alt Hacker NewsWhy should that make material difference to the IPO? What is the economic value of those results?
The entire US federal budget for math research is something like $100M annually. And mathematicians in other countries are hardly making bank either. How does one reconcile how the market has historically valued mathematics with the cash-strapped frontier labs ploughing so much money into that enterprise?
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runarberg • yesterday at 9:54 PM
The market works in mysterious ways. What companies do for marketing is often irrational, what companies do to attract investors is likewise often irrational, and why investors invest in companies is also often irrational.
Why should that make a material difference to the IPO? Because of the vibes, and investors are indeed all about the vibes.
They're burying any doubt that the models are capable of superhuman performance on intellectual tasks. Neural nets aren't calculators, and were notably poor at mathematical reasoning tasks for a long time. Now they're not, and the labs are proving that by chewing through what would ordinarily be decades of progress in a month. And the reason to go for math in particular is because there's no wiggle room. You can't just dismiss it as hallucination.
If the models can do this, they're almost certainly good at just about everything, because the reasoning and creativity required to solve these problems will translate. And even if they were only good at this stuff, that's still a tremendously valuable thing, because quantitative reasoning and analysis is the bedrock for many, many industries.
oAI is gunning for the largest IPO in history at this point, and they might actually get there.