god her appearance makes me feel like i’m being hate-crimed

It’s really fucking me up the way AI boosters and friends are treating mathematics as a natural science whose goal is to uncover mathematical facts in the number mines. I’m not even staunchly opposed to platonism, but my god. That’s not even how natural science works!

Random idiot on r/singularity

That stance assumes we still need to fully understand the manual mechanics in order to apply the end result.

​Saying we lose out on the "journey" is like an 18th-century laborer complaining that the steam engine will create a society where no one has the endurance to swing a 20-pound hammer for a full 12-hour day.

Do we lose something through abstraction? Absolutely. And I understand why people would mourn that. But do we need to have the endurance to swing the hammer to build a modern skyscraper?

We aren't losing the ability to do math, we are just moving up a layer of abstraction, transitioning from the laborers to the architects.

Also look out for the new obnoxious metaphor of “what if aliens descended from the sky and handed us their science and proofs, how is this different”. First of all shut up. Secondly we should assume the aliens in this scenario have reason, intent, and the ability to communicate through language. You’re imagining they’re using the scientific method and not divination from wiggling their proboscis in the fourth dimension. Which is quite different from OpenAI’s big dump on scientific practice.

also maths are not a science there i said it

Oh god, are they ... translating to english and back again??

It's amazing, I saw it once randomly yesterday from some obnoxious bluskyer and I saw it a dozen more times today. It's nice they all got the press release!

I mean, I don't know, my confusion comes from also seeing a lot of mathematicians react as if mathematics are over and that it sucks that the future is all about checking AI proofs. And I suppose it's unpleasant when a sort of maybe authoritative entity comes out of nowhere and tells you the answer to your favourite problem is 42 and doesn't elaborate. But I feel like I might be missing something as to why this is a big deal. (Apart from OpenAI's shitty conduct, I mean.)

I suppose what it comes down to is, if OpenAI couldn’t be bothered to try and elucidate their results, or even try to separate nonsensical exploits from genuine proofs, I don’t understand why mathematicians shouldn’t treat all of it as worthless instead of doing unpaid PR work for them.

I’m not at all a mathematician and mostly bad at understanding things, but, is an unwieldy proof that’s barely comprehensible and might be relying on multiple layers of bugs and traps and whatever undefined edges of formal proof systems even a proof at all? Does it actually merit consideration outside of pure spite (understandable)?

Like, in other words, I don’t think most mathematicians are particularly interested in building huge datacenters to brute-force compute quintillions of decimals of pi under current algorithms? Because the point is understanding, not mere knowledge? I dunno!

Yeah, and to be clear I’m unabashedly a humanist myself, but at this point in time I have to treat “Humanist” in org names as a red flag.

From Re-evaluating GPT-4’s bar exam performance (linked in the article):

First, although GPT-4’s UBE score nears the 90th percentile when examining approximate conversions from February administrations of the Illinois Bar Exam, these estimates are heavily skewed towards repeat test-takers who failed the July administration and score significantly lower than the general test-taking population.

Ohhh, that is sneaky!

What I find delightful about this is that I already wasn't impressed! Because, as the paper goes on to say

Moreover, although the UBE is a closed-book exam for humans, GPT-4’s huge training corpus largely distilled in its parameters means that it can effectively take the UBE “open-book”

And here I was thinking it not getting a perfect score on multiple-choice questions was already damning. But apparently it doesn't even get a particularly good score!

Oh well done, you added noise to a line going up!

I love the way these idiots keep incrementing the number on their ChatGPT fantasy as if it's a sufficient image of the future and it's going to get everyone on board. Complete failure of imagination, don't try to picture any actual use for it or anything, just make it... more.

cool graph what's the x axis

Malcolm and Simone Collins with their children – Octavian George, four, Torsten Savage, two, and Titan Invictus, one – at home in Pennsylvania.

bye

It's just a tool, like cars! My definition of tools is things that are being forced on us even though they're terrible for the environment and make everyone's life worse!

Spam machines are only ever funny or interesting by accident. The more they smooth out the wrinkles the more creatively useless they become. The tension is sort of fascinating.

Like I've always been interested in generative poetry and other manglings of text, and ChatGPT's so fucking dull compared to putting a sentence through babelfish a few times.

Having a conscience? There's no career in that!

This is cool but will any of it explain the most pressing MrBeast question: why does he smile like that? I'm assuming it's because he's always thinking about how terrible a person he is.