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ComplexSystems • today at 12:18 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

Yes, they should. They have invented a magic button that can tell you the long-awaited answers to the burning mathematical questions that you've spent your life researching. The caveat is that the technology is still new, so the explanations "are not fun to read" like set theory papers usually are (lol). If you don't think that's a worthwhile tradeoff, that's your call, but it sure as hell isn't everyone's.


Replies

advael • today at 12:23 AM

I don't think the claim is "they definitely have an oracle that solves the problem, and I reject it because it's hard to read". The claim is "OpenAI claims to have used an oracle to solve the problem. The proof is very difficult to read, and to even know if it does or not, we have to go through it with a fine-toothed comb, but they're going around claiming they definitely solved the problem (or at least getting press that claims that which they aren't pushing back against) and this might convince the people who sign grants even if it isn't true"

People who are invested in the idea that we've invented a general intelligence, now, which includes all these companies that are literally financially invested in this claim they are making, will tend to believe that its results can already be trusted in domains like this. Some mathematicians seem to believe some of the proofs written by their models, and some, like this one, don't. I do think it's valid for an expert to push back against the claim that the best use of their time right now is to verify the poorly written work of everyone who's claimed to solve the problem

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buriram • today at 12:41 AM

I don't understand. Why is this the onus of scientists and PhDs to review whatever results OpenAI had dumped out? If OpenAI had produced incomprehensible papers, surely any journals would just reject it, or demand the author to do a complete rewrite? Unless we are talking about a race to solve problems, which PhDs are afraid that they had been scooped up on?

bamboozled • today at 12:23 AM

The problem isn't just that the papers aren't fun to read. The problem is that a lot of the research that goes into solving these issues leads to other discovers, new fields to explore and people have to develop new approaches to solve them. The other part of it is, the quality and the enjoyment of working on these problems leads people to find new and other interest problems to work on.

If you just strip mine the answers and Sam Altmans magic button solves 100/100 problems, what's next? Who is left to come up with a new interesting question for the magic button to solve?

Lastly, life and the present moment is all there is, if there is no enjoyment in anything we do, then what's the point of all the "living for ever" Altman et al want to achieve.

We will live forever to read boring papers generated by LLMs? Literally sounds like an eternal hell.

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