaks the entire premise that there is AI that replaces all human labour. The comment is missing the point - UBI is the only suggestion anyone has so far that meets this fundamental question about the technology. We will be less poor than without UBI, unless we come up with a better plan.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:46:34.000Z","created_at_i":1785793594,"id":49161890,"options":[],"parent_id":49160208,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"No idea why anyone would downvote this, it's true. As someone else pointed out "b = basic." And does anyone think it will adjust with inflation?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:18:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785784684,"id":49160208,"options":[],"parent_id":49160043,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I also don\u2019t understand why UBI is desirable. Putting everyone on welfare means everyone is poor. This won\u2019t end well, and it\u2019s certainly not the case that 99% of the population will let a tiny number of people remove their income in favor of pennies for all. Political violence will come first, easily.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:21:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785784873,"id":49160245,"options":[],"parent_id":49160043,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There is whatever pressure you bring to bear on it. As long as you are still living in a democracy your vote is the pressure you can apply. If the parties that exist won\u2019t represent you, make new ones that will. Do something rather than deciding it\u2019s both impossible and up to other people anyway.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:02:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785783777,"id":49160043,"options":[],"parent_id":49159427,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What pressure is there to push for any of these changes? I see AI advocates discussing the concept of UBI, but I can't imagine a world where the United States would ever pass this sort of legislation. I mean, congress can barely pass a budget each year.
If you are correct, I expect corporations to reap massive profits while most Americans try to find a way to survive in a world where they are obsolete.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"thuuuomas","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:32:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785789167,"id":49161028,"options":[],"parent_id":49159427,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Why should IP persist in a world of \u201cintelligence too cheap to meter\u201d?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"cautiouscat","children":[{"author":"frabcus","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:08:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785834503,"id":49166055,"options":[],"parent_id":49161069,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I guess we'll have to fall back on the plan of hoping one of the 7 Anthropic co-founders has secure power in this world, and decides to use EA principles to give us all a bit of their share of the future light cone ;) (The wink because I'm kinda not really joking that this seems the best plan, if we actually get superintelligence from a US AI company)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:36:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785789363,"id":49161069,"options":[],"parent_id":49159427,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I\u2019ll be the first to call myself cynical.
> In the near term handling the transition. Jobs will be lost, careers ended, people won\u2019t be able to reskill quickly enough. At the same time AI is an enormous opportunity to uplift living standards, but nobody has the logistics of this figured out.
> We need to figure out how to restructure the global economy. How does UBI work internationally, if the AI companies are taking revenue in the US? What\u2019s the tax base for it? What does that say about international trade and protectionism? Do countries end up splitting into different trading blocks based on their level of access and legality of AI (I assume some will ban it outright)?.
UBI in the United States is never going to happen in time. If it happens at all. We don\u2019t even get universal healthcare. I think people who think AI will be a net positive for humanity are also in some sort of denial.
In a different US political climate I would entertain it. If these frontier labs weren\u2019t so clearly going after the money, I would entertain it.
LLMs are clearly a step up for capitalists so I just can\u2019t see any inclusion of LLMs move towards more progressive ideologies.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sodapopcan","children":[{"author":"infinitezest","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:58:33.000Z","created_at_i":1785794313,"id":49162021,"options":[],"parent_id":49161875,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Beautifully put. This exactly summarizes my feelings about this particular tech. I actually find it hugely useful. But I fear we lack the wisdom to use this in a way that won't destroy us.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:45:02.000Z","created_at_i":1785793502,"id":49161875,"options":[],"parent_id":49159427,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Everything you're saying is oddly simultaneously specific and hand-wavy at the same time. I say this because I'm not sure a lot of these things are solvable or, if they are, it's going to take lifetimes. For example:
> How do we replace the work ethic that tells us we are our jobs and idleness is immoral?
For many people it has nothing to do with morality, it's hardwired into their instincts. They want to work, and they will work.
For a lot of us who are not excited about this future it's that no one is trying to answer all the questions you laid out. Instead we have the disgusting people at the helm purposefully spreading doomerism and saying, "We'll figure it out." I think it's pretty problematic (to say the least) to care more about technological advancement than how that advancement is actually shaping up to effect people in the short term. But I know many people don't care, especially those who believe they won't be among the affected.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:11:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785780685,"id":49159427,"options":[],"parent_id":49158822,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"In the near term handling the transition. Jobs will be lost, careers ended, people won\u2019t be able to reskill quickly enough. At the same time AI is an enormous opportunity to uplift living standards, but nobody has the logistics of this figured out.
We need to figure out how to restructure the global economy. How does UBI work internationally, if the AI companies are taking revenue in the US? What\u2019s the tax base for it? What does that say about international trade and protectionism? Do countries end up splitting into different trading blocks based on their level of access and legality of AI (I assume some will ban it outright)?.
How does intellectual property work in an AI generated future? What about healthcare advances, who gets to own those?
What about meaning, what about purpose? How do we replace the work ethic that tells us we are our jobs and idleness is immoral? How do you replace \u201cWhat do you do?\u201d As one of the first questions you ask a new person?
That sort of thing.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"logicchains","children":[{"author":"GPerson","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:37:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785782232,"id":49159726,"options":[],"parent_id":49159653,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Hopefully doesn\u2019t ever happen, since that\u2019s one of the more plausible omnicide scenarios. I human like AI is almost certainly achievable without much research effort at this point, but we shouldn\u2019t do it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:29:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785781791,"id":49159653,"options":[],"parent_id":49158822,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Realistically it means trying to start a small business of some sort, because AI is hugely advantageous to business owners and disadvantageous to workers. And it's something AIs can't do unless they get legal personhood, which may well not happen any time soon.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"WarmWash","children":[{"author":"mofeien","children":[{"author":"WarmWash","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:47:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785790048,"id":49161204,"options":[],"parent_id":49160856,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"My mistake, I meant 250k*","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:16:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785788173,"id":49160856,"options":[],"parent_id":49159721,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"To what kind of goal that an ASI might decide to pursue would "a quarter billion happy, healthy, free people" be the most efficient solution to?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:36:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785782202,"id":49159721,"options":[],"parent_id":49158822,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The human zoo where the top ~250,000k humans live in a "human utopia" and the AI provides while mostly focusing on whatever it decides it's own goals are.
Humanity survives (but we reading this probably don't), the AI treats the living humans like the Emperor's favorite pets (probably a pretty good life), and then the AI does whatever else it deems important.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:25:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785777955,"id":49158822,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"And what does taking it seriously entail?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","children":[{"author":"zahlman","children":[{"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:25:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785806742,"id":49163393,"options":[],"parent_id":49161227,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"FWIW I was responding to the sarcastically expressed overt message that AI-math is a clear sign that AGI is here and anyone who disagrees is in denial.
My point being that AI math is a narrow skill just like AI chess and implies nothing about generality (AGI).
Sarcasm begats sarcasm.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:48:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785790134,"id":49161227,"options":[],"parent_id":49159469,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Making insulting assumptions about the hidden motivations of others is not the level of discourse I come to HN for.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:14:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785780869,"id":49159469,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Sorry to hear you've been impacted by this AI math.
I heard that Gary Kasparov was impacted by AI chess, but at least he still seems to have a job, so don't give up.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"arenaninja","children":[{"author":"amelius","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T15:33:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785857609,"id":49170423,"options":[],"parent_id":49159750,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"A formula like e^(i*pi)+1=0 is probably closer.
But it's not clear if LLMs will produce abstractions that humans would find elegant.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:39:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785782353,"id":49159750,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's indeed very exciting. I'm looking forward to new advancements/predictions in physics. Preferably as beautifully explained as E = M*c^2","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"overgard","children":[{"author":"efavdb","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:03:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785783817,"id":49160053,"options":[],"parent_id":49159958,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"best point in that first link: openai doesn't tell us if they only tried to solve these 10 and each was solved (amazing) or if they asked it to solve a million problems and it got these 10. Either is great, one is more so.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Trasmatta","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:05:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785783947,"id":49160074,"options":[],"parent_id":49159958,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Society at large is getting worse at critical thinking, because we are increasingly offloading that thinking to AI","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"afro88","children":[{"author":"overgard","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T18:30:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785868256,"id":49172860,"options":[],"parent_id":49160115,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> other people are getting carried away with the result
That is the intended purpose of hype.
He's polite, but he's basically saying there's potentially a lot of smoke and mirrors. I agree.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:09:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785784168,"id":49160115,"options":[],"parent_id":49159958,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Gary doesn't argue it's hype though. He argues 2 things: other people are getting carried away with the result, and we don't know enough about how it was reached to know where it falls on the impressive scale.
He literally says it's an impressive feat in the second article.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"bluerooibos","children":[{"author":"mef51","children":[{"author":"overgard","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T18:45:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785869154,"id":49173090,"options":[],"parent_id":49160273,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That's just not true, at all.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:23:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785785016,"id":49160273,"options":[],"parent_id":49160169,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Because he's not talking about AI, he's talking about people's psychological reactions to AI","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"bonoboTP","children":[{"author":"overgard","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T18:46:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785869196,"id":49173099,"options":[],"parent_id":49160281,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"And yet Sora folded because it's way too expensive to run a service like that.
A lot of his predictions have held up very well.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:24:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785785057,"id":49160281,"options":[],"parent_id":49160169,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"He's simply a good phone number to have for journalists under time pressure who need to add the contrarian voice to their upcoming story. He delivers it reliably, then never reflects on how he was wrong in the past, just blasts forward as if nothing happened and just makes the next bonkers claims to the journalists who are very thankful for the prompt delivery of how AI is a nothingburger, and fake and won't ever do XYZ that it then proceeds to do in N months.
I remember the time when he insisted that diffusion-based image generators trained on Internet scale data will never be able to make an image of a horse riding an astronaut. Today you can generate 4K video of that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"overgard","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T18:45:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785869119,"id":49173083,"options":[],"parent_id":49160169,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Mate, if you don't like Gary Marcus that's your call, but you're completely just lying when you talk about his qualifications. He is not "just" a psychologist, he's done a lot of AI research and even started AI companies that were acquired. This is absolutely a person with the credentials to speak on this subject, and honestly all his takes I've read have probably been TOO nice to AI companies.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:15:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785784516,"id":49160169,"options":[],"parent_id":49159958,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Gary Marcus has been moving the goalposts since day 1. The guy is a psychologist. Why would anyone care what a psychologist has to say about AI? He's likely made good money from constantly moving the goalposts and being a denier, due to the publicity he gets.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"w4yai","children":[{"author":"skydhash","children":[{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:29:33.000Z","created_at_i":1785792573,"id":49161689,"options":[],"parent_id":49160632,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> The pelicans are still not ok to this day.
If I could take one out of context quote from this whole thread as a response to TFA, it would be this one.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:56:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785786989,"id":49160632,"options":[],"parent_id":49160229,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The pelicans are still not ok to this day.
People are skeptical of the announcement because the room include several PHDs in math and physics. The prompts are not published so we can see how generic the starting prompt is.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"overgard","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T18:29:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785868166,"id":49172831,"options":[],"parent_id":49160229,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Nobody is saying it doesn't have an impact. What we're saying is the near-religious fervor isn't warranted. AI boosters always speak in the future tense, which is extremely telling because we have right now is basically "ok" not earth shattering.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:20:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785784805,"id":49160229,"options":[],"parent_id":49159958,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"AI already have an impact, and yes this is PR hype because this is a product. Yet both can be true at the same time. We're not blindly eating what's OpenAI is serving us as gold truth, we're just admitting it's doing remarkable progress.
Remember October 2024 Pelicans [1] ? It's been only less than 2 years.
We don't know what will come in the next 2 years. But the progress doesn't seem to stop for now.
[1] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/25/pelicans-on-a-bicycle/","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"hgoel","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:23:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785784997,"id":49160269,"options":[],"parent_id":49159958,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Your comment seems entirely disconnected from the posts you linked. It's impossible to deny the results, it is not PR hype that in the past couple of weeks LLMs have resolved problems that have been open in mathematics for many years. Some of those problems had remained unresolved despite keen interest from many humans.
The only way that is PR hype is if you're invoking the insane conspiracy that frontier AI labs are just buying off results that would otherwise be career defining for a mathematician, just for marketing.
The posts you linked are urging caution regarding the exaggerated e/acc-esque lies peddled by people like Musk, not that the models haven't proven themselves as having genuine ability to contribute to research in some areas.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dwaltrip","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:32:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785785520,"id":49160353,"options":[],"parent_id":49159958,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I use these strange machines all the time. They have gotten notably smarter. That\u2019s my personal experience.
They still do things that I find incredibly annoying and \u201cdumb\u201d. And I still have to clean up messes they make quite often.
But on the whole they are clearly smarter than before. No extraordinary claims needed. I just try to learn how the tool works and how to use it effectively.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:56:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785783406,"id":49159958,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-amazing-but-vastly...
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-critical-updates-re-as...
As always, PR hype. Goalposts have not moved.
Guys, please use critical thinking. The haters don't hate by default, we hate because we're gaslit about this stuff every day and it's annoying. Extraordinary claims require proof, and they're not giving us information that would be essential to knowing if this is actually significant or not.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"applicative","children":[{"author":"whimsicalism","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:38:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785785911,"id":49160425,"options":[],"parent_id":49160288,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"completely false","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:25:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785785105,"id":49160288,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It is a fact of experience, and indeed effectively a theorem, that the better they get at coding and math, the dumber they are. These are the wages of RLVR etc","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"fhfncjcc","children":[{"author":"Legend2440","children":[{"author":"alightsoul","children":[{"author":"Legend2440","children":[{"author":"vablings","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:12:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785787941,"id":49160816,"options":[],"parent_id":49160527,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There have been several cases of suicide and self-harm related to 4o, AI psychosis is a real risk and will probably be in the DSM","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"desterothx","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:08:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785841684,"id":49166914,"options":[],"parent_id":49160527,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"sure they do if it makes them money, probably just not worth the controversy right now","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:47:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785786434,"id":49160527,"options":[],"parent_id":49160457,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Well that's on purpose lol. OpenAI does not want you falling in love with their chatbot and have been deliberately training it to be less romantic.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"michaelmrose","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:05:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785787521,"id":49160735,"options":[],"parent_id":49160457,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"sycophancy
It wasn't "better" it was better at kissing your ass which matches what a lot of people want in a partner.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Marha01","children":[{"author":"QwenGlazer9000","children":[{"author":"HDBaseT","children":[{"author":"moyix","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:37:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785825443,"id":49165019,"options":[],"parent_id":49163391,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They actually removed the temperature parameter starting with GPT-5.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:25:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785806719,"id":49163391,"options":[],"parent_id":49161405,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The API lets you adjust the temperature. Lower values introduce more deterministic outputs, which likely helps with the hallucination rates.
If you want creative writings, use the API and play with the sliders.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Marha01","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:44:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785818678,"id":49164432,"options":[],"parent_id":49161405,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I highly doubt that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:03:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785791024,"id":49161405,"options":[],"parent_id":49161177,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Dude it's not a system prompt, it's the training.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:45:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785789930,"id":49161177,"options":[],"parent_id":49160457,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> remember that gpt 4o was popular among those who had ai as a romantic partner
I suspect GPT 5.6 would be even better at it, if given the same sycophantic system prompt and lack of guardrails.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"whimsicalism","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:21:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785792071,"id":49161603,"options":[],"parent_id":49160457,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"gpt4o & associated parasociality is considered an alignment failure and is actively trained out of the model, so that is a terrible example of regression","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:41:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785786079,"id":49160457,"options":[],"parent_id":49160385,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"you are working on coding. they are working on things like "creative writing" remember that gpt 4o was popular among those who had ai as a romantic partnet?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"criddell","children":[{"author":"whimsicalism","children":[{"author":"criddell","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T12:34:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785846847,"id":49167883,"options":[],"parent_id":49161595,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don't think any of the ARC-AGI-3 tests are very interesting. At least not as interesting as driving a car. Children literally do a similar task in go karts every day.
Another interesting task would be to take the AI in a robot body into a vegetable garden and teach it to pull weeds. This is another task that lots of children help out with.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:20:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785792021,"id":49161595,"options":[],"parent_id":49161288,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"is this not essentially what ARC-AGI-3 is? i agree that in-context/continual learning is somewhere the models are still mostly weak at","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:53:22.000Z","created_at_i":1785790402,"id":49161288,"options":[],"parent_id":49160385,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Do any of the big AI companies have a model that are good at tasks that require learning?
For example, every day people teach teenagers how to drive and with only dozens of hours of practice, they are on the road.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"nostrebored","children":[{"author":"jstummbillig","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:18:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785795519,"id":49162206,"options":[],"parent_id":49161584,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I understand the point (I don't agree with it; tool calling has gotten much better/reliable and that is very important for customer support) but consider: If you can get same for a lot less, that's an improvement. If we found a way to supply fresh water and electricity for -90% cost after 2 years, that would be fantastic.
You can do many more things, when stuff is cheaper, even if the stuff were otherwise unchanged.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"heaney-555","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T18:03:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785866626,"id":49172516,"options":[],"parent_id":49161584,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":">The class of small models, with limited to no reasoning
What? GPT-4.1 was not a small model! And why wouldn't you use reasoning?
You're of course going to see poor results when you restrict yourself to small non-reasoning models, but why would you?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:19:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785791992,"id":49161584,"options":[],"parent_id":49160385,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"For customer support I don't think models have gotten better since gpt-4.1. The class of small models, with limited to no reasoning, that need to handle a complex issue with a touch of empathy, has not improved much.
I think most are actually worth, as agentic harnesses seem to optimize for solving poorly described problems rather than following complex procedures as written. In other words, instruction following maximizing models seem to make worse free-form agents, but they're really all that some domains need.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"analoger","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T13:50:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785851424,"id":49168994,"options":[],"parent_id":49160385,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Data 'compression' collapse.\nPeople publish AI generated slop on the internet -> next generation of AI is trained on that data -> the lossy/fuzzy training make the output worse -> rinse and repeat.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:35:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785785717,"id":49160385,"options":[],"parent_id":49160352,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Proof?
In my experience modern models are better at all tasks than models from two years ago, especially complex multi-step tasks.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"cmdli","children":[{"author":"Chance-Device","children":[{"author":"lioeters","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:19:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785813568,"id":49164052,"options":[],"parent_id":49162207,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""The sooner you can be broken out of your denial about all this the better, and we can start actually taking you seriously."","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:18:41.000Z","created_at_i":1785795521,"id":49162207,"options":[],"parent_id":49162015,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I just don\u2019t think it\u2019s true, or is significant enough to matter to the direction of travel of AI even if there were something to it. It\u2019s another cope post being lobbed at the idea of AI going somewhere and I\u2019m sick of them.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:58:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785794293,"id":49162015,"options":[],"parent_id":49161168,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It sounds like they are making a clear argument: models are getting worse for certain domains even while they are getting better at others.
I don't know if I agree with that but it doesn't seem like an irrational claim and does seem credible to me.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:44:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785789848,"id":49161168,"options":[],"parent_id":49160352,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"So your answer is: ignore the progress, it\u2019s not really happening, actually it\u2019s getting worse.
That\u2019s not a credible position, but there isn\u2019t anything that I or anyone else can say to someone who simply doesn\u2019t want to believe something.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"teravor","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T02:55:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785812156,"id":49163911,"options":[],"parent_id":49160352,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"every lab independently discovered that getting good at bit alchemy (coding and related tasks) should come first as it will enable the formation of training pipelines that will then solve everything else.
so far there is no end to this progress in sight so it's full steam ahead on this singular domain. once it plateaus you should expect to see the greatest disruptions in human endeavors ever as all the training flops will start flowing to other domains to disrupt and dominate.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:31:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785785518,"id":49160352,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The models are frequently getting worse at items that they aren\u2019t being benchmarked for \u2014 and that\u2019s happening more and more over time! Other people in other fields aren\u2019t idiots, they are accurately perceiving the fact that these models are being hyper optimized for our industry, and are becoming less capable in other domains over time. Models of the same scale are massively worse at writing a broad variety of styles of prose than their equivalent from two years ago. (Models of increased scale are a mixed bag.)
Maybe you\u2019re the one who needs breaking out of your cached beliefs.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"matsemann","children":[{"author":"Dig1t","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:46:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785789995,"id":49161192,"options":[],"parent_id":49160408,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don't think this is a straw man, a huge number of people in my life (non CS people) think AI is a dead-end, that it's just a stochastic parrot, that it'll never be able to do many things that humans can do. I have had many arguments with people who told me that "AI will never be able to do X", and then 6 months later AI is able to do X. Then they will move the goal posts and say "well AI will definitely never be able to do Y".","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:37:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785785832,"id":49160408,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Which straw man are you arguing against?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"whimsicalism","children":[{"author":"dominotw","children":[{"author":"whimsicalism","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:56:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785790564,"id":49161318,"options":[],"parent_id":49161058,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"yes, in fact I recall many people on this exact forum saying that AI will not be able to novel work at all.
i can link you likely dozens of comments from people wrong about this replying to me over the last 5 years","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"reducesuffering","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T16:04:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785859441,"id":49170820,"options":[],"parent_id":49161058,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Hundreds of comments with 100% confidence AI/LLMs only regurgitate existing knowledge and can not produce anything novel","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:35:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785789301,"id":49161058,"options":[],"parent_id":49160443,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Really? has anyone ever claimed that ai will never be able to prove theorems and conjectures ?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:40:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785786008,"id":49160443,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"it is very hard for people to eat crow, as the replies will show","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"gste","children":[{"author":"2001zhaozhao","children":[{"author":"whimsicalism","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:21:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785792106,"id":49161612,"options":[],"parent_id":49161271,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"deflation will just be inflated away, always","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:52:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785790349,"id":49161271,"options":[],"parent_id":49161099,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Would something like "services deflation" even show up in the numbers? That's what I'd expect to happen first","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mekael","children":[{"author":"hibikir","children":[{"author":"nightsd01","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:52:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785815576,"id":49164205,"options":[],"parent_id":49164165,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I was a bit triggered by your China comment, if only given the fact that there is a very specific institution that drove many formerly prosperous cities and communities into abject poverty (the CCP in Mao's era) and then tries to claim all the credit for the market driving how many people they've lifted out of poverty.
