alt Hacker NewsI don't think the author's criticism of "Big-O Cabal" is very nuanced, but to the second half of the essay it is funny/concerning/sobering to find that the OpenAI proof is doing brute-force search for all instances below some super-astronomic threshold. It kind of buries the lede if the proof did not mention this clearly and the author has to comb through it to find out (I asked ChatGPT the same on the pdf file, but it came up with some other threshold number).
I don't think it matters? It's completely standard for "galactic" algorithms and not relevant to big-O runtime.
The complaint that these algorithms aren't "realistic" is ostensibly valid, but you could just as well aim that cannon at 95%+ of math research too. Complexity theory is interesting and fun. Isn't that enough?