As unsurprised as I am by this, and as much as I suspect a lot of people could have guessed it, having Claude confirm it is still fascinating, but.

Somehow, I find these results fascinating, but also quite sad, because we used a machine to solve it at all. I feel like some half drunk motivated graduate level humans could have figured it out too.

Then again, once you know the answer, perhaps you have an obligation to share it, keeping it to yourself might be unfair to everyone else.

Honestly I’m not entirely sure how I feel about all this. I would gladly welcome any groundbreaking work Claude might do to solve hard problems and move the world forward by decades or even centuries.

But these sorts of fun problems feel like things we should avoid pointing LLMs at. They remind me of those weird programming puzzles that are difficult to solve but incredibly fun to work through.

My concern is that if Claude ends up solving all the fun problems, will humans be left with nothing but the hard, headache-inducing ones? Tao had raised a similar concern, problems that graduate students would have been expected to solve and learn the process, are now things you can simply point an LLM at.

I’m still not sure how I will ever reconcile with this feeling, about any of this. I just find it genuinely sad that we might be automating away not only the difficult work, but also the joy of figuring things out for ourselves.