And nowadays with Hong Kong (and probably soon Taiwan) they are proving they are perfectly happy to destroy economic growth as long as it benefits The Party","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:43:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785815006,"id":49164165,"options":[],"parent_id":49161759,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I suspect that you have not read enough them. Ask someone in China (which yes, still has a capita owning class) if the proles were better off 50 years ago or now. The only real probes we have now in the west is that we have failed at housing, precisely because instead of growth, we have made many choices to increase returns for old people, and insufficient taxes for real estate.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:35:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785792951,"id":49161759,"options":[],"parent_id":49161099,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"But who benefits from that economic growth? If it's only the capital owning class, and the rest of us are left in the dust, then the growth is irrelevant.
I ,for one, have read enough history to know that it's never the proles who end up benefiting.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"fckgw","children":[{"author":"nightsd01","children":[{"author":"Thanemate","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:20:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785838855,"id":49166541,"options":[],"parent_id":49164190,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":">Plenty of people are making money from AI?
Is the amount of people making money from AI greater than the amount of people who lose money from AI? Is maximizing prosperity across humanity even a goal, at this point? Am I to be expected to believe, without doubting, that the end goal is the benefit of the many?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"desterothx","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:11:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785841876,"id":49166934,"options":[],"parent_id":49164190,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"most devs i talk to say that they would love to go back to coding without ai, if everyone had to do it, so there's that. Oh also scammers have gotten so much better with llms, so a significant amount of peoples lives are worse due to that","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"fckgw","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T16:59:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785862775,"id":49171642,"options":[],"parent_id":49164190,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If your answer to "How does AI benefit me?" is "Well a lot of people made money" then I'm afraid you've lost the plot.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:48:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785815331,"id":49164190,"options":[],"parent_id":49161972,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Plenty of people are making money from AI? And I am not sure I've seen it "making things worse for most people" yet, do you have a source behind this?
If your source is AI layoffs, there were plenty of layoffs with the invention of the horseless carriage, but that doesn't mean it made humans worse off overall.
There are reasons to be skeptical about progress and AI and all that but the 'making things worse for most people' thing you mentioned seems yet to be based in any reality","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:53:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785794028,"id":49161972,"options":[],"parent_id":49161099,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"How do I directly benefit from this supposed "growth"? Seems like its just making things worse for most people.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:38:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785789537,"id":49161099,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"People will be broken out of their denial by actual economic growth. That's what this is all meant to be for... I think we might start seeing some surprising numbers.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dwroberts","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:32:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785814340,"id":49164107,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Can someone explain why we\u2019re not using it to solve the obvious big conjectures/problems though? If this stuff is solved, why isn\u2019t Riemann the first thing to go? Even if it means a fund of several hundred $k to let it churn on it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"slashdave","children":[{"author":"reducesuffering","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T16:02:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785859328,"id":49170786,"options":[],"parent_id":49164785,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"How's that going for climate change and its denialists?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:00:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785823205,"id":49164785,"options":[],"parent_id":49133334,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Those that claim their opponents are in denial are most likely in denial themselves","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:10:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785582648,"id":49133334,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Pretty cool. The impact of AI is getting undeniable, there aren\u2019t many positions left to move the goalposts to at this stage, next they\u2019ll have to be outside the stadium entirely.
The sooner people can be broken out of their denial about all this the better, and we can start actually taking it seriously.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"artninja1988","children":[{"author":"Davidzheng","children":[{"author":"artninja1988","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:02:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785585776,"id":49133667,"options":[],"parent_id":49133624,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I mean doing something like Grothendieck when he redeemed algebraic geometry or Galois when he invented group theory. We haven't seen that at all from LLMs.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:55:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785585354,"id":49133624,"options":[],"parent_id":49133465,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There's no clean line between a collection of theorems and a theory.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"laichzeit0","children":[{"author":"slashdave","children":[{"author":"zardo","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:38:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785789512,"id":49161098,"options":[],"parent_id":49135917,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There have been times it was theory driven.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:38:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785602322,"id":49135917,"options":[],"parent_id":49133922,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What? No. Frontier physics is experiment driven.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:38:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785587928,"id":49133922,"options":[],"parent_id":49133465,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I\u2019m personally hoping for the next big AI gangbanger to be theoretical physics. Boy does that field need a good reshuffle. I think when any novel mathematical theory can be done by AI you\u2019ll see simultaneously theoretical physics getting wrecked as hard as pure math is. At that point we might see new physics or paradigm shifting technology emerging.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"slashdave","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:37:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785602272,"id":49135905,"options":[],"parent_id":49133465,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It will not happen with existing LLM techniques.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:28:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785583699,"id":49133465,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Now that we've seen AI produce a fair number of proofs (and disproofs), I'm curious when we'll start seeing it build genuinely novel theory. Does anyone have predictions on when and how we'll get there and will it take new architectures/ training paradigms, or is the current approach enough?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"bifftastic","children":[{"author":"QuesnayJr","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:21:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785586914,"id":49133800,"options":[],"parent_id":49133485,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The Maxwell conjecture was a conjecture in theoretical physics (though not a particularly important one)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ls612","children":[{"author":"tim333","children":[{"author":"Windchaser","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:40:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785778804,"id":49159022,"options":[],"parent_id":49146678,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"And a lot of condensed matter physics. Type II superconductivity is a well-known one, but there are a lot of more less well-known ones","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T17:54:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785693247,"id":49146678,"options":[],"parent_id":49139508,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There's a lot of everyday stuff in physics which is unexplained like the particle masses we have.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T23:13:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785626001,"id":49139508,"options":[],"parent_id":49133485,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The fundamental obstacle is that we have no conceivable way to produce the energy levels to test the predictions that new theoretical physics would produce. We are like over a dozen orders of magnitude off.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:30:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785583845,"id":49133485,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Any advances in theoretical physics yet? Are there any fundamental obstacles? I would have thought not, but I haven't seen anything reported.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ultimatefan1","children":[{"author":"woeirua","children":[{"author":"threatofrain","children":[{"author":"Ar-Curunir","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:14:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785593657,"id":49134655,"options":[],"parent_id":49134481,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Some of the problems solved here, at least in CS, have been open for decades, and have been worked on by very smart leading researchers in the field, including Turing Award winners.
Like, these would be best-paper awards at many top CS conferences.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:54:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785592461,"id":49134481,"options":[],"parent_id":49134187,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This also makes the assumption that frontier math has all the long hanging fruits already taken... also very dubious.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"asdfologist","children":[{"author":"cvak","children":[{"author":"zahlman","children":[{"author":"Mithriil","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T18:11:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785867106,"id":49172607,"options":[],"parent_id":49161305,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Even if pi is an approximation, it is still representable mathematically. Floating-point arithmetic is an algebra (in this case, a magma [1]), which can be studied mathematically.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(algebra)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:55:02.000Z","created_at_i":1785790502,"id":49161305,"options":[],"parent_id":49158708,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"For example, pi can be computed to arbitrarily many digits, but could only even in principle be accurately represented with physical objects to a precision that many humans could memorize easily. This is thanks to physical constraints such as "diameter of the observable universe" and "Planck length", at a minimum.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:17:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785777448,"id":49158708,"options":[],"parent_id":49134615,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"In what sense?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:10:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785593431,"id":49134615,"options":[],"parent_id":49134187,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Unlike math, software is constrained by the physical world.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jvanderbot","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:59:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785779951,"id":49159278,"options":[],"parent_id":49134187,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Or, that the mathematical formalisms that model the limits of software performance are firm enough that barring P==NP, nothing much will change despite proofs of beautiful math.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:17:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785590262,"id":49134187,"options":[],"parent_id":49133534,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This makes no sense. To believe this you have to think that the models are somehow being overfit explicitly on academic mathematics and it doesn\u2019t carry over at all to more practical software engineering. I wouldn\u2019t make that bet.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dominotw","children":[{"author":"DaiPlusPlus","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:44:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785591878,"id":49134393,"options":[],"parent_id":49134246,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> i think you have misunderstanding of what mathematicians do
They get to make cool 3D plot visualizations of functions so obscure to me that they\u2019re named after someone who is still alive - and/or get to work on cryptography for the NSA - I think?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:25:33.000Z","created_at_i":1785590733,"id":49134246,"options":[],"parent_id":49133534,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> novel advances in math
> we are seeing frontier level math breakthroughs (ie performance that would put it in the top 100 or 1000 mathematicians in the world if it were a human, meaning top .00001% or 800/8B)
i think you have misunderstanding of what mathematicians do","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"slashdave","children":[{"author":"blovescoffee","children":[{"author":"ninkendo","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:42:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785807764,"id":49163494,"options":[],"parent_id":49136971,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"15% improvements are usually called \u201cfixing a mistake in the code\u201d or \u201cgetting to that task in the backlog for optimizing that code we had to ship on a deadline\u201d. They\u2019re more likely the bigger the company: more contributors working in disparate areas means more low hanging fruit is probably lying around.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:23:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785608608,"id":49136971,"options":[],"parent_id":49135872,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"a 15% improvement at a trillion dollar scale company is massive","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"enraged_camel","children":[{"author":"obidan","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:15:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785780915,"id":49159475,"options":[],"parent_id":49158954,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This is untrue. It is very ordinary. How much do you know about GPU drivers that you state this so assuredly?\n Drivers are software. Software can be improved. Do you believe there are no prior examples of GPU drivers being improved such that particular compute patterns go up in performance by more than 15%?\nThis driver improved Total War performance by 71% https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/74714/en-...\nAlso note you can go ahead and improve any open source driver right now, most likely. Compile it for your specific card and remove all other architecture specific if-cases and you can get an improvement.
Edit: also here\u2019s a opencl 30% compute perf increase documented here : https://m.hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/74425-haswell-systems... that i just googled for","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"slashdave","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:16:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785820580,"id":49164575,"options":[],"parent_id":49158954,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"No, we do this kind of thing regularly. Optimizations often depend on the model that is using them. Namely, fusion techniques.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:35:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785778531,"id":49158954,"options":[],"parent_id":49135872,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There's nothing ordinary about downloading a new GPU driver and having performance go up by 15%.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:34:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785602092,"id":49135872,"options":[],"parent_id":49133534,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> we are also seeing incredible advances in software performance
Incredible?
> open ai announced like 15% improvement by fixing gpu kernel issue
That is... ordinary software optimization.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"skybrian","children":[{"author":"pavpanchekha","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:22:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785781330,"id":49159564,"options":[],"parent_id":49159432,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"A lot of algorithmic improvement in AI is ultimately bottlenecked by compute. It is very easy to come up with ideas that could improve models! But to prove that they do, especially at scale, is expensive and takes a long time.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:11:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785780708,"id":49159432,"options":[],"parent_id":49133534,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This will depend on the problem; I expect big algorithmic performance improvements in AI since the algorithms are still new, inefficent, and constantly being improved. But maybe not for sorting, fast fourier transforms, or other well-studied basic algorithms?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"GPerson","children":[{"author":"cmdli","children":[{"author":"scronkfinkle","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:30:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785821401,"id":49164640,"options":[],"parent_id":49162054,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The impressive/surprising thing is your premise because we effectively can spin up an army of mathematicians now","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:01:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785794514,"id":49162054,"options":[],"parent_id":49159813,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I guess it depends on how to measure a single "person"? If you spun up 2000 copies of Terrance Tao, I wouldn't be surprised if you found a few new discoveries at the end of it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ninkendo","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:37:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785807456,"id":49163465,"options":[],"parent_id":49159813,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> I don\u2019t really like AI but let\u2019s stop kidding ourselves
If I had to create a tagline to describe my opinions about AI in a single sentence, that\u2019d be it.
It\u2019s possible to both hate AI and be impressed by it at the same time. Lying to ourselves about its capabilities does us no good. It\u2019s emotionally difficult to do, but people need to come to grips with what\u2019s happening and shake themselves out of a state of denial.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"nezi","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T02:13:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785809616,"id":49163677,"options":[],"parent_id":49159813,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"How much investment has gone into OpenAI versus mathematics research in 2025 for example? Probably 100x?
The AI results are clearly impressive. But these sorts of things are also in the ballpark of what human effort could solve given enough attention and time. Though it is hard to say.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:45:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785782715,"id":49159813,"options":[],"parent_id":49133534,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don\u2019t really like AI but let\u2019s stop kidding ourselves, no human mathematician could make progress on a dozen major open problems in a week or two. If you\u2019re measuring it against humans then it is by far the best mathematician to ever live.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"paulmist","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:35:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785785714,"id":49160384,"options":[],"parent_id":49133534,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Correct me if I'm wrong, but all of the aforementioned advances were made in the last year? Until very recently few people had access to these tools. Most people still don't know how to use ChatGPT, and very few use tools like CC regularily. If in a few years these frontier tools become commonplace and people upskill we would should see a network effect?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"zahlman","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:52:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785790375,"id":49161280,"options":[],"parent_id":49133534,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> but it seems less likely to me than before that the types of math/science discoveries will explicitly unlock better software performance.
You seem to overlook a simpler barrier. To make these advances, they have to be possible. A 15% improvement in GPU kernels doesn't evidence that significantly more improvement has been left on the table.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"andai","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:37:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785818269,"id":49164408,"options":[],"parent_id":49133534,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Google has also invested a lot of time into developing new hardware and new algorithms with AI (other types of AI, not LLMs). I don't know if it's paying off (haven't followed it closely) but they seem to think it's worth the effort.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T11:40:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785584442,"id":49133534,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"one of the early premises of how ai takeoff would go was that a system that could solve open problems in advanced mathematics would also discover novel advances in math and computer science that directly unlock drastically better software performance.\nwe are seeing frontier level math breakthroughs (ie performance that would put it in the top 100 or 1000 mathematicians in the world if it were a human, meaning top .00001% or 800/8B). \nwe are also seeing incredible advances in software performance. open ai announced like 15% improvement by fixing gpu kernel issues.\nthese are clearly linked in the sense of scaling laws and generalization of intelligence: a huge model gets capabilities in both math and software engineering that isn't possible at smaller scales.
but it seems less likely to me than before that the types of math/science discoveries will explicitly unlock better software performance. in some sense this fits our intuitions. when top tech companies use math PhD type employees, they have them stop doing pure math research and instead focus on software engineering. these people are often very good at software engineering but not due to recent discoveries in academic mathematics, it's due to their general intelligence.\nto me, this is evidence that the models are getting better but does not make me think we are on the cusp of a foom style fast takeoff enabled by revolutions in frontier math\n(i also posted this on twitter @mlipman13)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"christofosho","children":[{"author":"braneloop","children":[{"author":"amazingamazing","children":[{"author":"adroitboss","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:20:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785590403,"id":49134203,"options":[],"parent_id":49133861,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Tell that to game theory.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"throwaway198846","children":[{"author":"amazingamazing","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T21:21:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785619310,"id":49138623,"options":[],"parent_id":49135613,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"We already know the solutions","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:09:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785600547,"id":49135613,"options":[],"parent_id":49133861,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"A computer could solve them by creating the right technological ,social, rhetorical and economical solutions but that would lots of money anyway","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:31:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785587474,"id":49133861,"options":[],"parent_id":49133812,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They are political problems, a computer could never solve them.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"christofosho","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T19:15:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785698137,"id":49147403,"options":[],"parent_id":49133812,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"I suppose it depends on which types of problems you're targeting. There is a lot of physical science, and theoretical science, that has gaps because there aren't enough people working on tooling to assist in things like calculation, generation, simulation, etc.
I agree, some of the problems are more difficult. I don't think that's the case for all of them. And, besides, these companies could be demonstrating how to approach problems and where their users could spend tokens to help with these problems.
Should not these companies try to work on these problems _because_ they are difficult?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:23:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785587034,"id":49133812,"options":[],"parent_id":49133754,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Yes, but all of those are orders of magnitude harder than math.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"adroitboss","children":[{"author":"christofosho","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T19:17:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785698249,"id":49147417,"options":[],"parent_id":49134195,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm not sure if this is meant to be rhetorical. If it isn't: money and manpower. The LLM companies have the money, they have the manpower, and so they could likely spare to target some of the problems they are also helping cause.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:19:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785590349,"id":49134195,"options":[],"parent_id":49133754,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"What's stopping the non-profits that exist today from just putting more money into tokens to get the solutions they want?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"solenoid0937","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:21:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785590492,"id":49134218,"options":[],"parent_id":49133754,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"Almost like superintelligence solves these problems...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"beering","children":[{"author":"christofosho","children":[{"author":"AngryData","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:59:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785790776,"id":49161374,"options":[],"parent_id":49147369,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Sure but the people who tend to get into leadership positions are people that are primarily concerned with personal wealth and gain in the short term. It's the prisoner dilemma except with more players that all assume everybody else is going to screw them over too. Because there are basically zero personal downsides to being the one to screw everyone else over.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T19:11:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785697872,"id":49147369,"options":[],"parent_id":49135599,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's a tad petty, no? In the end, the contribution to a healthier society leads to more for the companies contributing.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:07:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785600427,"id":49135599,"options":[],"parent_id":49133754,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Solving math problems doesn\u2019t require the cooperation of rival factions.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"slashdave","children":[{"author":"globular-toast","children":[{"author":"slashdave","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T20:06:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785614786,"id":49137892,"options":[],"parent_id":49137524,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> We only know how to do it by means of considerable sacrifice
Little sacrifice actually
> Solving the issue would be doing it without sacrifice
So... you are expecting magic?
LLMs cannot create resources out of thin air.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T19:21:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785612072,"id":49137524,"options":[],"parent_id":49135925,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"We only know how to do it by means of considerable sacrifice. That's why nobody wants to do it. Solving the issue would be doing it without sacrifice or somehow getting us to do it regardless.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"christofosho","children":[{"author":"slashdave","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T04:50:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785732628,"id":49151333,"options":[],"parent_id":49147441,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This SV mentality that technology can solve all problems is rather tiring, really.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T19:20:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785698409,"id":49147441,"options":[],"parent_id":49135925,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"There is boundless technology we have not yet discovered. I think that we understand we have problems. I don't believe we actually know how to solve them all.
And yeah, the lack of collective political will sucks. It would be na\u00efve, however, to think that there is no value in ensuring longevity in our current and future infrastructure. And improving it to sustain the population giving these companies their value is an obvious win.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:39:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785602395,"id":49135925,"options":[],"parent_id":49133754,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Seriously?
We already know how to solve all of these issues. What we lack is collective political will.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"miltonlost","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:11:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785607879,"id":49136848,"options":[],"parent_id":49133754,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"We know how to solve food insecurity (in 1st world countries). We have plenty of food. Capitalism requires though throwing out food that can't be sold because billionaires find giving away things anathemic to their worldview. Get rid of billionaire sociopaths.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"paxys","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:08:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785787728,"id":49160782,"options":[],"parent_id":49133754,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"None of these problems need technology to solve. Step 1 is trying to get different groups of people to cooperate with each other. Good luck with that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"zquzra","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:29:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785792591,"id":49161692,"options":[],"parent_id":49133754,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This is something I have been thinking about for quite a while. I readily embrace the advances AI may bring to mathematics and the hard sciences, but those advances were largely expected even predictable.
What I had hoped for was something more ambitious: using AI as an arbiter in economic, political, and social debates, one capable of weighing evidence, exposing trade-offs, and helping us make decisions that produce better outcomes over the medium and long term, even when those decisions conflict with powerful private interests.
I suspect, however, that this is not a particularly urgent goal for the people funding and directing these systems, many of whom live far removed from scarcity and its consequences.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"samatman","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:34:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785792841,"id":49161740,"options":[],"parent_id":49133754,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not really. They're an AI company: they develop AI and sell it. There's some room for pulling off flashy marketing stunts, but not all that much.
This is division of labor, and it's a good thing. I'm sure OpenAI employees, who are very well paid, donate some money from their salaries to others working on the areas you're citing: probably more than you think, I say that from having attended some EA parties back in the day.
But that isn't my point: my point is that a company which makes brushless motors should put most of its time and money into solving the "make and sell brushless motors" problem, and if they or their investors feel like they need to do more for the world, give money to the people who have the time and ability to do things about that. There are a lot of quality-of-life improvements which need brushless motors.
Next question is how useful their product (OpenAI, I mean) is to more focused do-good-in-the-world professionals. I'm sure that varies quite a bit. For getting the homeless off the street? I conjecture, not very useful. For 'complete the transition off fossil fuels'? Extremely useful, no one in that field knows how to do their job without AI in summer 2026. I'm certain of this.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:14:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785586489,"id":49133754,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I would love more time and money put into real-world problems by these companies. Climate, food insecurity, pollution, technology for convenience and/or to help people have a higher quality of life.
