> Before approving construction, I would want communities of humans to understand why the design works and what justifies confidence in its safety. I would hope that we all would.
Until very recently, I pored over every single line of code Claude generated with razor sharp scrutiny. I would usually catch issues with every response. I'm catching fewer problems these days. Maybe the model is just getting better, and maybe I'm being less careful while under pressure to ship more and more often. But model capability is obviously growing. Even back in March, you could tell it "give me a function that adds two numbers" and you could be 100% confident that it would write the correct function. There was almost no point in looking at the code. Since then, the complexity floor of problems in the category "this is so simple that the model couldn't possibly get it wrong" is rising, and with it, my cognitive surrender to the model is increasing too. Why check it? It's obviously going to be correct.
If AI designs a terawatt fusion plant, then of course we're going to meticulously pore over every detail to ensure safety, reliability, efficiency, whatever. If we find no flaws in the design whatsoever, will we be less careful about the second one? The third one? What about the ten thousandth one? Will "a nuclear fusion plant" become something that models couldn't possibly get wrong?
Terence Tao is arguing that the human involvement in research is crucial, but doesn't convincingly justify why, in my opinion. He says that "human agency is a value of fundamental importance" and that we will need to build "thriving human communities that can understand [AI ideas] together" - not for the sake of correctness, which AI may surpass us on, but for, I guess, the possibility of reclaiming human meaning and purpose. I don't disagree with this at all, but it's not an argument, it's a statement of values. Unfortunately, the stark reality is that if AI does surpass humans, it will become the economically dominant strategy to not verify them and not double check them, but to just do whatever they say. This seems like a great way to raise p(doom). But as the models get better and better, and as I'm scrutinizing Claude's output less and less... I just hope that there are more Terence Taos out there than people like me.
In my experience, LLMs are becoming very good at executing, but not a creating novel ideas or being creative.
Most of programming is reusing existing ideas in new shapes to solve new problems, but all the building blocks are there in the training set. Or new blocks can (easily) be derived from existing ones.
Math is different, it requires quite a bit of creativity, it's not just 'reuse all existing blocks'.
For the moment LLMs are good at discovering things that we overlooked in maths, or apply cleverly existing math blocks to make new results, but making a new theory that is really useful is out of reach for the moment in my opinion.
Sure, and I hope LLMs will at some point be able to do it. It would simplify greatly my work.
However, at the moment I consider that they stay in the 'convex hull' of their training set + a provided context, and I don't see that much research that made real improvements to the situation.
pyridines · · focus · HN ↗
Until very recently, I pored over every single line of code Claude generated with razor sharp scrutiny. I would usually catch issues with every response. I'm catching fewer problems these days. Maybe the model is just getting better, and maybe I'm being less careful while under pressure to ship more and more often. But model capability is obviously growing. Even back in March, you could tell it "give me a function that adds two numbers" and you could be 100% confident that it would write the correct function. There was almost no point in looking at the code. Since then, the complexity floor of problems in the category "this is so simple that the model couldn't possibly get it wrong" is rising, and with it, my cognitive surrender to the model is increasing too. Why check it? It's obviously going to be correct.
If AI designs a terawatt fusion plant, then of course we're going to meticulously pore over every detail to ensure safety, reliability, efficiency, whatever. If we find no flaws in the design whatsoever, will we be less careful about the second one? The third one? What about the ten thousandth one? Will "a nuclear fusion plant" become something that models couldn't possibly get wrong?
Terence Tao is arguing that the human involvement in research is crucial, but doesn't convincingly justify why, in my opinion. He says that "human agency is a value of fundamental importance" and that we will need to build "thriving human communities that can understand [AI ideas] together" - not for the sake of correctness, which AI may surpass us on, but for, I guess, the possibility of reclaiming human meaning and purpose. I don't disagree with this at all, but it's not an argument, it's a statement of values. Unfortunately, the stark reality is that if AI does surpass humans, it will become the economically dominant strategy to not verify them and not double check them, but to just do whatever they say. This seems like a great way to raise p(doom). But as the models get better and better, and as I'm scrutinizing Claude's output less and less... I just hope that there are more Terence Taos out there than people like me.
somethingsome · · focus · HN ↗
Most of programming is reusing existing ideas in new shapes to solve new problems, but all the building blocks are there in the training set. Or new blocks can (easily) be derived from existing ones.
Math is different, it requires quite a bit of creativity, it's not just 'reuse all existing blocks'.
For the moment LLMs are good at discovering things that we overlooked in maths, or apply cleverly existing math blocks to make new results, but making a new theory that is really useful is out of reach for the moment in my opinion.
erwincoumans · · focus · HN ↗
Curious how this ages.
Recursive self improvement, self-play and multi-agent RL could make useful new theories, eventually.
somethingsome · · focus · HN ↗
However, at the moment I consider that they stay in the 'convex hull' of their training set + a provided context, and I don't see that much research that made real improvements to the situation.