Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
One of the things that’s never clear from the reporting on ai successes is exactly how much actual paid human time went in to achieving those successes. This was especially notable in the fable-based security work… a huge amount of person-hours went into turning fable-detections into actual meaningful vuln reports.
A lot of demonstrably clever and capable people are involved with the llms-for-maths work, and a lot of money was spent on their time and supporting their work. Replicating it without your own stable of mathematicians and computer scientists and all the tokens they can eat is probably impractical.
Fwiw, lean is a general purpose programming language, though despite microsoft’s efforts no-one uses it for that. I think its popularity with mathematicians came as a bit of a surprise.
Anyway, the other important thing that didn’t get reported on is that building the formal definition of the problem is not trivial! Obviously I don’t need to tell you that, but from the reporting you’d think that an llm solved all these problems, when in fact it was an llm in the hands of some very capable people who absolutely did not just prompt the thing in plain english.
Anyone hoping for self-marking homework here is going to be disappointed… lean slop confirming to formal spec slop is just expensive slop. Reviewing regular genai code is awful, even the thought of reviewing genai dependently-typed code makes me want a new career.
It is surprising how many exceptionally strong mathematicians have started working for OpenAI and Anthropic. These people would have easily become professors at top universities if they stayed in academia. I think many mathematicians, especially the competitive ones at the top, have a "progress at any cost" attitude (and I'm sure the paychecks helped). As for the results, you still need good mathematicians to sift through all the output to identify that the proofs are valid.
I would honestly be positive about universities developing their own specialized math AI (in an ethical manner) to help mathematicians get these kinds of results, but right now, AI is inseparable from these evil companies. Thankfully, I believe this is a likely outcome in the future because the AI companies will one day implode.
From what I've seen, most prompts are in plain English. I suppose the part where the AI parses the statement correctly is much easier than the part where it boils a couple lakes in the process of bashing its head against the wall trying millions of different combinations of random shit from the literature to slap together a proof. For one of the big results (cycle double cover), the prompt specified that the AI could use 64 subagents and was required to not give up for at least 8 hours. The tokenmaxxers would be proud, we didn't need that forest anyway. Thank god math doesn't have a CTO to look at the expense reports.