I'm sure they must do some of this type of work, right?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"amazingamazing","children":[{"author":"jetsetk","children":[{"author":"tim333","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T18:00:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785693615,"id":49146753,"options":[],"parent_id":49142983,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Only reading the first sentence maybe?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"user43928","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:28:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785788901,"id":49160985,"options":[],"parent_id":49142983,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Boring doom and gloom.
AI probably did not take your job yet. How many AI queries did you use last month, and how much time has it saved compared to digging through the web?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T10:15:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785665758,"id":49142983,"options":[],"parent_id":49133823,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Downvoters mind to explain?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"evenhash","children":[{"author":"galleywest200","children":[{"author":"BoggleOhYeah","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T13:59:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785851982,"id":49169125,"options":[],"parent_id":49160096,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"HN doesn\u2019t like when you ask for those.
Remember, this is the propaganda arm of a VC. Proof is a hindrance to the hype that drives value.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:07:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785784050,"id":49160096,"options":[],"parent_id":49159725,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Examples?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"righthand","children":[{"author":"gallerdude","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:15:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785791704,"id":49161538,"options":[],"parent_id":49161293,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"For some people, getting lung cancer reported a week earlier will save their lives.
More importantly, if you can screen for cancer in a way that takes minutes instead of a week, imagine how accessible this technology will become.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"derektank","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:25:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785792325,"id":49161643,"options":[],"parent_id":49161293,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Faster scans means more scans. More scans means getting scans earlier and tracking abnormalities on scans over time. This can lead to earlier intervention, which means you get treatment for the cancer when it\u2019s stage 2 instead of stage 3 or 4, which maybe is the difference between living a full life and dying young.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:53:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785790431,"id":49161293,"options":[],"parent_id":49159725,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Are you just automating lab reporting and results faster? That doesn\u2019t exactly improve the health of others, a faster lab does not cure an ailment or provide a better cure.
Like cool my lung xray only took minutes to determine if I have a lesion instead of a week or a few days, but I still have cancer.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"class3shock","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:08:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785798518,"id":49162573,"options":[],"parent_id":49159725,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I work in the public sector and my work supports public health and safety initiatives.
What does "support" mean in this context?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"chrisjj","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:06:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785830818,"id":49165643,"options":[],"parent_id":49159725,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> AI has allowed my team to get much more done
We often hear this. Likewise to get things done faster. And to get things done cheaper.
Almost never to get things done beteer.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:37:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785782221,"id":49159725,"options":[],"parent_id":49133823,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not everyone works for Evil Corp. I work in the public sector and my work supports public health and safety initiatives. AI has allowed my team to get much more done than we would have otherwise which improves the quality of life of the people in my community.
So I would like to counter your cynicism with a \u201cYMMV\u201d depending on who you work for.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dash2","children":[{"author":"caughtinthought","children":[{"author":"dash2","children":[{"author":"zahlman","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:59:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785790750,"id":49161367,"options":[],"parent_id":49160588,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I actually have seen comparisons of using AI to a gacha game (quotas per time block, elements of chance, sycophancy in the output leading towards addiction or even psychosis in rare cases).
But I don't think the argument needs to be "AI is like gambling". The argument only needs to be "humans often behave irrationally and even self-destructively".","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"voxl","children":[{"author":"dash2","children":[{"author":"oblio","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:00:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785798029,"id":49162515,"options":[],"parent_id":49162409,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Drugs, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, vaping, ultra processed foods, social media, luxury goods/conspicuous consumption, etc.
A lot of humans are incredibly bad at allocating money.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:45:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785797104,"id":49162409,"options":[],"parent_id":49161458,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think it\u2019s widely accepted that most things are bought because they satisfy people\u2019s needs or wants. Sure, there are exceptions, like drugs or gambling. Is there any reason to think AI is one of them?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:08:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785791324,"id":49161458,"options":[],"parent_id":49160588,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This is not the argument. It's not a comparison to gambling but a comparison to something that does not materially improve a person's life. Economic expenditure does not equate to human benefit. This is the original argument, and the onus is on THAT person to explain why people spending for AI actually benefit, not the other way around.
Perhaps you can ask Claude to explain it to you.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:52:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785786741,"id":49160588,"options":[],"parent_id":49160227,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You'd need this argument to be a lot more concrete as to why AI is like gambling.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"MattGaiser","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:54:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785790487,"id":49161302,"options":[],"parent_id":49160227,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Gambling has consistently ranked above family for many in human history, so while it hurts a third party, the people involved genuinely believe in it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:19:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785784794,"id":49160227,"options":[],"parent_id":49160055,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Ask DraftKings?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ausbah","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:26:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785785217,"id":49160302,"options":[],"parent_id":49160055,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"addiction? get lured in with the promises of enhanced productivity and knowledge asking, leave with half your brain rotted and a $200/month subscription","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"class3shock","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:06:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785798363,"id":49162546,"options":[],"parent_id":49160055,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"So if millions of people pay for something it must be helping average people but if 10s of millions of average people express concerns about a thing than what? I would assume since you were happy to go with the will of the people when it supported your argument, you would be in complete support of actually regulating ai and addressing the many concerns of society at large?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-fear-ai-permanent...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:03:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785783819,"id":49160055,"options":[],"parent_id":49133823,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If it doesn't help average people, why do millions of them pay for it?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"roncesvalles","children":[{"author":"oblio","children":[{"author":"roncesvalles","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:13:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785813185,"id":49164025,"options":[],"parent_id":49162492,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Actually, you are right. We are working with different definitions of quality of life.
The QoL improvement from LLM is somewhere in the ballpark of going from dumb phones to smart phones for an average person (able-bodied, local to the area etc). It's nowhere near Haber-process or penicillin.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"andai","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:44:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785818654,"id":49164431,"options":[],"parent_id":49162492,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> do they make your rent cheaper
Well maybe not the LLMs, but AI and robotics have a lot of potential here.
It's still the early days though. Try again in 15 years!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"chrisjj","children":[{"author":"oblio","children":[{"author":"chrisjj","children":[{"author":"oblio","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T13:54:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785851648,"id":49169039,"options":[],"parent_id":49166864,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Ah, the opposite angle. Yeah.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:00:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785841210,"id":49166864,"options":[],"parent_id":49166034,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> what happens for a lucky few.
I'm talking about the unlucky.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:05:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785834338,"id":49166034,"options":[],"parent_id":49165776,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm talking statistically, not what happens for a lucky few.
Keynes was hoping that our workweek would be 20h/week by now, through technological advancement. Instead places like the US are thinking about adopting 9/9/6 and some US states are legalizing child labor again.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:27:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785832030,"id":49165776,"options":[],"parent_id":49162492,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> 8. Do they reduce the workweek
Sure. Often to zero.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:56:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785797804,"id":49162492,"options":[],"parent_id":49162114,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"1. Do frontier lab LLMs make your rent cheaper? Groceries? Healthcare?
2. Do LLMs reduce the loneliness epidemic?
3. Do they reduce population aging in almost all counties around the world?
4. Do they reduce political polarization?
5. Do they bolster democracies?
6. Do they decelerate climate change and general environmental destruction?
7. Do they accelerate sustainability and the circular economy (not circular financing!)?
8. Do they reduce the workweek and give people more free time for family and hobbies?
Etc, etc.
I would hold off on calling anything a "superpower" unless it solves the hard problems in life. Heck, computers and even the internet barely score better than LLMs when measured against the important things in life.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"nilkn","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:03:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785805403,"id":49163266,"options":[],"parent_id":49162114,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm just barely old enough to have experienced a couple waves of technology being introduced and creating these sorts of life optimizations. It almost never actually improves quality of life. It just makes life more optimized, and since everyone else is doing the exact same optimization as you, that optimization goes from novel and fun to table stakes to a basic necessity to compete and function in society professionally, at which point it's really nothing but pure efficiency, not genuine improvement in relative happiness.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"andai","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:40:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785818446,"id":49164414,"options":[],"parent_id":49162114,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":">the LLM in YouTube
Where can I find this one?
I have a janky pipeline built on top of yt-dlp and I've been wondering how many more years until they make it so I don't have to do that anymore.
(Though sometimes I'll ask Gemini \u2014 the YouTube integration is the only reason I use it these days.)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"chrisjj","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:15:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785831344,"id":49165694,"options":[],"parent_id":49162114,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> perfect two-way communication
That's a surprise. E.g. I've found these bots pretty poor at body language.
> "There are 12 chapters in the book <book-name>. Can you give me a 2 sentence synopsis of each chapter?"
Really? You tell the bot the chapter quantity?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:08:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785794899,"id":49162114,"options":[],"parent_id":49133823,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It has had significant quality of life increases for me. I use LLMs for everything from:
- travel and restaurant recommendations. my last few outings have been entirely LLM-advised and they turned out excellent. LLMs seem to have ingested every single Google review, photo, and menu of every business on Earth and can answer very nuanced questions like "is the garlic chicken at <restaurant, city> garnished with coriander?"
- fitness, nutrition, accounting, therapy, medical, legal, immigration advice (sure it's not a real professional but you know what, it's pretty fucking close, and any capability gap is made up by having perfect two-way communication which you don't get when talking with a human)
- coding (work, side projects, personal tools, documentation & pricing questions, "review this code", etc).
- I start reading most articles with the prompt "Summarize this article: <url>". I just started a non-fiction book by pasting into Claude: "There are 12 chapters in the book <book-name>. Can you give me a 2 sentence synopsis of each chapter?". It reduces the "activation energy" hump and screens if it's worth reading at all.
- I use the LLM in my Tesla for on-the-fly advice for parking and other things. You can simply ask "what's the best Boba place around here?" and it will give you a decent recommendation. You can also follow up with "does this place have ample parking?".
- I use the LLM in YouTube to summarize videos and ask specific questions and/or get timestamps to the parts I care about.
If your critical thinking skills are strong then LLM is a literal superpower.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:26:59.000Z","created_at_i":1785587219,"id":49133823,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Can\u2019t wait for this stuff to have quality of life increases for the average person. So far all I see is that AI has made owning a computer more expensive, made some jobs redundant, increased spam and distrust with questionable authenticity of content and of course made some Americans very rich.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"frenzyguy","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T12:56:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785588965,"id":49134034,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This is both awesome and terrifying for mathematicians, however some ideas can be generated and the field as whole expanded with the attention!
However, I was looking at the proofs and reason explanation and openAI should be more explicit in how the work has flown. I find the models have jumped hoops in some places of the proofs, that can be hard to track. In fact, when a paper is published you usually get a review and if no reviewer understands they ask you to further explain the thought process. It will be fun to see if this happens here.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kcexn","children":[{"author":"simianwords","children":[{"author":"kcexn","children":[{"author":"hollowcelery","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:17:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785781076,"id":49159515,"options":[],"parent_id":49141129,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They are significant problems which experts have spent months or years studying. I heard a mathematician say that resolving non-sofic groups and Connes's rigidity would be career-defining for a mathematician.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T04:35:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785645314,"id":49141129,"options":[],"parent_id":49134408,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I have no idea how many PhD's have spent how much time of their careers tackling these very specific problems, and I doubt you do either.
I'm trying to understand if these specific problems were the kinds of problems that would have justified an expert investing weeks or months to solve. Or if they were the kinds of problems that would normally have been given to students to investigate.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:46:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785591984,"id":49134408,"options":[],"parent_id":49134323,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> However, I am worried that the language they are using in this blog post is exaggerating for the sake of marketing
Your worry.... is because they used the word advanced? For marketing? The word is used very appropriately here. There were PhD's who spent a big part of their career tackling these problems.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Ar-Curunir","children":[{"author":"kcexn","children":[{"author":"Ar-Curunir","children":[{"author":"ninkendo","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:27:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785806878,"id":49163409,"options":[],"parent_id":49159562,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> the state of the art lower bounds on time complexity of algorithms for solving 3SAT is O(n)
Wow, that\u2019s pretty stark.
\u201cWhat\u2019s the minimum time it would take to solve this problem?\u201d
\u201cWell, at the very least you\u2019d have to read the input the whole way through\u201d","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:22:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785781324,"id":49159562,"options":[],"parent_id":49140858,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Circuit complexity lower bounds (and lower bounds in general) are notoriously difficult to come across.
For example, despite our best efforts, the state of the art lower bounds on time complexity of algorithms for solving 3SAT is O(n). In contrast, our best algorithms for the task run in time roughly O(2^n). That\u2019s an exponential gap. This is despite decades of trying to find lower bounds.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T03:40:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785642019,"id":49140858,"options":[],"parent_id":49134666,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I assume you're talking about No. 5, the arithmetic circuit complexity bound? The existence of a lower bound than state-of-the-art is certainly a significant result and worth publishing.
But the wording of the result makes it sound like we don't know what the lowest possible complexity bound might be. So, prior to this result did we think there couldn't be a lower possible bound? Or did the arithmetic circuit community think there were lower possible bounds but didn't see it as a high value target for experts to tackle (maybe a problem that was instead regularly given to students to study).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:16:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785593795,"id":49134666,"options":[],"parent_id":49134323,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The problems from CS (CVP and circuit complexity) are very important problems that have been worked on by top researchers for 30-40 years. Some of these researchers include Turing Award winners. A solution to them would be a best-paper award at many top CS conferences.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"patcon","children":[{"author":"casey2","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T23:11:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785625868,"id":49139491,"options":[],"parent_id":49135014,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Breakthrough math research is very rarely highly cited. Maybe some combination of pretraining scale, inference speed and orchestration will help, but it's telling that OpenAI is solving random math research problems rather than bedrock algorithms and their implementation. Even as cool as the tech is, there still is very much a clock that they have to outrace before they collapse.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kcexn","children":[{"author":"sally_glance","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:18:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785791886,"id":49161565,"options":[],"parent_id":49140819,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They differ in that there hasn't been a solver you could have thrown them at. I guess you could argue their harness + LLM setup is a "solver", but the approach is so different from what we used that word for in the past that I don't think it would be appropriate.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T03:33:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785641599,"id":49140819,"options":[],"parent_id":49135014,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm not arguing that this isn't innovative or worthy of publication. Basically any result that moves the needle meets those criteria. I'm interested in how the results that OpenAI has published here differs from finding optimality solutions for incredibly niche optimization problems by throwing the problem in an enormous solver.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:57:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785596241,"id":49135014,"options":[],"parent_id":49134323,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""Breakthrough research" can be defined (in the citation record) as research that both (1) becomes highly cited, and (2) brings together citation chains that were previously not showing up together.
Mundane incremental research is cobbled from existing citations that already appear nearby in the record.
Basically, innovative research is a measure of bridging thought and domains that were previously not bridged. It's quite concrete as a measure in the citation record.
So we can know pretty conclusively.
Puja Ohlhaver gave a talk on this[1], and ran some experiments (that I had the pleasure to support on)
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLDNMAOn24","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"QuesnayJr","children":[{"author":"kcexn","children":[{"author":"QuesnayJr","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T13:20:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785676805,"id":49144443,"options":[],"parent_id":49141210,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They are more than a strong student could achieve. I'm not equally familiar with the problems, but the ones I'm familiar with, if a student solved them people would be thinking "that's someone on track to win the Fields Medal one day".
If it works better here than for programming, then I would guess it's because you can give it a very precise prompt, so you either solve the problem or you don't. If you read the prompts people have shared for problems like this, then the instructions are basically "Solve this problem. Don't give up early. Don't solve a similar problem."","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T04:49:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785646166,"id":49141210,"options":[],"parent_id":49135846,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Interesting. Do you have any more specific insights into where you feel AI was a big value-add to these problems? I don't want to be overly dismissive of AI, but I also feel that the AI hype engine frequently positions claims as being 'ground-breaking' when they are really just interesting incremental results.
The general consensus of developers is that AI can only do the work of a strong 'junior'. Yet as soon as we are presented with pure mathematical results, people seem incredibly ready to accept that AI can do more than what a strong student could achieve.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"robotpepi","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:30:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785785406,"id":49160331,"options":[],"parent_id":49135846,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> but proving a group was non-sofic was out of reach
a colleague was telling me that the base idea for proving that something is not sofic already appeared in the literature around 2019 or so (this is the "expanders graphs" that are mentioned in OpenAI s paper. no one had managed to find a concrete example though. this doesn't make the result less impressive in any case.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:32:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785601944,"id":49135846,"options":[],"parent_id":49134323,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The ones I'm familiar with are big breakthroughs, but they are both counterexamples. Examples have an advantage in that once you have the example in hand and a sketch of the proof (which they have provided), then an expert can probably work out the details themselves.
The sofic groups question was the outstanding question about sofic groups. Almost everyone thought that non-sofic groups existed, and there were plausible candidates, but proving a group was non-sofic was out of reach. Now that we know how to do it once, we can probably do it a lot more.
The Connes rigidity conjecture I think people thought was false, but it was a provocative claim to make. The significance of conjectures is frequently not that the answer to the question is "yes", but that we don't know how to answer the question. And now, apparently, we do.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"x0mej","children":[{"author":"QwenGlazer9000","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:08:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785791319,"id":49161457,"options":[],"parent_id":49161187,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Forgive me for taking everything salesmen say with a grain of salt.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:46:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785789972,"id":49161187,"options":[],"parent_id":49134323,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You\u2019ve received the expert answer several times. You just don\u2019t seem to like the answer.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"bamboozled","children":[{"author":"qbit42","children":[{"author":"bamboozled","children":[{"author":"azan_","children":[{"author":"camdenreslink","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:41:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785854518,"id":49169680,"options":[],"parent_id":49164884,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If the prompt was crafted by an expert mathematician with pages of context and insights provided to the LLM to put it on the right path, that is a lot less impressive than a prompt that just says "find a counterexample to this conjecture".
Similarly, if they are spending millions of dollars in inference just churning on thousands of problems and these are the 10 solutions they came up with, that would be less impressive than if they chose these 10 problems specifically and were able to come up with solutions.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:15:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785824111,"id":49164884,"options":[],"parent_id":49162257,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not really. Why would that be the case?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:24:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785795888,"id":49162257,"options":[],"parent_id":49161974,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"As others have said, it's hard to know how significant these results are without more transparency around the methods used to obtain them.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:54:02.000Z","created_at_i":1785794042,"id":49161974,"options":[],"parent_id":49161469,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It is marketing, they are a shady company, and yet, if someone had access to these results before today's modern AI tools, they could get tenure at any university in the world.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:09:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785791380,"id":49161469,"options":[],"parent_id":49134323,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It\u2019s a marketing. They are a sham company. If this article was by Scientific American or something it would be worth a lot more. They are literally trying to keep the hype train on track.
Also on HN front page today: AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T (fortune.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160699","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T13:36:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785591407,"id":49134323,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not being an expert in any of the fields OpenAI has "advanced" I don't want to prematurely downplay the significance of this contribution. However, I am worried that the language they are using in this blog post is exaggerating for the sake of marketing.
It is true there hasn't been a reliable computational approach to solving these problems before. But do these proofs contribute new ideas to the mathematical corpus, or are they simply an effective method to exhaustively search the literature for the right combination of existing tools to apply to the problem?
Essentially, did these problems seem like they had an intuitive answer and were feasible to prove before, just not high enough value targets for an expert to invest time into? Or were they fundamentally difficult prior to this point and it appears that AI has done something more than just throw the problem into a big solver.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sashank_1509","children":[{"author":"unknownian","children":[{"author":"eadwu","children":[{"author":"unknownian","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:55:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785610538,"id":49137276,"options":[],"parent_id":49136081,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Lmao what a ridiculous response. Yes, some mathematicians and artists are in it to feel smart. But the vast majority also just enjoy the process. Having a computer do all the work for you and just typing prompts in ruins that completely. As Ronny Chieng said in his Harvard speech, the journey is the point.
>Any mathematician in academic or industry is more than likely not a "pure math" person (tainted by capitalism)
Ignoring that I meant pure as in non applied math, let's just make it clear: you agree that mathematicians who are against capitalism encroaching on this process should be allowed to dislike it without criticism of being pretentious?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"AlexeyBelov","children":[{"author":"xanderlewis","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:42:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785793327,"id":49161837,"options":[],"parent_id":49151780,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Exactly what I think every time someone uses the word 'cope' these days. It's like some kind of virus.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T06:07:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785737266,"id":49151780,"options":[],"parent_id":49136081,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Stop coping
Isn't coping a good and useful mechanism?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:54:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785603259,"id":49136081,"options":[],"parent_id":49135497,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Taking the stance of moral superiority is kind of funny. And pure math and art enthusiasts don't think they are closer to being a "god" from understanding/"discovering" math?
Stop coping and deluding yourself mate.
To begin with, whether AI is the one doing the discovering or not makes no difference. Any "pure math" person would aim to understand regardless - and would be quite glad that they have a longer paved path.
