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FloorEgg • yesterday at 9:29 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

If intelligence is compression, and these models are a different form of lesser intelligence than human, but being scaled up to brute force problems, then it makes sense the artifacts that produce (the proofs) would have worse compression than a human proof would.

In other domains I have seen first hand overwhelming evidence of how things that cause the AI to make mistakes also cause humans to make the same mistakes.

I wonder if the proofs being produced that are hard for humans to interpret are also hard for other LLMs to interpret.

In other words, I wonder if humans are still much better at compressing understanding into proofs than the best LLMs, and what it will take for LLMs to exceed them.

It kind of an explicit example of how the LLMs can be materially less intelligent than people, but still be more productive through scaling, and yet they also can't replace people because they are a categorically different kind of intelligence. It's like all the AI debates compressed into one example showing countwr-intuitive answers.


Replies

perching_aix • yesterday at 11:11 PM

> I wonder if humans are still much better at compressing understanding into proofs than the best LLMs, and what it will take for LLMs to exceed them.

Isn't it fairly established that (generally [0]) manually written / optimized skill files perform a lot better than generated ones? Meaning that yes, this likely does hold.

[0] or to be specific, that the pecking order is: ai generated < human co/written < hyperoptimized for the specific model via some convergence process

esafak • yesterday at 10:05 PM

This is just the first cut. I have no doubt that they will polish their proofs over time.

slopinthebag • yesterday at 9:54 PM

idk if i'd even say they're "lesser", just very different. so they look like gods/babies depending on what they're doing because we anthropomorphise them.

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