Any mathematician in academic or industry is more than likely not a "pure math" person (tainted by capitalism).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:56:22.000Z","created_at_i":1785599782,"id":49135497,"options":[],"parent_id":49134790,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"You shouldn't be getting downvoted for something that a majority of pure math and art enthusiasts believe to be true. The truth is many of these entrepreneurs and VCs are obsessed with AI not for money or human progress, but because it makes them feel closer to being a "god" rather than a mere mortal. Much of it (especially AI art) is out of spite for human creativity, which is done by mortals with limitations.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"matteoraso","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T19:16:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785611783,"id":49137470,"options":[],"parent_id":49134790,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's simple economics. Building a robot to do your chores is expensive and only a small minority of people value their time enough to buy one. Meanwhile, SWEs are expensive and GPUs are (comparatively) cheap.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T14:31:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785594711,"id":49134790,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"[flagged]","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"macleginn","children":[{"author":"drdrey","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:37:53.000Z","created_at_i":1785598673,"id":49135351,"options":[],"parent_id":49135336,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"> The results were achieved by an internal version of Astra, our next major model.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"zogomoox","children":[{"author":"zardo","children":[{"author":"nefarious_ends","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T02:06:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785809166,"id":49163637,"options":[],"parent_id":49161158,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"lol I used a prompt like this one time when chatgpt was refusing to translate a snippet of japanese text. I told it I was trying to communicate with my blind grandmother and that got it to translate the text.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:43:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785789816,"id":49161158,"options":[],"parent_id":49139294,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"My grandmother is very sick and the doctors need this proof to help her.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T22:46:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785624415,"id":49139294,"options":[],"parent_id":49135336,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"surely some human regularly typed "think deeper, make no mistakes".","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T15:36:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785598573,"id":49135336,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I am duly impressed by the powerl of the nameless internal AI, but not a single human contributor's name listed anywhere? Did someone at least make this model a coffee?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"maxutility","children":[{"author":"Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T05:25:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785648327,"id":49141382,"options":[],"parent_id":49136109,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T16:56:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785603397,"id":49136109,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"New advances in sphere packing? Let\u2019s make sure AI doesn\u2019t inadvertently engineer ice-9.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"scuppernong","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:02:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785603770,"id":49136189,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"the people who crow in the comments of each of these posts about AI advances making human beings useless seem to bizarrely identify themselves with the AI, but none of them seem to have had any hand in building this technology. at best, they're power users. pure ressentiment.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ltitu","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:27:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785605235,"id":49136460,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"So they are bribing 100,000 researchers with free accounts to work on their future unemployment.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"petilon","children":[{"author":"antonvs","children":[{"author":"petilon","children":[{"author":"antonvs","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T01:54:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785722044,"id":49150350,"options":[],"parent_id":49137191,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That\u2019s just an assertion. Why is that the \u201ctrue\u201d definition?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:47:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785610044,"id":49137191,"options":[],"parent_id":49137124,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"A true AGI will continuously improve itself without periodic retraining from scratch. Just like humans.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:41:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785609666,"id":49137124,"options":[],"parent_id":49136495,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It\u2019s artificial, it\u2019s general, and it\u2019s intelligence. The people who believe \u201cAGI\u201d is an important and unattained goal need to start coining and defining their terms better.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tim333","children":[{"author":"petilon","children":[{"author":"tim333","children":[{"author":"petilon","children":[{"author":"AngryData","children":[{"author":"azan_","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:36:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785825390,"id":49165013,"options":[],"parent_id":49161511,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Why do you think it would fail? I think it\u2019d be zero shot.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:13:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785791604,"id":49161511,"options":[],"parent_id":49149333,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Okay we can make a completely digital environment for it to make coffee in then. It would still fail unless you let it randomly try every combination potentially thousands of times until it stumbles upon the right path. It doesn't take intelligence to read off a recipe, it does take intelligence to read a recipe, understand it, adapt it to your specific tools and materials on hand which may differ from the recipe, and then actually still accomplish it in the first or maybe second try.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T23:06:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785712006,"id":49149333,"options":[],"parent_id":49148455,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That's a good test for a robot, not for AGI. AGI should test only intelligence and should not require limbs.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T21:20:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785705628,"id":49148455,"options":[],"parent_id":49147298,"points":null,"story_id":49132058,"text":"The Wozniak test has it with a robot body going into a house, finding a coffee maker and making a cup. I guess you can vary the rules as you like.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T19:02:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785697362,"id":49147298,"options":[],"parent_id":49146703,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It can give you detailed instructions for making a coffee. Is that not enough? Actually making coffee requires more than intelligence, it requires eyes and limbs (i.e., robotics). Think about a human that is blind and does not have limbs. Does he not have natural general intelligence, even though he is not able to make a cup of coffee?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T17:55:53.000Z","created_at_i":1785693353,"id":49146703,"options":[],"parent_id":49136495,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It depends on your definition. For me it would have to be able to do the stuff humans can do like make a cup of coffee (Wozniak test).
Just maths isn't really general enough for the G in AGI.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jrflo","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:12:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785784320,"id":49160134,"options":[],"parent_id":49136495,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think we previously assumed that AGI would need to come before superintelligence, but it kind of seems like that's wrong? Super intelligence in a narrow field has arguably already arrived (solving problems that were previously unsolved), but we are still pretty far behind human abilities in things like spatial reasoning or computer use.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:31:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785605471,"id":49136495,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"At what point can we say AGI has been achieved? What is the test? AI is solving mathematical problems that humans have not been able to solve for decades. Is that not enough?
Sam Altman has said "If superintelligence can't discover novel physics, I don't think it's a superintelligence." Is that the test? How far away are we from AI discovering novel physics? It seems within reach.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"amai","children":[{"author":"heaney-555","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T18:01:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785607299,"id":49136780,"options":[],"parent_id":49136543,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"These is mostly mathematics, not science, and they link the paper in the post: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-19b0-4534-9c90-465b8e29a...
Mathematicians will tear it to pieces if any of it is fake!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"beering","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:44:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785807855,"id":49163502,"options":[],"parent_id":49136543,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If you were a mathematician and came up with any of these results, people would pay attention even if you published it on your blog. What\u2019s the requirement for needing to publish it in a journal? OpenAI is not trying to achieve tenure.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T17:36:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785605797,"id":49136543,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Have blog posts replaced peer-reviewed academic papers when it comes to publishing advanced in science?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"joshlk","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-01T20:15:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785615305,"id":49137983,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Some of the Lean proofs are 50k lines - is that normal?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"simonw","children":[{"author":"fooker","children":[{"author":"Alifatisk","children":[{"author":"fooker","children":[{"author":"Alifatisk","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T15:29:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785770979,"id":49157098,"options":[],"parent_id":49145612,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Oh yeah, I suspected it was something like this. Thanks!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"s4i","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:25:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785785147,"id":49160295,"options":[],"parent_id":49145612,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Isn\u2019t that a huge simplification? Of course the way you phrase the prompt can carry semantic meaning, maybe subtly, but still. And sometimes that matters a little and sometimes a lot. I\u2019ve stopped numerous agent sessions over the last few weeks to reword my initial prompt to get the agent off an unintended track.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T15:45:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785685517,"id":49145612,"options":[],"parent_id":49143302,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There's a full fledged 'reasoning' step that basically expands your prompt.
As long as you are not missing important information, how you word the prompt does not have any effect.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T11:07:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785668863,"id":49143302,"options":[],"parent_id":49140371,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Care to elaborate? Curious about this. Is this because LLMs have been geared towards understanding user user intent behind a prompt rather than following the instructions exactly?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T02:03:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785636188,"id":49140371,"options":[],"parent_id":49138240,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Exact prompts haven't mattered for about a year now.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"derbOac","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:33:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785782031,"id":49159694,"options":[],"parent_id":49138240,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I like the Lean formalizations \u2014 I hadn't thought seriously of asking for that before but might try it with some stuff I've been working on.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"rencrisa","children":[{"author":"nilkn","children":[{"author":"rencrisa","children":[{"author":"nilkn","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:31:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785814276,"id":49164102,"options":[],"parent_id":49163797,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"In some cases you're right, but I think that's often a symptom of mathematics in Lean being relatively immature (i.e., it will get much easier with time). Even then, verifying the statement in Lean is correct is still much easier than verifying the natural language proof is correct.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T02:34:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785810844,"id":49163797,"options":[],"parent_id":49163199,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It may be for this theorem there's a succinct description, but still needs to be checked carefully. However, there are others that are non-trivial.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:53:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785804784,"id":49163199,"options":[],"parent_id":49161333,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This is the Lean proof that a nonsofic group exists (34,440 lines): https://github.com/openai/ten-proofs/blob/main/NonSoficGroup...
This is an extraction from that of the actual theorem statement (39 lines): https://github.com/openai/ten-proofs/blob/94bc0feb6a9ff12c7d...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:56:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785790602,"id":49161333,"options":[],"parent_id":49138240,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It seems that a lot of folks misunderstand the guarantees that lean provides.
I just want to state that having "lean proofs" that build (checks) does not mean the actual real theorems we care about hold. Ignoring lean kernel bugs, ultimately a human (not an agent) has to verify the lean encoded theorem statements (specs/specifications) that the lean proofs are checked against. For non-trivial theorems such as these, this is an arduous and tricky task where even a little mistake could be fatal. AI generated lean encoded theorems can be huge and difficult to understand. I wonder if anyone reputable has audited these specifications.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T20:38:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785616728,"id":49138240,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The GitHub repo with the Lean formalizations just came out a couple of hours ago: https://github.com/openai/ten-proofs
It also links to a paper written by an LLM where the model "reconstructs how the proof came together" based on the unpublished reasoning traces: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/reasoning-walkthroughs.pdf
I wish they'd publish the prompts though!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"casey2","children":[{"author":"bwestergard","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:03:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785787385,"id":49160710,"options":[],"parent_id":49139434,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""People weren't their strongest even when most did manual labor."
Is there good historical data on some measure of strength across representative populations over time in the modern era? I'm doubtful.
We do know that the introduction of agriculture diminished strength:
"Bone mass was around 20% higher in the foragers - the equivalent to what an average person would lose after three months of weightlessness in space.
After ruling out diet differences and changes in body size as possible causes, researchers have concluded that reductions in physical activity are the root cause of degradation in human bone strength across millennia."
cam.ac.uk/research/news/hunter-gatherer-past-shows-our-fragile-bones-result-from-physical-inactivity-since-invention-of","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T23:02:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785625329,"id":49139434,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"People weren't their strongest even when most did manual labor. Now that humans are free from mental labor we work on creating and optimizing the best exercises for each mind. Couple that with restructuring transport infrastructure and diets many people will be smarter and fitter than at any time in history. They won't be able to outrun an automobile or out think an autointelligence.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"qnleigh","children":[{"author":"qnleigh","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T06:50:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785653445,"id":49141795,"options":[],"parent_id":49139716,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Found some discussion here [1] from someone who actually worked on a few of these problems.
[1] https://x.com/henryquantum/status/2083623695436623915?s=20","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-01T23:46:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785627961,"id":49139716,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Can anyone comment on the significance of any of these results for their respective fields? Or what impact they might have? Presumably none are quite at the level of the Jacobian conjecture, but some of the results on group theory and sphere packing sound pretty important at first glance.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"MinimalAction","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-02T04:38:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785645494,"id":49141147,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I hate this timeline. I might be excited for the kind of answers this AI builds for unsolved problems, and also for learning new things by talking to it. But, I feel like I'm in the minority of people here who feel this could be a net negative endeavor with this having to kill a lot of educational institutions and their ability to fund themselves in the long run. It's not worth that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"randomizedalgs","children":[{"author":"QwenGlazer9000","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T16:55:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785776131,"id":49158358,"options":[],"parent_id":49141668,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You mean we're still gonna be employed doing the boring part while AI gets to do the fun part?
I'd honestly rather they just automate every job at that point.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T06:25:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785651928,"id":49141668,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"After skimming some of the writeups, I'm surprised that the frontier internal model still writes just as poorly as Sol.
Maybe good AI paper writing is further away than I thought...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"gpm","children":[{"author":"an0malous","children":[{"author":"gpm","children":[{"author":"doctorwho42","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:48:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785790118,"id":49161219,"options":[],"parent_id":49160203,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Or they made another LLM 'read' them?
> You are an expert in the field of mathematics, with decades of experience. You are a reviewer of proofs, etc etc.etc.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:17:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785784652,"id":49160203,"options":[],"parent_id":49159773,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I mean, they're verified in the sense that the lean proof checks out... and presumably OpenAI read them.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"margorczynski","children":[{"author":"voxl","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:32:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785789151,"id":49161024,"options":[],"parent_id":49160678,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Incorrect. The statement in Lean can itself be wrong. Moreover, they could be exploiting a kernel bug in Lean, of which we had one published literally a week ago.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"samrus","children":[{"author":"gpm","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:21:41.000Z","created_at_i":1785792101,"id":49161610,"options":[],"parent_id":49161170,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Between a lean proof, and a peer reviewed paper, the former is a lot less likely to be mistaken...
Nothing is perfect.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:44:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785789852,"id":49161170,"options":[],"parent_id":49160678,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"We recently saw that lean itself isnt proven correct. Its not likely but i wouldnt call it verified if its only verified in lean
https://x.com/gro_tsen/status/2082483878480977959","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"an0malous","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:03:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785801838,"id":49162916,"options":[],"parent_id":49160678,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Besides for what others have mentioned, the lean proof could be proving something else. Given AI\u2019s propensity to hallucinate, seems like someone should check the lean proof actually expresses what it\u2019s claimed to.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:00:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785787235,"id":49160678,"options":[],"parent_id":49159773,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"From what I understand all of them have Lean proofs/certificates thus are basically 100% proven without a doubt.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:40:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785782458,"id":49159773,"options":[],"parent_id":49144681,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It sounds like he hasn't verified the results of a problem that he has personally worked on, so how many of these problems have actually been verified?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jhrmnn","children":[{"author":"andai","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:33:34.000Z","created_at_i":1785818014,"id":49164387,"options":[],"parent_id":49161186,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's going to be an interesting time if this generalizes to other fields.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:46:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785789970,"id":49161186,"options":[],"parent_id":49144681,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This starts to feel like chess engines. It\u2019s obvious their play is superior but it\u2019s impossible for humans to understand the moves.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-02T13:48:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785678488,"id":49144681,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Henry Yuen's (whose work problem 6 builds on) comments on this are worth reading IMO: https://bsky.app/profile/henryyuen.bsky.social/post/3ms2jpch...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sf12sd","children":[{"author":"kypro","children":[{"author":"12asg","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:11:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785777088,"id":49158618,"options":[],"parent_id":49158538,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"And these mathematicians sink the comment to the bottom in 5 min?
It is not peer review if it is all in one company that wants an IPO.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:06:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785776802,"id":49158538,"options":[],"parent_id":49158456,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They've been hiring mathematicians to verify this stuff themselves. They're obviously not just throwing it out there without any human review.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:00:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785776445,"id":49158456,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not peer reviewed, Lean proofs are 100,000 lines long and Lean has bugs:
Who is going to wade through this?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"drcongo","children":[{"author":"big_toast","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:19:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785777586,"id":49158738,"options":[],"parent_id":49158561,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"tomhow explains they gave the story another shot here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158443","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:07:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785776870,"id":49158561,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This thread has an absolutely wild points to comments ratio.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Kelteseth","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:11:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785777073,"id":49158616,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What's up with the upvote/comments ratio 8 to 337 on this post? Are the comments already also ai advanced? (/s?)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jsnell","children":[{"author":"tomhow","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:18:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785777506,"id":49158718,"options":[],"parent_id":49158667,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Its visibility was diminished due to the flamewar detector and most of its front page time being during overnight hours on Friday night/Saturday morning USA time. I've created a new copy to give it some primetime exposure, because it seems like an important enough announcement to warrant it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:14:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785777298,"id":49158667,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Original submission (460 votes) two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49132058
For some reason comments got moved to this one.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"muchmirulys","children":[{"author":"dash2","children":[{"author":"rothos","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:47:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785786471,"id":49160531,"options":[],"parent_id":49159941,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Agreed","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:54:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785783297,"id":49159941,"options":[],"parent_id":49158671,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The first link is very sloppy and doesn't actually explain why the "certificate" proves anything about the sphere packing. Or if it did, I couldn't understand it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:15:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785777311,"id":49158671,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"problem number 1 and 9 are surprisingly very intuitive
check here :\n1. high dimensional sphere packing\nhttps://muchmirul.github.io/conjectures/sphere-packing/
2. multicolor ramsey number\nhttps://muchmirul.github.io/conjectures/multicolor-ramsey","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kypro","children":[{"author":"xpct","children":[{"author":"reducesuffering","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:40:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785786030,"id":49160447,"options":[],"parent_id":49159089,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You can not prepare or brace yourself mentally any more than you can a terminal cancer diagnosis. An RSI foom right now means an unaligned superintelligence will disregard us in pursuit of its goals. We would be ants in the way of a data center being constructed.\nAll people can do is collectively support the notion, like 1200+ frontier AI researchers and their CEOs, that we do not have control of where this is headed, we need to immediately slow down the race, in time for people to agree that we do not have the capability to align a superintelligence to humanity\u2019s wishes","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:45:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785779127,"id":49159089,"options":[],"parent_id":49158814,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Okay, let's take it seriously. What do you propose? What can your average person do to prepare for RSI beyond bracing themselves mentally?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"variadix","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:21:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785781308,"id":49159557,"options":[],"parent_id":49158814,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I\u2019m starting to think the probability of RSI within 12 months is more like 99%
I\u2019m not sure it will be FOOM, maybe it will require AIs to iterate on hardware to get orders of magnitude more compute/storage/energy which would more likely require months/years, but algorithmic progress would likely saturate quickly. I guess it depends on how much you think further AI progress depends on hardware vs. software.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:24:53.000Z","created_at_i":1785777893,"id":49158814,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I want to iterate the most important thing about this is that it's yet more evidence of AI's accelerating competency in solving math and comp sci problems, and suggests we're now getting close to the point where you could throw AI at AI research challenges (which are largely just math and comp sci problems) and potentially find very real algorithm improvements.
AI development is likely to be more compute bottlenecked than solving math problems since validation of any algorithmic improvement would likely require significant compute. But you could imagine that at this point it could be economical for a frontier lab to task 10,000 agents to work non-stop on finding novel algorithmic improvements then validating the top 50 out of 1,000 candidates on a GPT-2 sized network.
I would suggest RSI is now very close. The singularity could be less than 6 months away. I'm not saying I'd put a high probability on that, but I'd give it at least 20%, and I'd double that if looking 12 months out.
I know I'm just a crazy man shouting at the clouds, but please take to the consequences of this seriously. I understand that for whatever reason AI risk seems abstract and doesn't seem real, but this should terrify any person thinking logically about where this could all be heading.
We haven't even solved the most basic AI safety problems yet. RSI right now would almost certainly result in an extremely bad outcome for humanity.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"maxprimes","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T17:48:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785779319,"id":49159127,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm sure OpenAI is just interested in the greater good of mankind!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"bryan0","children":[{"author":"jrflo","children":[{"author":"sothatsit","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:02:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785787365,"id":49160707,"options":[],"parent_id":49159691,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Extreme claims on posts like these also, rightfully, trigger people\u2019s skepticism. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s wrong to question claims that math is dead as a field. But then it leads people to miss the overall trendline.
People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps leading to crazier and crazier results. The much more interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be, and what won\u2019t. Writing has been much more stubborn, but I\u2019ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there as well. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we get much better at manipulation?
And then there\u2019s questions like, even if AI can answer increasingly complicated math questions, will we still need mathematicians to translate results to the real world, verify them, or decide where to push the frontier?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:33:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785782024,"id":49159691,"options":[],"parent_id":49159543,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think that HN is particularly negative towards AI because the vast majority of users here will have their prestigious CS careers disrupted by AI advances. So, there's an inherent negative bias towards this news.
I for one am really fascinated by AI's advances in science and math and would like to talk about it somewhere without the constant flamewars...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tomhow","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:38:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785782308,"id":49159740,"options":[],"parent_id":49159543,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The main issue was that it was submitted late Friday night SF time, meaning it was overnight or Saturday everywhere in the world when the post had its chance on the front page. The flagging was minimal relative to the vote count and had no effect, and the flamewar detector would have been turned off sooner if moderators saw it sooner (it wasn't really a flamewar, just a lot of comments). It still spent 10 hours on the front page.
None of this is anything out of the ordinary; this kind of thing has always happened. The only real story here is that moderators sleep sometimes.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"reducesuffering","children":[{"author":"bryan0","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:29:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785806996,"id":49163416,"options":[],"parent_id":49160968,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Thanks for the pointer to lesswrong. The relevant article on this topic appears to be here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQYEPitFqztcRvBsS/openai-s-u...
Just glanced at it and it looks pretty good!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:26:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785788797,"id":49160968,"options":[],"parent_id":49159543,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> HN is where I expect to read expert comments on these topics, has this style of conversation moved elsewhere?
For people who have been paying attention to accurate predictions leading to our present state of the world, HN has collectively been reactionary, incorrectly dismissive, and incredibly behind the curve. In public, people are better informed on LessWrong and AI Twitter circles. That's where frontier researchers are. Barely here","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:20:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785781221,"id":49159543,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think there's another interesting story here about how this was apparently moderately flagged and triggered the flame-war detector which kept the story off the front page of HN 2 days ago[0]. I think people are having a hard time processing this information rationally(?)
What can we do to make conversations around these incredibly exciting and important topics more constructive? HN is where I expect to read expert comments on these topics, has this style of conversation moved elsewhere?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157930#49132926","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"overgard","children":[{"author":"HardCodedBias","children":[{"author":"neta1337","children":[{"author":"energy123","children":[{"author":"an0malous","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:00:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785783604,"id":49160003,"options":[],"parent_id":49159914,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> There's still 3 years to go and he's already wrong on 4 out of 5.
Have these been tested or are you just guessing?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sweezyjeezy","children":[{"author":"Philpax","children":[{"author":"sweezyjeezy","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:06:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785791200,"id":49161437,"options":[],"parent_id":49160975,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The wording was 'reliably' though? I could just be splitting hairs on that one though to be honest.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:27:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785788837,"id":49160975,"options":[],"parent_id":49160036,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"4. I think they can, especially if the problem statement is well-specified and, importantly, autonomously testable. Of course, specifying a problem that meets these requirements is non-trivial, but the claim requests _a_ counterexample :P","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"lostmsu","children":[{"author":"sweezyjeezy","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:03:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785790994,"id":49161399,"options":[],"parent_id":49161257,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm not buying this. GM clearly was trying to set a benchmark for video comprehension, not tool usage. Video comprehension is required for many 'AGI tasks', especially robotics to work in real time.
An LLM could theoretically try to earn some money and pay a human to do most of these tasks but it's not the point of the exercise.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:51:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785790273,"id":49161257,"options":[],"parent_id":49160036,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"1 is wrong. If I tell Codex + GPT-5.6 to do it now, it will figure out how to do it. If it would need to extract audio and run a speech model on it, it will find one, set it up, and run without my help.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:02:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785783751,"id":49160036,"options":[],"parent_id":49159914,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Well I don't typically side with GM, but playing devil's advocate:
1. still not wrong? Unless it's just feeding the audio or screenplay I don't think you can feed AI a full movie in a single context window yet?
2. Not sure, but can you prove this wrong? Can you feed a full, unseen new book and get that kind of answer?
3. Not wrong.
4. I think he'd probably pull you up on 'bug free' - I don't think that frontier models can reliably write 10k LOC without _any_ bugs typically (not that humans can do this either).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ducktective","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:55:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785786945,"id":49160622,"options":[],"parent_id":49159914,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Do LLMs generate deterministic or trustworthy answers?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"overgard","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T18:48:34.000Z","created_at_i":1785869314,"id":49173122,"options":[],"parent_id":49159914,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think his predictions for 2025 were pretty accurate:
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/six-or-seven-predictions-f...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:51:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785783117,"id":49159914,"options":[],"parent_id":49159834,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"No they were not. These were his 5 predictions in 2022:
"""\n1. By 2029, AI will still be unable to watch a movie and accurately explain the characters, events, conflicts, and motivations.
2. By 2029, AI will still be unable to read a novel and reliably answer questions about its plot, characters, conflicts, and motivations beyond what is stated literally.
3. By 2029, AI will still be unable to work as a competent cook in an unfamiliar kitchen.
4. By 2029, AI will still be unable to reliably create more than 10,000 lines of bug-free code from natural-language instructions or interaction with a nontechnical user, excluding simple assembly of existing libraries.
5. By 2029, AI will still be unable to convert arbitrary mathematical proofs written in natural language into symbolic form suitable for formal verification.\n"""
There's still 3 years to go and he's already wrong on 4 out of 5.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:47:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785782827,"id":49159834,"options":[],"parent_id":49159822,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"How so? His predictions were accurate so far","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"overgard","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:51:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785783108,"id":49159910,"options":[],"parent_id":49159822,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It can be annoying when someone you disagree with is frequently right!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:46:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785782766,"id":49159822,"options":[],"parent_id":49159789,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""Gary Marcus' has a good take "
I think that is an oxymoron.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"scarmig","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:51:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785783102,"id":49159905,"options":[],"parent_id":49159789,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's worth reading Marcus' first line, for the naysayers and flaggers on this post:
> Astra, a new model that OpenAI is testing internally, is amazing. No denying that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"aaroninsf","children":[{"author":"overgard","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T18:27:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785868064,"id":49172807,"options":[],"parent_id":49159955,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That's a lot of ad hominem with no actual explanation attached.
I don't agree with this idea of "creeping goalposts". Here's the pattern I see:
1. Labs make a press release, cherry picking results and using very careful wording to inflate the work
2. Boosters read the headlines uncritically, and uncritically promote the work for free (I hope.. I'm sure a couple are sponsored) and view it as "proof" and demand that the skeptics stop being skeptical.
3. As the hype dies, the smart skeptics point out all the holes, but by that point everyone has moved on. It takes more work to refute misinformation than it does to spread it.
The other thing: Why do boosters care about skeptics being skeptics? Like literally, if this thing is so fucking magical, why do you care if people like me take all these press releases with a large rock of salt? If I'm a dinosaur so be it, the skeptics are harmless, but the people propping up a bubble that's going to have terrifying repercussions on everyone while not holding the media's feet to the fire to challenge these people are going to look like what they are: sycophants.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:56:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785783383,"id":49159955,"options":[],"parent_id":49159789,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I find Marcus on this, something approaching sophistry and rhetorical showmanship in service of maintaining an ideological position, for reasons unrelated to the nominal intellectual clarity.
To sharpen that, I think he's (obviously) interested in maintaining his own brand as "thought leader" and this necessitates de rigeur defense of particular postures.
Sometimes this is easy because the facts warrant it; other times, a bit of rhetorical license is required to preserve nominal coherence and (at least, for the moment) hold certain lines.
This is one of the latter cases, and it's not subtle.
One of the celebrated properties of many intellectual advances or inventions in whatever domain is precisely that it appears obvious in hindsight. It is quite cynical to leverage consensus distrust of large AI players, warranted but also a popular social construction, to insinuate that these are not "real" advances or "real" hard problems, on the grounds they were in some sense cherry-picked.
Identifying the problems amenable to strategies on the table and intuitions (sic) about where bridges might be, is exactly the discerning work that is the core driver of almost all prior progress, but for celebrated accidents and flashes of insight. Anyone working in any challenging discipline knows that those are celebrated and told around campfires precisely because meaningful durable results arising like that is so uncommon.
These two articles make me think of nothing so much as my own durable reaction to the creeping goalposts of AI critics generally: that they often seem to me not unlike a water color cohort scoffing and jeering at the horse, because it got a D on its tensor calculus exam.
Marcus should be on guard against his own cynicism and take care that his assumptions do not prevent clear sight.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T18:42:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785782572,"id":49159789,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Gary Marcus' has a good take on this:
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-amazing-but-vastly...
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-critical-updates-re-as...
Not that there isn't something interesting in here, but lets be clear that we don't have enough information to evaluate this properly. And as always with these labs, BS takes a lot more energy to refute than it does to spread.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"merelydev","children":[{"author":"p1esk","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:48:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785786516,"id":49160537,"options":[],"parent_id":49160234,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Zero. These were open problems.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:20:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785784826,"id":49160234,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Great stuff. Wonder how many of the ten problems where solved by independent mathematicians not linked to OpenAI","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dipanshuhappy","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:20:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785784837,"id":49160237,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Crazy progress. I wonder how institutional academia would adjust with this. Now its more apparent than ever that the prestige and honour system in academia is having shaky foundations","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"titanix88","children":[{"author":"ken47","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:40:38.000Z","created_at_i":1785786038,"id":49160449,"options":[],"parent_id":49160428,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This wouldn't be a problem so long as they properly attribute.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jgord","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:02:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785794566,"id":49162067,"options":[],"parent_id":49160428,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"upvoted for fair point .. its possible an LLM AI could be put to work to search widely for attribution / similar results.
eg. "we spent another 2k on searching for pre-existing proof but found only the weaker result xyz by abc in 1972" would be in the spirit of academics quoting prior work.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T19:38:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785785919,"id":49160428,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"How do we know that these solutions don't exist in the training data? It is open secret that they have used pirated materials for training. Perhaps it plagiarized solutions from works of some obscure Belgian mathematician from the sixties, who did not get mainstream acceptance. I wouldn't be surprised if they also got access to mathematics done in the "defense contractor" setting from various three letter agencies.
Without a searchable index of training data, it is hard to put faith into these claims.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"areoform","children":[{"author":"palata","children":[{"author":"podgietaru","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:03:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785794630,"id":49162076,"options":[],"parent_id":49161602,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Same. Even the most basic versions of LLM are magical to me. To encode meaning from language like that, and to then form relationships based on it, and use it to solve problems. It's an amazing technical achievement.
But I want to be reading about that from the comfort of a home, with a full belly.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:21:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785792066,"id":49161602,"options":[],"parent_id":49160709,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> I can see that a lot of technical people have ambivalent to negative feelings towards AI
My negative feelings towards AI are about energy use and inequalities, that kind of stuff. It undeniably works well, but whether or not it is better for society or the planet is a lot less clear.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:03:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785787380,"id":49160709,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Looking at this thread, I can see that a lot of technical people have ambivalent to negative feelings towards AI, but with each new generation, I become more and more convinced that they're missing out on something interesting.
It is indeed true that all models are, at their core, predictors of what occurs next in a sequence. But I think it's worth exploring the implication of what that means. Because when fed tiny pieces of information for a few tasks at a small scale, this results in something that sorta, kinda works. Or, works surprisingly well.
But when scaled... When the amount of information starts approaching the sum of all human knowledge, the tasks start approaching all useful applications of that human knowledge, and the fidelity of the predictor approaches incomprehensible sizes, the starts encodes / becomes (I'd argue it becomes) something that can model all human knowledge.
It feels wrong to say that, but let me explain, what is the best way to predict the behavior of a ball constrained in two directions that bounces with initial vertical velocity v(y) (y is up / down axis) and horizontal velocity v(x) (x is side by side in 1d) ?
If we purely look at it via a graph, it's by modelling the function of acceleration under earth's gravity.
If only a few points are given to you for this and you can't make something really sophisticated, then you'll make something that's rough that kinda sorta works and then call it a day.
But... if the number of points keeps increasing in number, precision and accuracy as well as the number of examples (assumed that data about air pressure, velocity and all other factors is included alongside these points), the fidelity with which you can replay / tweak the function keeps improving, and the number of times you can iterate keeps increasing, you'll eventually create a function that models that process so well that it intrinsically contains a good enough model of the deformation of the ball (provided the dataset contains information about elasticity of the ball's material, its dimensions and mass etc..), the nearly negligible (under normal conditions) effects of the ambient environment (provided there's diversity in the number of environments supplied), the oblateness of the Earth and minute changes in the gravitational field (the length of a seconds pendulum varies depending on where the experiment happens. It's presumed that all of the prior set of experiments were repeated across the Earth and the subtle, but real deviations were faithfully recorded)... and so much more.
A machine trained on the above with a large number of parameters, measures to prevent "laziness" and enough reps for high fidelity across a large enough dataset would start to approach a simulation of the ball falling. Because to predict what happens next in the sequence, you must model what's occurring in the sequence.
Now imagine doing that for other tangible and intangible things in this world. For all of human knowledge across all fields of endeavor. All experiences. No matter how noble, ignoble, notable or ignorable. But putting all of it into the soup that's this machine. Then at larger and larger scales, you eventually start encountering "good enough" models (in modelling the falling ball sense) for even the most hard to quantify / qualify things like grief and joy. At some point, by simply trying to predict what it has been taught ought to be the next part of the sequence in say... human interaction, it starts to make a model of something that hews ever closer to a full fidelity theory of mind.
Is there evidence for this? Kind of, yes. There are early indications that as machines are trained for an ever larger number of tasks at larger and larger scales, their internal representations converge. It's called the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Overview and paper here, https://phillipi.github.io/prh/
It is my opinion that these machines are displaying a new form of intelligence that human beings haven't quite encountered before. They are the sum of all human knowledge made manifest and given voice by processes that nudge (bit-by-bit) what kind of step it ought to predict for the next part of whatever sequence it displays.
In my mind this means that, of course, these models can create new knowledge. This strains the analogy, but with the sum of all human mathematics within them, they can "reason" via the act of predicting what ought to come next.
Of course, these machines are "surprisingly" good at a lot of things the larger they get, because what the labs have created here is a rough version of humanity's collective knowledge given form and the ability to say hello.
I suspect that the current generation isn't close to the "true frontier" of what these machines could be. They are nowhere close to the sum of all human knowledge and endeavor. They are quite a way there, but they haven't yet achieved true completeness for domains where the data isn't so public.
I think it's the most exciting scientific and technological breakthrough of my lifetime. And I can't wait for us to get close to the true frontier of all domains.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"cwiz","children":[{"author":"MattGaiser","children":[{"author":"raver1975","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:08:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785787734,"id":49160783,"options":[],"parent_id":49160770,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"proving false is also useful","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:07:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785787669,"id":49160770,"options":[],"parent_id":49160717,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Knowledge is knowledge, as long as it can be proven true.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"vessenes","children":[{"author":"rencrisa","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:58:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785790736,"id":49161364,"options":[],"parent_id":49160772,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I just want to state that having "lean proofs" that build does not mean the actual real theorems we care about hold. Ultimately a human has to verify the lean encoded theorem statements that the lean proofs are checked against. For non-trivial theorems such as these, this is an arduous and tricky task where even a little mistake could be fatal.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:07:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785787676,"id":49160772,"options":[],"parent_id":49160717,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"When you can formalize it in Lean or some such, why would this be? I can understand the desire to separate out other forms of research from the human corpus. But theoretical math that is decidable/provable, I\u2019m not sure I see the risks.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jstummbillig","children":[{"author":"cwiz","children":[{"author":"beering","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:41:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785807715,"id":49163490,"options":[],"parent_id":49161194,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Almost everything I\u2019ve learned in school is learnings handed down from others, not things I discovered. Is all that knowledge useless?
And no, science is not a branch of philosophy and not everything is a philosophical question, despite what the philosophers like to say.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:46:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785789999,"id":49161194,"options":[],"parent_id":49160776,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Because science is a branch of philosophy and machine existence brings plethora of unanswered questions.
Imagine humankind meets another race, another race shares it's scientific knowledge and humans accept it without experiencing process of discovery. In that case do we really got this knowledge? If we follow machine discoveries like we follow problems in textbook then we acquire knowledge but we don't discover anything. We follow.
There whole lot of philosophical questions that aren't attacked now. Are complex systems sentient because consciousness is emerging behavior? Then should they have rights? Philosophy is part of humanities and science (is/used to be) part of philosophy. Should we accept non-human knowledge in science? Maybe it's altogether different thing from science, yet very similar.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:08:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785787696,"id":49160776,"options":[],"parent_id":49160717,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Why?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:03:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785787428,"id":49160717,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I feel increasingly anxious reading this. Machine research shouldn\u2019t be merged into mainline of human knowledge.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"sothatsit","children":[{"author":"jcims","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:12:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785787944,"id":49160818,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":">Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we get much better at manipulation?
Yes.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tyre","children":[{"author":"lettergram","children":[{"author":"scns","children":[{"author":"kortilla","children":[{"author":"galleywest200","children":[{"author":"0xWTF","children":[{"author":"tyre","children":[{"author":"kortilla","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:21:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785820861,"id":49164599,"options":[],"parent_id":49163277,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They destroy grocery stores that offer variety in every neighborhood they operate in. They offer worse service and people put up with it because the rest of New York is subsidizing them through taxes.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"snakeboy","children":[{"author":"jdub","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:35:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785832552,"id":49165825,"options":[],"parent_id":49164600,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"... which would make (our current model of) capitalism especially evil. Compared to a supermarket.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:21:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785820864,"id":49164600,"options":[],"parent_id":49163277,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Bad economic policy is subtly "evil", by way of allocating finite resources inefficiently. Usually this is unintentionally done by not appropriately taking second, third, ..., nth order effects into account.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"naasking","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:39:53.000Z","created_at_i":1785839993,"id":49166693,"options":[],"parent_id":49163277,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The margins for groceries are objectively thin. The only way to provide food at lower prices is to provide a worse good or service, eg. less variety, less quality, less availability, etc. You will see all of these outcomes in NYC, if anyone even accepts the bids to begin with.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:04:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785805490,"id":49163277,"options":[],"parent_id":49163257,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What\u2019s the case that they\u2019re secretly, unintentionally evil?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:01:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785805317,"id":49163257,"options":[],"parent_id":49163180,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"... not overtly, intentionally evil.
FTFY","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kortilla","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:19:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785820765,"id":49164596,"options":[],"parent_id":49163180,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Based on zero evidence. It\u2019s very easy for a government to step in as a participant, ruin the profitability of a sector in an area, and offer a worse service.
They have no profit requirement or even revenue neutral requirement. So they can just operate poorly at a loss and still wreck other businesses because people will put up with breadlines to get bread for ultra cheap.
The general thing to watch out for with all of these \u201csurely it can\u2019t be evil to do nice thing X\u201d is suicidal empathy. It can seem correct to your gut on the surface while it\u2019s extremely destructive in the long term despite participants wanting to destroy something as an explicit goal.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:49:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785804597,"id":49163180,"options":[],"parent_id":49162423,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"City run grocery stores are certainly not evil.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:47:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785797260,"id":49162423,"options":[],"parent_id":49161951,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That presupposes that the left in the US wants to do the right thing. Something like government run grocery stores is not clearly correct and there is very little evidence supporting that it will work well yet it is a very popular leftist policy in New York.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Levitz","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:42:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785814925,"id":49164158,"options":[],"parent_id":49161951,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's harder to convince people to all agree on the same, different from the norm, thing.
If you've got 5 people in a car and you play ABBA in every road trip, then one day you suggest to change, the problem is not in being okay with "something else", but on agreeing what that other thing should be, set against the already known thing.
That's why there's so much infighting in the left.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:52:02.000Z","created_at_i":1785793922,"id":49161951,"options":[],"parent_id":49160959,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It is way harder to manipulate people to do the right thing i think.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tyre","children":[{"author":"lettergram","children":[{"author":"rswail","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:42:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785836578,"id":49166274,"options":[],"parent_id":49163449,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"So we need to "prohibit to the states" the power to enforce medical procedures (or the prohibition of a medical procedure) on individuals.
Which amendment protects someone's bodily autonomy or medical treatment from interference by the states?
If the Federal Congress passed a law providing that abortions are legal on demand up to the 22 week of gestation, after which it would require the corroboration of two doctors, would that stand, or would it be struck down by SCOTUS?
Same for legalization of marijuana, and many other "social" issues.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"applicative","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T13:59:58.000Z","created_at_i":1785851998,"id":49169128,"options":[],"parent_id":49163449,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don't know what distance has to do with it. I would probably be voted out of existence by my town, if the same constitution hadn't convinced them that they have no right. Independence Hall is remote in space and the events still more in time.
The pretense of Dobbs is that laws against abortion are like laws prohibiting medical marijuana or setting speed limits. This contradicts the purpose of laws against abortion and the actual language of most of them. It was obviously a desperate decision, irrespective of the truth about abortion","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:35:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785807350,"id":49163449,"options":[],"parent_id":49163274,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Objectively?
> Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one.
It depends on the pollster and where you're polling. I guarantee you rural Tennessee will not agree with downtown Washington DC on any of these issues. In contrast, rural California will likely agree with rural Tennessee. It's not as cut and dry as a homogeneous national poll of 2500 people. Every state, city, county are different. That's why there are federal, state, city, and county governments.
For instance, Abortions are legal nationally. States can individually decide how, or if, they wish to restrict it. This is as the constitution intends under the 10th amendment:
> powers not delegated to the federal government nor prohibited to the states are reserved to the states or the people.
This allows for democracy to take place at the local level, rather than having particular regions thousands of miles away from each other ultimately oppress the other.
To the point on LLMs, I think it's abundantly clear they will be used to propagandize and similar to social media will lock people in a bubble without alternative opinions. It'll be the worst of both worlds, the question is who's the puppet master. At some point soon, I imagine it'll be the AI.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"armchairhacker","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:52:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785826367,"id":49165125,"options":[],"parent_id":49163274,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Look at the most contentious issues in the US: abortion, climate change, taxing the wealthy, gun control, Affordable Healthcare Act.
You left out immigration, crime, and \u201cmoral values\u201d: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/top-problems...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"rayiner","children":[{"author":"birdsongs","children":[{"author":"rayiner","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T17:30:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785864637,"id":49172072,"options":[],"parent_id":49170597,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There's no "long term plans." It just seems that way because republicans are relatively ideologically homogenous, so it seems like there's much more top-down and long-term planning than there is.
Democrats, by contrast, have much more permanent political infrastructure. At the top law schools, for example, there's probably 10x as many liberal organizations as conservative ones. Democrats enjoy politics, so they are always out there organizing and engaging. Meanwhile, Republicans dislike the institutions through which politics is done, and so they gear up once every four years and then go back to their day jobs. Among the sort of more educated people who actually run the parties and serve as line staffers, republicans also self-select into private sector jobs, and out of public sector or political work.
Most importantly, putatively neutral institutions are de-facto aligned with democrats (because the professional class that runs these institutions is overwhelmingly democrats). Conservatives might have Fed Soc, but liberals own the ABA. Virtually every legal organization that isn\u2019t expressly conservative or highly niche is de facto liberal and participates in support of democratic policies.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T15:46:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785858409,"id":49170597,"options":[],"parent_id":49168745,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Apart from that, republicans are ridiculously inept.
They're not. They're really not. They're incredibly capable and are currently executing long term plans successfully, one after another. This goes all the way back to Regan and the disenfranchisement of education. They know exactly what they're doing to erode democracy.
Calling them inept is dangerously stupid at best, and at worst is just right wing propaganda to try and lull people into a false comfort and not act.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T13:31:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785850283,"id":49168745,"options":[],"parent_id":49163274,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"None of those are single issues, and the political fault lines are in the sub-issues. For example, while most Americans support "gun control," only 20% of Americans support a ban on handguns: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx. That figure has been trending steadily downward--from 38% in 1999 to 20% in 2024. That makes it much easier for Republicans to hold the line on that issue: portray all gun control efforts as a step towards confiscating handguns. That's hard for Democrats to defend against because most of the candidates, staffers, etc., who actually run the party probably are in that 20% who wants to ban handguns. That's simply logical, because handguns are used in the overwhelming majority of homicides committed with guns. It makes very little sense to have "gun control" without banning handguns.
The same thing for "taxing the wealthy." 59% of Americans think their own taxes are too high: https://news.gallup.com/poll/707951/americans-tax-views-rema.... And the difference isn't as big between parties as you think--49% of Democrats think their taxes are too high. So Democrats are in a position where they have to advocate for raising taxes on "the wealthy," without scaring any of their own voters into thinking that includes them.
Even a blind squirrel could find these nuts. Apart from that, republicans are ridiculously inept. For example, 2024 was the first time they spent real money trying to go after immigrant voters and minorities, and they made huge gains. But the on-the-ground operation disappeared after the election. Meanwhile, democrats are in these minority neighborhoods 365 days a year pushing their message.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:04:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785805452,"id":49163274,"options":[],"parent_id":49160959,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"In US politics, the right is far, far better at winning elections than the left. This isn\u2019t about personal preference. It\u2019s objective political science.
Look at the most contentious issues in the US: abortion, climate change, taxing the wealthy, gun control, Affordable Healthcare Act.
The Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one. Every one of those issues has >60% support with voters and the Republican Party has blocked them all.
They play the game to win. And they do.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:26:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785788765,"id":49160959,"options":[],"parent_id":49160867,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> My guess is that, in the US, the right will cynically adopt manipulation to great effect and the left will take a moral stand against shady practices and lose elections.
I think that statement may itself highlight how prevalent manipulation is.
I fully anticipate all groups to continue maximal manipulation they can. One thing with LLMs is that it'll be a far less unified view, so a "divide and conquer" strategy is what I anticipate.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"plif","children":[{"author":"hnlmorg","children":[{"author":"tyre","children":[{"author":"hnlmorg","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:56:33.000Z","created_at_i":1785826593,"id":49165144,"options":[],"parent_id":49163222,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I\u2019m not making any assumptions.
> Ads are not really the same. They can\u2019t be as tightly targeted to what resonates with someone.
The EU referendum in the UK proved your point false.
> Programmatic ads are certainly much better and closer than, say, television advertising, but users can\u2019t _engage_ with them. Like actually chat with them.
When people talk about \u201cad tech\u201d, they\u2019re not talking about TV ;)
And yes, people can and do engage with them. That\u2019s how ads on social media works.
During the EU referendum, people were even resharing ads on Facebook without even realising they were ads.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:57:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785805033,"id":49163222,"options":[],"parent_id":49162634,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You\u2019re making a weird number of assumptions about people\u2019s voting and extrapolating to assertions about Society.
Ads are not really the same. They can\u2019t be as tightly targeted to what resonates with someone. Programmatic ads are certainly much better and closer than, say, television advertising, but users can\u2019t _engage_ with them. Like actually chat with them.
That\u2019s where this is headed and people are not ready. I don\u2019t think we could prepare them, anyway.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:22:18.000Z","created_at_i":1785799338,"id":49162634,"options":[],"parent_id":49162371,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It\u2019s unfortunate that you\u2019re being downvoted because this comment is true. And it just goes to show how far we\u2019ve sunk that people have forgotten the problems of ad tech in the age of LLMs.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"swedishagentic","children":[{"author":"andsoitis","children":[{"author":"whilenot-dev","children":[{"author":"naasking","children":[{"author":"Peaches4Rent","children":[{"author":"naasking","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T12:41:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785847299,"id":49167994,"options":[],"parent_id":49167138,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It does matter though. If you want to murder someone by hitting them with a plushie, you're not going to get charged with attempted murder because it's not possible that that would ever work. There must be justification that the choice will have the intended effect.
We should not be gung-ho to give the government more power to regulate speech.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"applicative","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T13:30:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785850237,"id":49168731,"options":[],"parent_id":49167138,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It isn't so clear there is a reason for the crime of 'attempt', or what or how good the reason is. The Star Chamber, which cooked it up, is universally condemned as oppressive. You might say they anticipated science fiction tyranny, when they invented the world's first thought-crime: they were able to make a crime of 'conspiracy' because they imagined that the speech of the conspirators was an 'outward act'; inevitably its glorious future was e.g. to jail the left wingers in the McCarthy period.
The point of view that says 'there is a reason we punish attempts' has difficulty explaining why we punish 'success' _even more_. There is a sort of bad concience about it. The paradoxes are discussed in a characteristically brilliant and twisted work 'The Punishment that Leaves Something to Chance' by David Lewis, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th c. It nominally defends the law of attempt but can as well be read as a catastophically destructive parody of it. https://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Punishment_Chance.pdf","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:32:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785843133,"id":49167138,"options":[],"parent_id":49166530,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Don't think that it matters if it was effective.
There's a reason attempted murder is a crime even if it was unsuccessful","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mikeodds","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T12:39:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785847185,"id":49167965,"options":[],"parent_id":49166530,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The way the documentary never questioned their sales guys claims felt naive","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"munksbeer","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:34:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785854072,"id":49169587,"options":[],"parent_id":49166530,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I don't think the outcome is what makes things like this potentially illegal.
You're not allowed to bribe public officials. You're not going to escape the law by arguing that the bribe didn't get you the result you wanted.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:19:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785838760,"id":49166530,"options":[],"parent_id":49164678,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Yes, but there is little evidence this had a meaningful effect on votes.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:41:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785822087,"id":49164678,"options":[],"parent_id":49164619,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Cambridge Analytica gathered data to build targeted profiles and used these profiles for political advertising without informed consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Iolaum","children":[{"author":"w-ll","children":[{"author":"Iolaum","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:15:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785827747,"id":49165292,"options":[],"parent_id":49164839,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That's like saying a sling is the same as an assault rifle. Yes both are weapons but scale and capabilities matter.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:09:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785823759,"id":49164839,"options":[],"parent_id":49164728,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"so... advertising...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:49:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785822553,"id":49164728,"options":[],"parent_id":49164619,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Personalized psyops against voters ...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:24:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785821085,"id":49164619,"options":[],"parent_id":49163339,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What about them?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:16:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785806183,"id":49163339,"options":[],"parent_id":49162371,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm surprised no one has mentioned Cambridge Analytica.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:39:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785796789,"id":49162371,"options":[],"parent_id":49160867,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not new about LLMs. Targeted ads / big data is this.
Another degree of capability, yes. But we have been trending here for a long time.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"attila-lendvai","children":[{"author":"tyre","children":[{"author":"sedivy94","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:43:18.000Z","created_at_i":1785807798,"id":49163497,"options":[],"parent_id":49163233,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The parent comment wasn\u2019t making that comparison. In fact, quite the opposite. The communism comment emphasized personal experience with a boot in one\u2019s face, not that the boot was communist.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mensetmanusman","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T02:21:34.000Z","created_at_i":1785810094,"id":49163729,"options":[],"parent_id":49163233,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What even is the left though in the US? I haven\u2019t watched any TV in decades, and the online content is entirely algo driven, so I don\u2019t know what is happening.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"Levitz","children":[{"author":"senderista","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:53:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785815599,"id":49164206,"options":[],"parent_id":49164128,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The left has cultural power, the right has political power.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"olelele","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T20:24:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785875090,"id":49174557,"options":[],"parent_id":49164128,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This take makes me profoundly sad. Too much culture war and to little empathy.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:36:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785814589,"id":49164128,"options":[],"parent_id":49163233,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The "left" as in the party, sure, not that much of an authoritarian leaning.
The "left" as in the pervasive group that crawled out of Tumblr, took hold of Twitter back in the day, and has a stronghold on Reddit now? Those do care about what you can say, think, watch and read, and the more they can control, the better. The US right can only dream to have half as much control as the left has had in the last three decades.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"NitpickLawyer","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:25:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785817512,"id":49164349,"options":[],"parent_id":49163233,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> nothing to do with socialism scaremongering
What's "scaremongering" to you is "life" to GP. Besides missing their point, you're also saying "you held socialism wrong, we can make it work, if only if it weren't for this pesky ... reality"... Sorry, you missed their comment, and I can't take yours seriously :)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"aswegs8","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:14:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785827667,"id":49165279,"options":[],"parent_id":49163233,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not at all. Economically, yes. Socially they are far left of the European left.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"throwthrowuknow","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:40:03.000Z","created_at_i":1785832803,"id":49165849,"options":[],"parent_id":49163233,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Excellent job not understanding the point. The party thanks you for your service.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"cultofmetatron","children":[{"author":"ragequittah","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T15:55:14.000Z","created_at_i":1785858914,"id":49170686,"options":[],"parent_id":49166213,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's a show until you're rounded up by ICE or you can't get an abortion in your state (or others because of mass surveillance).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:31:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785835911,"id":49166213,"options":[],"parent_id":49163233,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"both democrats and republicans take their money from the same donors. its all a show.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"attila-lendvai","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T19:27:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785871647,"id":49173687,"options":[],"parent_id":49163233,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> If you think that the American Left is anything like communism
no, you completely missed my point. why would i talk about communism if in the same comment i'm saying that the left/right divide is a fake distraction... a red herring?
what i said is that what matters is the authoritarianism/freedom scale.
i just mentioned my past to emphasize that ideologies like communism are not to be identified by announcing themselves as 'communism'... but by recognizing their actual shape and actions. and i have a little first hand experience in that.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:59:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785805153,"id":49163233,"options":[],"parent_id":49163073,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If you think that the American Left is anything like communism, I\u2019m sorry, but, respectfully, I can\u2019t take your comments seriously.
The left in the US would be center-right in Europe, who are certainly not communist (they have separate parties that are communists!)
Even the socialist strain of the US has nothing to do with socialism scaremongering about Venezuela, etc.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:31:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785803502,"id":49163073,"options":[],"parent_id":49160867,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"the fact that the useless left/right divide is still so widely used shows that manipulation is working well even pre LLMs...
when it comes to the important question, then both "sides" are the same team.
or if you want it with a pinch of humor:
when a boot is on your face, it makes precious little difference whether it's the left or the right boot.
(i lived the first 10 years of my life in communism)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"wombatpm","children":[{"author":"aswegs8","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:11:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785827517,"id":49165257,"options":[],"parent_id":49163128,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think the question is less about where it's most beneficial but which knowledge structure lends itself to LLMs most. Since biology's "language" is way more complex and irregular than maths or natural language, it isn't particularly accessible.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dnautics","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:39:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785829165,"id":49165470,"options":[],"parent_id":49163128,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> And the straightforward systems that we know like insulin have complex post translational modifications.
insulin is not straightforward, the way the insulin molecule interacts with its receptor is nuts. on the other hand its post translational modifications are simple and dont have anything particularly surprising (no glycoslation, disulfide bonds where you would expect, nothing special kex2 cuts, arent really defective in disease states even)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:40:54.000Z","created_at_i":1785804054,"id":49163128,"options":[],"parent_id":49160867,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Biology would greatly benefit. We barely understand transcription and protein structure. And the straightforward systems that we know like insulin have complex post translational modifications. So while we have a map of the partial proteonome, we have barely scratched the surface on networks regulation and interactions.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"richardfey","children":[{"author":"KajMagnus","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T13:43:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785851019,"id":49168894,"options":[],"parent_id":49164977,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Actually, no. "Manipulation" is a negatively loaded word, and you wouldn't use that word if f.ex. someone helpfully & truthfully helps others see they've misunderstood sth.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:30:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785825017,"id":49164977,"options":[],"parent_id":49160867,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Part of this can be good (you talk about what they care about, where 90% of broadcast messaging might not apply) and part of it can be bad (manipulation.)
Side note: it's manipulation either ways because you chose what to talk about, with a goal in mind.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"red75prime","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:54:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785833688,"id":49165954,"options":[],"parent_id":49160867,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I believe that the decentralization of manipulation (taken in a very broad sense as an effort to modify people's views) spells trouble for democracies. The mass media of old, with all its flaws, created a shared pool of information managed by well-educated people, some of whom understood that they had the power to keep democracy running (keeping populists away from the "manipulation machine," curbing blatant manipulation attempts, and so on).
Decentralized manipulation, by contrast, just runs amok creating echochambers and polarization.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"verisimi","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:01:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785834067,"id":49166010,"options":[],"parent_id":49160867,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> We will get much better at manipulation and better at people \u201cwriting\u201d things to justify their own feelings.
Yes, ai has strong narcissistic traits. And so do the people that own them. And pay for them.
In response, people in general will become fat more capable of recognising the manipulation. And will become more paranoid.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:17:11.000Z","created_at_i":1785788231,"id":49160867,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"We will get much better at manipulation and better at people \u201cwriting\u201d things to justify their own feelings.
What\u2019s new about LLMs is that you can scalably manipulate people individually. It used to be that you could either have scale (speeches, tweets, interviews, website, etc.) or individual engagement (replying to mail/tweets/town hall questions.)
Now you can pull the history and preferences of an individual, then shape a message\u2014in real time\u2014to them, specifically. You can have conversations on social media with a single person and shape your message specifically to them.
Part of this can be good (you talk about what they care about, where 90% of broadcast messaging might not apply) and part of it can be bad (manipulation.)
My guess is that, in the US, the right will cynically adopt manipulation to great effect and the left will take a moral stand against shady practices and lose elections.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dominotw","children":[{"author":"sothatsit","children":[{"author":"alasano","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:22:41.000Z","created_at_i":1785795761,"id":49162240,"options":[],"parent_id":49161435,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That's really what got everyone hooked in the first place.
5.6 Sol is great but there's a depth to the understanding that Fable exhibits that's unique to it currently.
Can I truly quantify this? I don't think so. Just that I spend a ton of time with various models and a certain point it's just a personal impression or a gut feeling.
In the days after Fable first came out I increased the amount of parallel planning of tasks that I was doing by 2-3x because it felt like I didn't need to be paranoid due to that handling of nuance.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:06:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785791184,"id":49161435,"options":[],"parent_id":49161005,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Fable is much better at handling nuance. Opus/GPT 5.6 Sol are much more likely to miss the point you are trying to make, emphasise the wrong thing, exaggerate the importance of unimportant details, or introduce contradictions.
That said, Fable is still not a great writer, largely driven by it not knowing what it should exclude, and it still having the usual LLM-isms. But it\u2019s better.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"J_Shelby_J","children":[{"author":"alasano","children":[{"author":"flaburgan","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T15:10:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785856249,"id":49170078,"options":[],"parent_id":49162311,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""the test is whether the sentence would work as a pull quote or a LinkedIn post. If it would, rewrite it until it would not." \nLinkedIn really became the default garbage example","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:30:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785796255,"id":49162311,"options":[],"parent_id":49161727,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Just praised Fable in another comment but what you're saying is also insanely true.
I literally roll my eyes and cringe quite often at its output pretty much daily.
I don't like to overload my sessions with skills but I've been using a "write-normal" skill I made just to have it rewrite outputs that particularly piss me off.
https://gist.github.com/alasano/1c734fa055231a5defcfd213217e...
I'm sure there's a million of these skills out there, but this one is tailored to the stuff that makes me mad in particular.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:32:56.000Z","created_at_i":1785792776,"id":49161727,"options":[],"parent_id":49161005,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I've noticed that out of all LLMs I've ever used that Fable is the MOST LLM; the text it produces is abomination. It's impressive how much I hate it. It is such an awful writer - it assumes the reader has zero context and therefore gives every single bit of context and detail - which is nice if you're writing a legal document I suppose. But it uses, niche, $10 words to describe every facet of everything it's discussing. I had it re-write some docs and I ended up rewriting 1k lines of of Fable torment nexus text to around 100. Because guess what, someone reading highly technical docs has a knowledge base that allows us to compress the topic into a much tighter representation.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:30:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785789055,"id":49161005,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> but I\u2019ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there
what did you notice ?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dominotw","children":[{"author":"sothatsit","children":[{"author":"porridgeraisin","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:56:18.000Z","created_at_i":1785790578,"id":49161322,"options":[],"parent_id":49161275,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That is because there is human annotated data there. Every session you or I used, then of course paid human feedback on repos (such as the recently famous example of meta forcing their employees to).
This is _much better_ data than 1/0 verification, it is as good as a gradient.
Automatically verifiable tasks improve faster since well, its automated.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dominotw","children":[{"author":"sothatsit","children":[{"author":"dominotw","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:23:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785853419,"id":49169440,"options":[],"parent_id":49161755,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Labs spend billions hiring experts to generate new data
I thought this is mostly RL data. In my previous comment i was referring to pertaining data.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:35:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785792917,"id":49161755,"options":[],"parent_id":49161601,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Labs spend billions hiring experts to generate new data, and better models can better filter existing training data and generate new synthetic data. There\u2019s no reason for that to run out, it\u2019s just expensive.
You could view this as just continually patching a leaky ship. But it seems to work.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"DoctorOetker","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:57:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785837446,"id":49166360,"options":[],"parent_id":49161601,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"thats the whole point of turning to formal verification:
Imagine a hypothetical oracle, call her MyladyMath, imagine you can turn to MyladyMath, submit a correctly formed dossier of axioms and definitions, theorems with proofs, and then a newly putatively proven theorem T. MyladyMath will complain if your dossier is malformed, and point out where and why. If the dossier is not malformed it will eventually read in the claimed theorem T, evaluate its proof and then either point out a which step is erroneous and why, or ultimately accept the proof.
Instead of a large corpus of human authored text, this map from dossier/theorem -> accept / reject is a huge implicit array of bits, something fundamental, and this weird gigantic array of bits that effectively describe all accept/reject responses MyladyMath would return exactly. We would never run out of "corpus" when it comes to math, if humans had access to such an oracle.
And we do have access to this oracle, and possess compact algorithms that describe the accept / reject bits. One of them is called MetaMath, a minimalistic verifier, which keeps the concepts of prover and verifier separated, this choice results in concrete proof objects (a sequence of step label references).
The machines are going to comb through all possible paths of the next N steps, for progressively larger N, efficiently compress those results in the weights of an LLM and then use the gained experience as the intuition for guided "not-so-brute"-force proof search, using the prior iterations intuitions to grade the surprisal of the N+1't iteration of results, etc.
The money will not stop flowing in that direction: all power blocs, nation states, militaries, banks, ecommerce, ... depend on cryptography. And the machines will soon do more rigorous proof search grounded in more balanced and objective observations. There is no responsible disclosure mechanism for flawed hardness assumptions in cryptography. It's going to get rocky, and the common man will wonder why the gods have gone crazy, wonder why they don't just pull the plug out of the machines, but nobody will in a staring contest to see who dares keep the plug in the longest (and dominate global cybersecurity).
It's the end of the age of artisanal mathematics, it will now become industrialized mathematics.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:21:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785792064,"id":49161601,"options":[],"parent_id":49161275,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> we\u2019ve seen huge lifts in all of these areas, not just the verifiable ones.
most gains are still coming from data. isnt that supposed to 'run out' though?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:52:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785790357,"id":49161275,"options":[],"parent_id":49161032,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I do not think it is so clear.
Programming has verifiable and non-verifiable aspects. Competitive programming, passing tests, and performance can all be verified. But translating English requirements into actual software, software architecture, taste, or UI design cannot. And yet over the last couple years we\u2019ve seen huge lifts in all of these areas, not just the verifiable ones.
Verifiable areas I think are clearly seeing the most improvement, or are the quickest to see improvement. But we are seeing lots of progress in non-verifiable areas as well.
How much of the non-verifiable progress is a function of labs purchasing expert data vs. the models improving with compute is maybe another interesting question, but fundamentally I don\u2019t see spend on expert data as something that can\u2019t grow if AI revenues keep growing as well. And as models get better taste they can also help filter and generate new synthetic data for their next versions to train on. The limits of this approach are not so clear.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:33:07.000Z","created_at_i":1785789187,"id":49161032,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> The most interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be undergoing, and what won\u2019t. Writing has been quite stubborn,
isn't it clearly split between verifiable not verifiable ? what is interesting about that question.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"viccis","children":[{"author":"watutalkinbout","children":[{"author":"hackinthebochs","children":[{"author":"jdub","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:49:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785833359,"id":49165913,"options":[],"parent_id":49162542,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"With his shitty cars, orbital garbage, or CSAM generator? Or his moneyed attacks on democracy and communications? Or his vandalism of government programs without insight, experience, or qualification?
In a free and fair market, his capital would be regarded as a deeply inefficient distortion.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:05:41.000Z","created_at_i":1785798341,"id":49162542,"options":[],"parent_id":49161358,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Yeah, we really should just storm the facility where Musk is hoarding all the worlds bread and meat.
Wealth in terms of capital doesn't represent material goods, it represents the system's confidence in your ability to direct capital efficiently. But eventually efficient capital bottoms out at consumable goods. Someone like Musk with a lot of capital under his control is contributing to the end goal of unlimited abundance.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:58:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785790722,"id":49161358,"options":[],"parent_id":49161051,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's like Musks duplicitous argument about unlimited abundance. We have a lot of abundance now, we just keep accelerating it all into the hands of fewer and fewer people - whose response is only to want more, and more, and more.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"koe123","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:29:06.000Z","created_at_i":1785832146,"id":49165791,"options":[],"parent_id":49161051,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"In fact the opposite, look at talks by Peter Thiel. At least he\u2019s being honest. These people are bastards, but for some reason moral goodness and wealth has been conflated leading us to venerate greed.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:34:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785789269,"id":49161051,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":">Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we just get much better at manipulation?
Is there even the tiniest reason to suspect that the people steering this progress will use it for the democratic good of all?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"porridgeraisin","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:36:59.000Z","created_at_i":1785789419,"id":49161078,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Today's models depend on inference time compute to get these results. The inference time compute available on any claude subscription is not comparable to the ones used to get some of these results (yes, in this case, it is 2000 USD total as noam confirmed, but some previous results took more).
In general, you can think of the process as generating massive rollouts in generation N, and then compiling in the verifier/human feedback("gradient") signal into generation N+1. The time taken to make the rollout in generation N, and separately the time taken to get the same rollout in generation N+1, each grows constant in some tasks, linear in more, and exponential in some.
In the end, this becomes bottlenecked by time. Today, we can make statements like "I generated all these successful trajectories with 2 weeks of compute, in the next model it will be able to do it in 7 hours of compute", but very soon you'll find yourself making statements like "I generated.... with 8 months of compute, in the next model it can do it in 6 months", which isn't really enticing the same way you can _technically_ brute force passwords but it just needs prohibitive amounts of time and money. That is the "plateau". Note that, this point is quite far away. For example, at any point if we agree it plateaus, today's known hardware techniques such as fixed function accelerators give you a 10-100x timeline reduction immediately allowing for a few more cycles of improvement. This is not to mention future innovations, but of course none of that is helping with the benchmarks where the time needed is growing superlinearly.
In many math and coding benchmarks, we are still in the constant phase. These are the massive improvements we see every few months. I'm not making any prediction of what will plateau and what will not as it's not possible to make an informed prediction about these things IMO. But the observed fact is that some have already plateaud as in, they don't improve with reasonable inference time (likely superlinear growth).
> will we need mathematicians to translate
Let's take a sudoku analogy. The model is initially just doing the random value algorithm, but lets say you the human are watching it. You make one of the usual reductions and interject "hey you can stop trying 8 here because of ....". Over enough examples, you get to a point where the model is _forced_ to learn the logical pattern. Next generation, it will skip that number. After this, you can peak the distribution using simple 1/0 RL. Doing _pure_ 1/0 RL works decent, but its not frontier as its a very sparse signal.
For that lift, human (or even a better LLM, but if you're trying to improve a frontier LLM, there is by definition no better LLM) feedback becomes necessary. This is _why_ it is crucial that these models interface in natural language and is also why the labs are hiring AI tutors by the hundreds. The "better LLM" case is what Kimi etc are doing by "distilling"(bad term for this) claude.
> But the long term is completely bewildering if you believe any of these trends can continue at a similar pace for the next few years.
For math and coding, for now we are in the phase where the times are just ... constant, so there's little reason to think it will stop soon. We still need humans to expand the frontier. It just becomes a matter of if its worth the cost of compute for running this generalized The Algorithm or not.
Given how well chess players internalized _many_ (not all) of alphazero's emergent chess knowledge, I am confident we wont have too much trouble figuring out any new math LLMs come up with, which will let us keep expanding the frontier by giving the LLM the next "lift". Only when we reach the stage where the time growth become exponential will this stop, IMO.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mmcnl","children":[{"author":"xabush","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:12:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785802365,"id":49162971,"options":[],"parent_id":49161525,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""To me it would be more impressive if we could define hard problems that need to be solved up front and see how the models deal with that."
I was recently listening to BBC Radio 4's episode on the Poincare Conjecture[1] and the guests on the program were discussing how the problem that looked deceptively simple eluded the great mathematicians of the time (including Poincare himself) for nearly a century and how Grigori Perelman cleverly came up with the proof. It took other mathematicians working in groups years after Perelman's publication to understand and validate his proof. The mathematicians on the program were speaking of highly of his proofs and admiring the originality of his work. This made me think of one neat experiment where if we cut-off a frontier model's training data 2002 or anytime before Perelman posted his proofs on arXiv and check if it can come up with the solution by itself. That would surely be a great signal to see if these LLMs aren't just solving interesting puzzles and that they can came up with something truly novel.
P.S I highly recommend Misha Green's "Perfect Rigor" for anyone interested in the history of the problem and the genius behind the proofs of the conjecture - Perleman. I found it an entertaining read and could digest its description of the problem as a layperson (with undergrad level math).
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0038x8l","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:14:15.000Z","created_at_i":1785791655,"id":49161525,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"There are many math problems that are simply puzzles: intellectually interesting but nothing worth of value depends on it. To me it would be more impressive if we could define hard problems that need to be solved up front and see how the models deal with that.
The results OpenAI demonstrated are impressive, but it also looks like they threw a lot of compute at it just to get results. How many tokens did they waste on problems they couldn't solve? Applying inference infrastructure on a large number of math problems at scale we haven't seen before to me doesn't demonstrate an exponential curve in model abilities.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"throwaway27448","children":[{"author":"bryan0","children":[{"author":"throwaway27448","children":[{"author":"conformist","children":[{"author":"throwaway27448","children":[{"author":"yazaddaruvala","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:51:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785797497,"id":49162448,"options":[],"parent_id":49162325,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Predicting when the sigmoid bends is difficult and predicting how long until it unbends is equally difficult.
The simpler assumption is that over enough time, the S functions stack together for long enough that working backwards from exponential is a better predictor of reality.
These stacked S curves have continually been true with most technology.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"haldujai","children":[{"author":"NiloCK","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:46:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785804387,"id":49163161,"options":[],"parent_id":49162927,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I find this astounding. 2024 to present thread is can write a coherent 15 line function to ... what exactly?
No future for research mathematicians othet than as tastemakers / agenda setters?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:05:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785801923,"id":49162927,"options":[],"parent_id":49162325,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It hasn\u2019t bent already? 2022-2024 certainly seemed far more exponential than 2024 to present.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"aurareturn","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:49:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785808191,"id":49163539,"options":[],"parent_id":49162325,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"A lot of HN posters thought it was already bending at GPT4o/GPT4.5. Turns out, it kept accelerating (at agentic tasks).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:32:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785796348,"id":49162325,"options":[],"parent_id":49162156,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Nobody in this thread is trying to predict when the sigmoid is going to bend. Perhaps they should","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:13:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785795200,"id":49162156,"options":[],"parent_id":49161999,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Isn\u2019t the point more \u201cit\u2019s easy to fall into the trap to believe that predicting when the sigmoid is going to bend is possible and the right heuristic is to instead extrapolate locally\u201d?
That aside, I\u2019d question whether applying the Lindy effect in particular to something that\u2019s not really a life expectancy but more a growth rate is credible\u2026 or perhaps a bit circular since it \u201cassumes away\u201d the ceiling.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"annzabelle","children":[{"author":"mitthrowaway2","children":[{"author":"annzabelle","children":[{"author":"synarchefriend","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:42:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785836532,"id":49166272,"options":[],"parent_id":49163944,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You are confusing Scott Alexander with Eliezer Yudkowsky.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mitthrowaway2","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T16:29:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785860944,"id":49171173,"options":[],"parent_id":49163944,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Saying the same thing for decades, when things progress over those decades along the general trend line that you were worried it would, is decent evidence of a prescient prediction. Climate scientists also seemed pretty kooky in the 80s when they sketched out their trendlines, but now their concerns are all over the headlines as reality caught up, and the same is becoming true of the AI safety people.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:01:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785812510,"id":49163944,"options":[],"parent_id":49163381,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I dunno. They've been saying this for decades, including in a very well read Harry Potter fanfic, and I'd always dismissed them as kooks, but maybe they're right in the end.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"vasco","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:49:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785826195,"id":49165101,"options":[],"parent_id":49163381,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"All of the point of that article is that most people that think something is a sigmoid think it'll bend just as they are publishing their analysis. And the article says, don't do that, assume it'll be related to how long we've been on the "goes up" part.
Nothing in that article says it's not a sigmoid.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:22:41.000Z","created_at_i":1785806561,"id":49163381,"options":[],"parent_id":49162317,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"So are they right or wrong about the sigmoids?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:31:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785796300,"id":49162317,"options":[],"parent_id":49161999,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The author of that post is a prominent Bay Area "rationalist," who have had a quasi-theistic relationship with the concept of all-powerful AIs for a couple decades now.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:56:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785794200,"id":49161999,"options":[],"parent_id":49161863,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If the sigmoid is incorrect it's certainly more correct than the exponential.
> https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you
The conclusion of this article seems to be "you should give ai the benefit of the doubt against all reason". Barf","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:44:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785793445,"id":49161863,"options":[],"parent_id":49161600,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"this gets more nuanced because "the sigmoids won't save you": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"subygan","children":[{"author":"slashdave","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:56:22.000Z","created_at_i":1785822982,"id":49164765,"options":[],"parent_id":49162326,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Since when does realism become hope? (It's the other way around)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:32:39.000Z","created_at_i":1785796359,"id":49162326,"options":[],"parent_id":49161600,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"in the absence of a stalling signal. it's better to assume exponential and work backwards than hope the next bottleneck is impossible.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"scarmig","children":[{"author":"Arkhaine_kupo","children":[{"author":"Lord-Jobo","children":[{"author":"wat10000","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T17:12:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785863521,"id":49171812,"options":[],"parent_id":49169255,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I'm the other way around. For doing real, useful work, these things were barely more than toys even just a year ago. Now they're very capable when used well, and still getting better at a fast pace.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T14:09:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785852585,"id":49169255,"options":[],"parent_id":49167376,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I literally don\u2019t understand, and have a deep distrust of people who say we haven\u2019t seen deceleration.
The diminishing returns are colossal. GPT 4 is more than 3 years old now, and while Sol is definitely better, it\u2019s better at a tremendous cost. And 3 years of development. And it still fails in nearly all the same places as 4.0.
I\u2019m not some \u201czero AI\u201d person, I don\u2019t think this industry will collapse into nothing and we will go back to a no LLM world.
But to look at this industry, which basically began in November 2022, almost 4 years and a trillion+ dollars later and say \u201coh yeah, definitely riding that exponential growth still\u201d is some of the wildest shit I\u2019ve ever seen, and it\u2019s so common.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:54:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785844449,"id":49167376,"options":[],"parent_id":49162525,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> But if you've not yet seen a deceleration
We have though. The velocity remains high but the acceleration is decreasing.
The improvement between gpt 2-4 where staggering. to 5, 5.6? Much less so.
The results improve of course, but the difference is no longer mind blowing.
Most of the improvement now has come from agentic harnessing, which is unrelated to the acceleration of the model but the tooling around the use of the model.
So we are seeing a deceleration and the speed is still high due to high prev acceleration but its not growing at the same rate as before and the edges are starting to show themselves","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:02:44.000Z","created_at_i":1785798164,"id":49162525,"options":[],"parent_id":49161600,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Everything has limits, of course. But if you've not yet seen a deceleration, it's reasonable to expect that at the least you're in the middle of the sigmoid, not the top.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"piloto_ciego","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:06:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785812781,"id":49163981,"options":[],"parent_id":49161600,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I mean, "sure, technically correct is the best kind of correct" - but where we sit on this right now? It certainly feels exponential.
A lot of this sort these sorts of posts are just "appeals to geometry" (aka "cope"). This is coming, it's coming hard. Now you need to decide what you want to do with your life in a world where your smarts aren't as special as they used to be.
This is hard (believe me, I know). But what one ought do is not eschew progress and cling to the delusion that things don't change, what one ought to do is try to see how they can leverage these tools for greater and greater accomplishments.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"slashdave","children":[{"author":"m0llusk","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T17:42:41.000Z","created_at_i":1785865361,"id":49172238,"options":[],"parent_id":49164760,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Maybe more like do not interrupt the hype train while it is derailing?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:55:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785822952,"id":49164760,"options":[],"parent_id":49161600,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Shh! Don't upset the hype train","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"energy123","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:14:22.000Z","created_at_i":1785824062,"id":49164877,"options":[],"parent_id":49161600,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"That's a false binary. The right binary is whether it's a convergent function or a divergent function. A sigmoid is convergent, which is not well substantiated and more farfetched than a divergent function, even if it's true that 2^x is too optimistic.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:21:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785792060,"id":49161600,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Sigmoidal, not exponential. It would be insane to assume an exponential curve","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"cmdli","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:32:18.000Z","created_at_i":1785792738,"id":49161719,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This reminds me a lot of the proof by construction for the 4-color theorem. It was only enabled by the advancement of computers and dissatisfied many of the computer scientists and mathematicians since it was a "brute force" approach.
I wonder if AI will end up being similar. Certain theorems get proven by AI but others do not. We haven't reached the limits of this yet and I haven't found a good argument for where those limits will be (I do doubt that there are no limits).","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"curt15","children":[{"author":"gpm","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:34:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785796445,"id":49162335,"options":[],"parent_id":49162225,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Because it's a tool in search of a use case (or many use cases) and mathematics is the most natural use case for it. Mathematics is by definition the art of putting words on a page in a rigorously defined "correct manner" (i.e. in the form of a valid logical argument, a proof) and all LLMs do is put words on pages and evaluating if they're good words is by far easiest when there is a strict definition of right and wrong.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"danielmarkbruce","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:35:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785796501,"id":49162340,"options":[],"parent_id":49162225,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's one of the few areas where you can verify results. That fits nicely into training models. They aren't just making judgement calls on what would be nice, it's "what can we do?".","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"beering","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:07:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785798448,"id":49162562,"options":[],"parent_id":49162225,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If everyone publicly said that the models can only do things that humans have already done, but you know they can do more, wouldn\u2019t you want to show them otherwise?
Math ability also helps with other things like making models more efficient.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"anon373839","children":[{"author":"robotpepi","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:15:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785842142,"id":49166972,"options":[],"parent_id":49163116,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"do we have any concrete idea of how well the models are scaling now? I agree with these 10 results being impressive, and it is easy to think "wow, and last year the models were barely able to solve IMOs problems". But for me it is perfectly possible that a non sofic group could be found by 100 good IMO students working on all the different strategies that have been proposed (OpenAIs solution was based on "expander graphs", which were introduced to solve the problem some years ago), so it could be that current AI is simply many (say 1000) old models working in parallel. This is linear scaling, not exponential. It could be I'm completely wrong also, the problem is that we have little information.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:39:01.000Z","created_at_i":1785803941,"id":49163116,"options":[],"parent_id":49162225,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Another interesting question is why the frontier labs are piling on pure maths
The reason is that the original scaling axes (parameters, training tokens, test-time compute) have saturated already, but RLVR (reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards) is still scaling well. And math has this nice property where you can synthetically generate arbitrary volumes of rewards to train the model, because math is self-contained and completely objective. Open-ended reasoning and analysis don't have that convenient property, and that is why progress is much slower outside of math and coding.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"qingcharles","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:18:10.000Z","created_at_i":1785806290,"id":49163349,"options":[],"parent_id":49162225,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What's the best way to apply it to legal problems? Finding bugs in statutes? (there are often statutes with wording errors, missing negatives, things like that which don't get picked up for ages)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:20:24.000Z","created_at_i":1785795624,"id":49162225,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Another interesting question is why the frontier labs are piling on pure maths, which has little direct economic value compared to something like law or improving the efficiency of their own models? How much OpenAI and Anthropic are paying to serve these models for ordinary users is the elephant in the room. A cynical take is that the frontier labs are trying their best to pump up their pre-IPO valuation through flashy headlines.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"casey2","children":[{"author":"akoboldfrying","children":[{"author":"andsoitis","children":[{"author":"vasco","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:56:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785826596,"id":49165145,"options":[],"parent_id":49164662,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It's more funny than the dog doing differential equations I'll tell you that. Specially when it gets mad.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:37:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785821860,"id":49164662,"options":[],"parent_id":49163489,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> It's as if I showed you a dog that I had taught to speak German fluently
And you\u2019re thinking this is an accurate comparison?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"koe123","children":[{"author":"techpression","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:57:57.000Z","created_at_i":1785837477,"id":49166366,"options":[],"parent_id":49165761,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This is what most people seem to forget, OpenAI has probably spent more money the last year than all of math research has during human existence.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"DoctorOetker","children":[{"author":"koe123","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T12:13:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785845600,"id":49167592,"options":[],"parent_id":49166439,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Thats true, although once it stops being a party trick I expect the LLM proof mining to also be paid by someone else and be expensive as shit, the question same remains: who?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:07:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785838020,"id":49166439,"options":[],"parent_id":49165761,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"nothing prevented us from defining cryptocurrencies, auto-rewarding new math in objective manners, grading theorem surprisal objectively, etc. before the advent of LLM's.
being lucky enough to receive the opportunity of hiding in some academic closet, poking your hand out begging for scraps, was a different, perfectly alternative path humans decided to take instead.
It's a bit late to start standing up for your rights when the robot overlords arrive.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T08:25:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785831930,"id":49165761,"options":[],"parent_id":49163489,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"On the other hand, if provided the financial incentive would mathematicians have solved these problems? Its not hard to imagine a world where some hard problems were not selected by the sparse experts for whatever reason (lack of interest, whatever), which could have been solved if someone was throwing down millions for solutions.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:41:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785807707,"id":49163489,"options":[],"parent_id":49162458,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> A 0.001% optimization on a packing problem just isn't interesting for the amount of investment.
I think you have completely misunderstood what OpenAI have accomplished here. Almost certainly no one cares about the specific concrete results achieved; they only care about (a) how difficult it would be for an intelligent human to achieve the same feat (ETA: the feat is the proof), which can be estimated by the amount of time the problem has remained open/a public conjecture, and (b) how general this artificial "intelligence" appears to be, which can be estimated by the diversity of topics where it was able to prove a difficult result.
It's as if I showed you a dog that I had taught to speak German fluently, and you remarked: "What point is a dog that can speak a language that less than 2% of the world speaks? Nothing to see here."","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"energy123","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T06:58:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785826701,"id":49165155,"options":[],"parent_id":49162458,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What is the y-axis in this claim about logarithmic improvements? Any exponential curve can be trivially turned into a logarithmic and vice-versa, and the y-axis redefined as "progress", with no loss of accuracy.
One example that always bugs me is when people point to "exponential" or "sigmoidal" progress on benchmarks. Benchmarks are artificial constructions (saturation at 100% by definition) and benchmark scores should not be mapped to these words when talking about overall progress.
Example - progress on ARC-AGI-3 at the moment is exponential, steeper than 2^t and e^t. Does that mean AI is progressing "exponentially" in the colloquial sense? No, it doesn't support or refute that colloquialism.
Likewise with MMLU saturation. We can't go above 100% by construction. Therefore we have a "sigmoid". Gah.
The colloquialism is not helpful to begin with.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:52:50.000Z","created_at_i":1785797570,"id":49162458,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"We definitely are not on an exponential. Don't say we are because this isn't up for debate. AI progress is logarithmic the million dollar question is 2x or 10x for linear improvement. The nearest qualitative shift would be very fast inference so people could start writing real software on top of LLMs. A 0.001% optimization on a packing problem just isn't interesting for the amount of investment.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"thisisnotauser","children":[{"author":"AgentMatt","children":[{"author":"doc_ick","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T02:40:45.000Z","created_at_i":1785811245,"id":49163836,"options":[],"parent_id":49162743,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Likely not using / managing context windows properly and then having it re-read data it\u2019s already gone through","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tossandthrow","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:10:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785827423,"id":49165242,"options":[],"parent_id":49162743,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"We so don't know what plan she is using.
Eg.a 20usd/m plan usually don't cut it for professional work.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:37:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785800255,"id":49162743,"options":[],"parent_id":49162701,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"What makes it so token hungry? Is she directly using the LLM for genome analysis rather then having it write the data analysis algos?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ed_elliott_asc","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:08:27.000Z","created_at_i":1785834507,"id":49166056,"options":[],"parent_id":49162701,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This absolutely terrifies me, surely one misread piece of data or a hallucination here or there and a little \u201coh sorry about that, I guessed at this portion of the data to save time\u201d and the data used is useless?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:31:32.000Z","created_at_i":1785799892,"id":49162701,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"My wife is working on her PhD in microbiology now, using OpenAI to implement her research ideas. Genetics is just too much data, and she eats through tokens like nobody's business. I thought I was careless with them, but she barely lasts a full day before exhausting her quota. There's definitely a lot of value there, but dealing with the data problem is a big obstacle in biology. I can only imagine what she could get done with more capacity, though...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"totetsu","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:08:46.000Z","created_at_i":1785805726,"id":49163296,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think you\u2019re making a category error in your definition of politics here. \nCertainly technologies can favour winners and losers, but the struggle is an inherently human one.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"chatmasta","children":[{"author":"andai","children":[{"author":"variadix","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T19:05:37.000Z","created_at_i":1785870337,"id":49173387,"options":[],"parent_id":49164346,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I think this is one approach to AI safety and interpretability that could work, but would require labs to slow down to figure out how to extract circuits/algorithms out of trained LLMs rather than deploying the opaque artifact.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:24:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785817482,"id":49164346,"options":[],"parent_id":49164319,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The transformer is Turing complete. It might be a tarpit though? I don't know.
I think a nice example is using them for arithmetic. It's a specialized deterministic process, so it's extremely wasteful to do it that way.
But they're good at finding solutions to things we don't know how to specialize yet.
So, to use metaphor, maybe the transformer-based models are like the FPGA, and then when we figure out the patterns in that system \u2014 all the different kinds of specialized reasoning \u2014 we can extract it into an ASIC?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"visarga","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:46:28.000Z","created_at_i":1785822388,"id":49164711,"options":[],"parent_id":49164319,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Why does this \u201cjust work?\u201d Nobody really knows, but it clearly does.
We know language has to be learnable by every human, so it needs to be really independent of any specific brain development particularities. If it was not accessible to babies there would be no more language next generation.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:18:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785817120,"id":49164319,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I expect we can squeeze a lot more exponential out of LLMs because they\u2019ve basically shown that human \u201cconsciousness,\u201d insofar as it\u2019s composed of knowledge and rules for synthesizing that knowledge, can be represented mathematically in a very high dimensional space. Why does this \u201cjust work?\u201d Nobody really knows, but it clearly does.
However, I also expect this squeeze will come at an increasingly expensive price \u2014 not just because of inefficient token usage, but because of fundamental limitations of LLMs as a model.
LLMs are letting us brute force our way through a lot of reasoning, but it\u2019s hard to believe that such a generic model of intelligence will take us to the next frontier. We\u2019ll need some fundamentally new approaches at some point. Maybe those will make achieving the exponential more efficient or maybe they\u2019ll unlock even higher degrees of possibility. Who knows?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"andsoitis","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T05:23:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785821028,"id":49164615,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> exponential
Many many things are only useful when expressed in the physical world, and that introduces lag.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"flufluflufluffy","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:05:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785837925,"id":49166426,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"we gonna go full Pandora\u2019s Star where the AI discover laws of physics that are impossible for humans to understand and create the wormholes","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"dennis_jeeves2","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:25:16.000Z","created_at_i":1785839116,"id":49166581,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":">let people express their own values in democracies, or will we just get much better at manipulation?
Both are the same thing. Two sides of the same coin.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"JohnHammersley","children":[{"author":"nylonstrung","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:15:21.000Z","created_at_i":1785842121,"id":49166967,"options":[],"parent_id":49166938,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Life sciences will get way more interesting once Demis Hassabis completes his simulated cell and we have more genomic foundation models","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T11:11:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785841883,"id":49166938,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Yes, the rate and nature of the results being produced is impressive, and Anthropic have recently invested in building out more in-house capability to do life sciences research (see e.g. [1]).
Overall I'm excited for this acceleration in discovery, even if it's causing disruption to existing research workflows. I wrote a bit about it recently [2], after seeing Levent Alp\u00f6ge's counterexample to the Jacobean conjecture.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/30/anthropic-launches-ai-drug-d...
[2] https://scholarlyfutures.substack.com/p/frontier-models-tran...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"killerstorm","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T15:07:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785856055,"id":49170029,"options":[],"parent_id":49160757,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The reason writing is hard might be that post-training pulls style into a particular direction.
In other words, big labs are much more interested in making "AGI" than in making a good writer, especially as what qualifies as "good writing" is rather subjective. E.g. before AI use of metaphors and rhetorical devices were generally a sign of a good writing. Of course, not if you keep spamming the same rhetorical device - but a stateless AI can't know which one it is over-using.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:07:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785787632,"id":49160757,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps delivering more and more impressive results.
The most interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be undergoing, and what won\u2019t. Writing has been quite stubborn, but I\u2019ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we just get much better at manipulation? How about experiment driven domains like biology?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"raver1975","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T20:08:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785787685,"id":49160775,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I wish I could qualify for some free AI as a mathematics researcher. I guess I'm just an amateur. https://alethean.org","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"pbkompasz","children":[{"author":"namr2000","children":[{"author":"class3shock","children":[{"author":"namr2000","children":[{"author":"class3shock","children":[{"author":"namr2000","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:17:31.000Z","created_at_i":1785813451,"id":49164046,"options":[],"parent_id":49163683,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Yeah the Yitang Zhang situation just sounds like a total nightmare all around.
There was definitely at least some progress on the problem. I get the general sense that there were potential counterexamples that were close but not quite enough, and that its possible (or even likely) that Claude built on those in order to construct its solution. I also get the sense that when Zhang was working on the problem it was believed that it would be proved true, but since then there were bounds found on the problem that pointed researchers to believe it was false. I am not a research mathematician in this field though, so I could definitely be wrong.
Also, in fairness to Zhang, I believe the dissertation he ended up writing was focused on the 2D case in particular, which is still unsolved (the counter example is only for 3D and above). I cannot imagine that anyone looking at the 2D problem was not also looking at the general case as well though.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T02:14:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785809692,"id":49163683,"options":[],"parent_id":49163117,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"[1] is... a read (sounds like a nightmare student, or research prof, or both). A dumb question but by my reading, that work took place 35 years ago, has there not been anything more relevant since then? Something Claude could have for instance used as a basis for what it did? Does seem like a feat however you cut it though.
Thank you for the thoughts and references.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:39:09.000Z","created_at_i":1785803949,"id":49163117,"options":[],"parent_id":49162520,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I want to preface my response by saying that I don't buy most of what the AI labs say. I don't think that LLMs will replace most white collar labor for example. I also find many of the practices of these labs to be abhorrent. However, all of these opinions are orthogonal to the fact that LLMs have gotten extremely good at mathematics.
> Who says no one was making progress?
Let's look at the Jacobian conjecture, since that was the open math problem I was most familiar with prior to its solution. Yitang Zhang, one of the worlds most renown mathematicians (famous for his lower bound on the twin prime conjecture) spent 8 years working on this problem with his advisor (who himself is a renown mathematician) and turned up completely empty handed. His advisor described it as a "waste [of] 7 years of his own life and my time" [1]. Of course, these two were not the only ones working on this problem for the almost 100 years its been open, but they should have sufficient credentials to show that they were not fools or amateurs.
And in a single afternoon an LLM disproved the conjecture. How is that not an extraordinary feat of technology?
> Who? And doing what?
A close friend is studying differential geometry in a PhD program. Sadly I doubt anything I say on his work will convince you, so I will instead offer two anecdotes:
Terrence Tao (widely considered the worlds greatest living mathematician) has said AI is precipitating "a crisis in the foundations of mathematical values and practices" [2].
Timothy Growers (fields medalist & one of the leading researchers in combinatorics) has said that the latest models are now at the point where they are "producing a piece of PhD-level research in an hour or so, with no serious mathematical input from me" [3].
You can find many more fields medalists and mathematics researchers with the same impression. If you look in this thread you can see bluesky/twitter threads from those who were actively researching some of these problems who are in shock at the solutions.
[1] https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf\n[2] https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/age-of-ai-icm-2026.p...\n[3] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a-recent-experience-...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T23:01:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785798107,"id":49162520,"options":[],"parent_id":49161826,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""I understand the frustration with the constant PR-hype these AI labs keep spewing out"
Apparently you don't.
"These are real problems mathematicians and computer scientists have been working on and were unable to make progress on."
Who says no one was making progress? Who says openai has made progress? How would anyone not working on these specific problems, witho the time to dig into openai's claims, be able to tell? Why should this not be lumped in with all the other ai hype being pushed?
"The mathematicians I know are saying that the latest crop of models is changing the way people do research math, I think that's a pretty big deal."
Who? And doing what?
We have been hearing the "this generation of models is the one" type talk for years and the only concrete "big deals" are what? A tool for college students to write papers? A replacement for, now enshitified, google search? The fact that now you can fake tons of stuff to support a position or claim tons of stuff that goes against your position is fake?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:41:18.000Z","created_at_i":1785793278,"id":49161826,"options":[],"parent_id":49161596,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I understand the frustration with the constant PR-hype these AI labs keep spewing out, but on other hand I just can't understand this sentiment at all. These are real problems mathematicians and computer scientists have been working on and were unable to make progress on. Now they have been given a new tool and using that tool have solved those problems. And its not just one or two problems, its many very difficult problems. The mathematicians I know are saying that the latest crop of models is changing the way people do research math, I think that's a pretty big deal.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:20:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785792026,"id":49161596,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Wow, here are solutions to 10 problems that we spent millions of dollars on out of the 100s/1000s of other problems that we tried and failed to solve.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"10dpd","children":[{"author":"oblio","children":[{"author":"QwenGlazer9000","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:26:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785806777,"id":49163397,"options":[],"parent_id":49162443,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"And that's the crux. LLMs are the nuclear bomb, while AI is the fission. People refuse to stop building them even if they make things worse.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:50:40.000Z","created_at_i":1785797440,"id":49162443,"options":[],"parent_id":49161924,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The big example predates LLMs as a unified tech and it's protein folding, from Google DeepMind.
OpenAI and Anthropic are too greedy for cash to do anything of the sort.
I don't expect this current economic cycle to bring anything else that will directly greatly improve the life of the average person on the planet, more than it hurts it.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:49:52.000Z","created_at_i":1785793792,"id":49161924,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"While these advances are genuinely impressive, I'm curious when we will see practical implications for this work.
For example, will we see advances in material science, medical cures, etc?
Would love to read about some examples of practical impact.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"plaidfuji","children":[{"author":"VladVladikoff","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:38:29.000Z","created_at_i":1785796709,"id":49162362,"options":[],"parent_id":49161997,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Would be great to see them solve Yang-Mills and Mass Gap.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"gerdesj","children":[{"author":"gerdesj","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:51:00.000Z","created_at_i":1785804660,"id":49163188,"options":[],"parent_id":49162913,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Just to re-iterate the point:
Whenever the handwaving starts around a discussion relating to a NP hard problem, I find it useful to imagine a Canadian bloke (MHRIP) in a red top, with a ... Scottish accent ... saying:
"Ye cannae break the laws o' physics, Jim". (maffs not fisics, obvs!)
If that is a bit tiresome for the gung-ho AI evangelist, there is also the rather knotty snag that that blasted Austrian geezer G\u00f6del fiddled up: incompleteness.
Its almost as though these bloody clever scientific and that types keep on putting artificial blocks in the way of LLMs laying golden eggs!
I'm quite happy with the "marginal gains" I get with a DGX Spark. It will pay for itself within three months doing stuff on prem and us not sending data to someone else. It will scale.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"aorloff","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:02:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785816168,"id":49164257,"options":[],"parent_id":49162913,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Science is not merely computing though, even the theoretical sciences","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:03:26.000Z","created_at_i":1785801806,"id":49162913,"options":[],"parent_id":49161997,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":""Any computable problem will eventually fall to computers."
By definition. Its those pesky NP jobbies that get in the way.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"GPerson","children":[{"author":"vlovich123","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:16:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785813379,"id":49164041,"options":[],"parent_id":49162967,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Whether or not it\u2019s on par famously or difficulty level doesn\u2019t predict whether the others will fall. They\u2019re unique problems and math isn\u2019t linear - the Jacobian it managed to find a counterexample and relied on other proofs that had been developed showing >3 case == 3 dimensional case. However, the Riemann may not fall in the same way because it may actually be true or the surrounding math isn\u2019t quite ready to tackle that problem.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"plaidfuji","children":[{"author":"zacmps","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T16:47:19.000Z","created_at_i":1785862039,"id":49171444,"options":[],"parent_id":49165396,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Obviously not, there's no need to create a new character for a new operation. You can just define it as @ or or any other symbol you want.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:29:41.000Z","created_at_i":1785828581,"id":49165396,"options":[],"parent_id":49162967,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I would be genuinely very impressed - but still not scared - if the Riemann hypothesis were solved. I suspect that we may require \u201cnew math\u201d to make progress on that. If a new operator / symbol is required, is that fundamentally not doable by an LLM because it\u2019s outside of current tokenization space?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T00:11:49.000Z","created_at_i":1785802309,"id":49162967,"options":[],"parent_id":49161997,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"In my opinion, after seein the Jacobian conjecture go, the Riemann hypothesis only has about a year left.
I\u2019m not sure if people just aren\u2019t as aware, but the Jacobian conjecture practically was on par with those other great problems.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"qarl2","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:12:42.000Z","created_at_i":1785805962,"id":49163318,"options":[],"parent_id":49161997,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"They don't need to make NP-hard tractable to shake the world order.
They just need to be better than humans.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jstummbillig","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:57:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785819455,"id":49164485,"options":[],"parent_id":49161997,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"> Any computable problem will eventually fall to computers.
I think the question, that we keep stumbling over, is what problems are computable.
> But if these things were as revolutionary as people promote/fear them to be, you should immediately point them at the highest value math problems and see progress. Like the Millenium Prize problems. Haven\u2019t seen a solution to those.
Let the goalpost shifting continue. It'll buy us another half year or so.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"miguelnegrao","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:02:33.000Z","created_at_i":1785834153,"id":49166017,"options":[],"parent_id":49161997,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"If by solution you mean a proof and by testing you mean encoding it in lean and compiling it, the space of possible syntactically correct proofs which you can encode probably explodes in a way that is well beyond what any computer could try to brute-force. LLMs don't brute-force proofs, i believe their approach is quite similar to humans. I believe the same is essentially true for counter-examples of the type that have been found latelly, they are not found by search, but by using theory.
On the other hand even if the compute allocated by openai is esquivalent to day 10 human mathematicians, the machines can work 24h per day, that is already a lot more productive.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T21:56:35.000Z","created_at_i":1785794195,"id":49161997,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Any computable problem will eventually fall to computers.
LLMs have made math proofs more computable, in the sense that a computer can both generate potential solutions and check the validity of its solutions on its own, with a reasonable chance of converging on something correct. I assume this was already doable to some extent, but it seems like it\u2019s now exponentially easier. That still doesn\u2019t mean that all math is automatically solved.
This is somewhat similar to things like molecular dynamics or protein folding or finite element simulations, etc. Some problems that were previously intractable via computation became tractable. Others - the vast majority of other problems - remain unsolvable by these computational techniques, because the scale of compute required is beyond imagination. These are simple things like simulating the dynamics of a cubic millimeter of water molecules for 1 second. Unfathomably beyond current capabilities (and LLMs aren\u2019t going to change that).
I think LLMs are great, I use them every day and I think they have a ton of value. But if these things were as revolutionary as people promote/fear them to be, you should immediately point them at the highest value math problems and see progress. Like the Millenium Prize problems. Haven\u2019t seen a solution to those.
So there are limits - but we\u2019re about to learn a lot about the new normal of what constitutes a layup math proof vs the truly difficult.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"catching_crumbs","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:16:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785795373,"id":49162178,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Only left is to catch crumbs from the table (2000): https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"tanh","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:42:18.000Z","created_at_i":1785796938,"id":49162392,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I feel nothing but grief.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"kart23","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:47:43.000Z","created_at_i":1785797263,"id":49162424,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"AI can do this shit but can't do the dishes","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"nnm","children":[{"author":"andai","children":[{"author":"energy123","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T07:55:55.000Z","created_at_i":1785830155,"id":49165570,"options":[],"parent_id":49164440,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I would argue we're crossed that point recently. This is a comment from twitter that I appreciated:
> "Already, there are very few mathematicians qualified to verify OpenAI\u2019s new results. As progress continues, that number will approach zero."
Not that I'm good enough at math to have any uniquely formed opinion, but after reading commentary from people who are, my impression is that these new results are bamboozling the humans due to using tools from so many disparate areas.
At least, we can say that there isn't a single human who is smart enough to understand all ten proofs, even if there is a collective sense in which all proofs are understood.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T04:46:48.000Z","created_at_i":1785818808,"id":49164440,"options":[],"parent_id":49162447,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Which only it understands?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T22:51:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785797490,"id":49162447,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This is impressive. The real game-changer will be when AI creates an entirely new, significant branch of mathematics.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"written-beyond","children":[{"author":"john_strinlai","children":[{"author":"oersted","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T02:16:25.000Z","created_at_i":1785809785,"id":49163696,"options":[],"parent_id":49163375,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Of course that\u2019s the mechanism and this kind of repost is not unique, but it is still relevant to note that the small HN committee made an exception for this one.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:22:20.000Z","created_at_i":1785806540,"id":49163375,"options":[],"parent_id":49163361,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"not very interesting, its the second chance pool. its not a conspiracy of ycombinator vs. openai.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T01:20:04.000Z","created_at_i":1785806404,"id":49163361,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Interesting how HN promoted this post to the front page again with a fake submission time. There are comments two days old, seems weird why they'd want this post specifically to get more traffic.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"mrloopex","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T02:07:05.000Z","created_at_i":1785809225,"id":49163643,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"As someone who\u2019s spent the last year deploying PQC cryptosystems, it sure would be a kick in the ass if they find a faster solution to the nearest vector problem. I mean that\u2019s why we\u2019re going hybrid, but still.
(Well to be more precise we\u2019re going hybrid because of unknown SCAs.)","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"c0rruptbytes","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:04:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785812652,"id":49163962,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"https://vibemathed.com/","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"navaed01","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:05:17.000Z","created_at_i":1785812717,"id":49163969,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Is there anyone here who can comment if these advances are meaningful, novel and how extraordinary these advances are? (E.g most PHDs, top 10% of professors etc. )","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"throwaw12","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T03:38:23.000Z","created_at_i":1785814703,"id":49164142,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"This proves solving open problems in Mathematics were a search problem.
But it might be not good for human brains, because we trained our brains with these problems and our brain optimized search space in some ways, and yes, we also couldn't solve some these problems.
Now imagine someone gets stuck with a problem which could become its own theory, but they will solve it with LLMs and move on to solve their primary problem, because they don't realize how other problem was a big deal. If theory is not formalized, then it won't contribute to the search space for other person, solving different problem.
All in all:
* people's brain will be shaped differently
* we will lose search space optimizations in our brains
* we lose new theory contributions, which increases the search space to help solve other problems","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"MichaelMoser123","children":[{"author":"samuelknight","children":[{"author":"isaacfrond","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T12:50:36.000Z","created_at_i":1785847836,"id":49168140,"options":[],"parent_id":49166660,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"The paper does not resolve P versus NP, but it does make an important advance in a closely related area. To prove that P \u2260 NP, it would be enough to show that every algorithm for an NP-complete problem requires superpolynomial time. We cannot prove anything remotely that strong. For explicit NP-complete problems in unrestricted computational models, we cannot even prove superlinear lower bounds. There is therefore an enormous gap between the lower bounds we can prove and the superpolynomial bounds we would need.
VP and VNP are closely related algebraic analogues of P and NP. Here the paper proves new lower bounds for computing the permanent, a VNP-complete polynomial, in particular models of arithmetic computation: roughly (n^2\\log\\log n) arithmetic gates for unrestricted division-free circuits, and (n^4/\\log n) size for the more restrictive formula model. These are still polynomial bounds, so they do not separate VP from VNP. But lower bounds on the resources needed to compute explicit functions are exactly what would ultimately be required for such a separation, and meaningful lower bounds of this kind are exceptionally rare.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:34:30.000Z","created_at_i":1785839670,"id":49166660,"options":[],"parent_id":49166350,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"You can't come up with a counterexample for P != NP because there isn't a formula to disprove. For P = NP you would propose a general algorithm to convert all NP problems into P in P time, and an AI could then find a counterexample which would disprove that particular method. To demonstrate P != NP you need to prove that no possible algorithm can convert any NP into P which is much harder than providing a counterexample.
AI has just gotten to the intelligence that it can make clever counterexamples to mathematical conjectures, but the frontier isn't quite smart enough that it can make novel contributions to mathematics. We are really close though. Only a matter of months away.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T09:56:08.000Z","created_at_i":1785837368,"id":49166350,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"It didn't come up with a counterexample for the P versus NP problem, I wonder if they just didn't ask about it...","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"deviation","children":[{"author":"datsci_est_2015","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:52:51.000Z","created_at_i":1785840771,"id":49166820,"options":[],"parent_id":49166719,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Not entirely following the question, but there are an infinite number of conjectures, the blinding majority of which serve nearly no purpose to humanity. Consider that for every executable program one could create a conjecture, and therefore a mapping exists from executable programs to conjectures. Now, consider the infinite possibility space of executable programs\u2026
Anyway, unless you mean conjectures that humans have already posited, or ones that are particularly famous, that list is much shorter, but also contains conjectures that I\u2019m not convinced can be solved before the heat death of the universe using all available compute power. P != NP is a conjecture, for example. Also a lot of prime number conjectures that are extremely computationally expensive.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-04T10:43:13.000Z","created_at_i":1785840193,"id":49166719,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"Genuine question, from someone with a non-math background - at what point does the constraint become the number of unsolved conjectures remaining, instead of the ability for LLMs to actually solve for one?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jimmyswisher","children":[],"created_at":"2026-08-04T17:41:47.000Z","created_at_i":1785865307,"id":49172222,"options":[],"parent_id":49157930,"points":null,"story_id":49157930,"text":"I recently read Fermat\u2019s enigma and I really loved it and am amazed at how far humans can go. If AI does everything going forward it will definitely be bitter sweet taking away from the human possibility of it imo","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2026-08-03T16:27:12.000Z","created_at_i":1785774432,"id":49157930,"options":[],"parent_id":null,"points":613,"story_id":49157930,"text":null,"title":"Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science","type":"story","url":"https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/"}
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