5 ms·
This is great. But how incremental are these advancements? I picked one at random (B.2 -- the second autocorrelation inequality). Then, I looked up the paper
by qq12as 1y ago
This is great.
But how incremental are these advancements?
I picked one at random (B.2 -- the second autocorrelation inequality). Then, I looked up the paper that produced the previous state of the art (https://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.1379 https://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.1379). It turns out that the authors had themselves found the upper bound by performing a numerical search using "Mathematica 6" (p.4). Not only did the authors consider this as a secondary contribution (p.2), but they also argued that finding something better was very doable, but not worth the pain:
"We remark that all this could be done rigorously, but one needs to control
the error arising from the discretization, and the sheer documentation
of it is simply not worth the effort, in view of the minimal gain." (p.5)
So at least in this case it looks like the advancement produced by AlphaEvolve was quite incremental (still cool!).
- prvc 1y agoMerely from your telling, it seems it is no longer "not worth the effort", as "the effort" has been reduced drastically. This is itself significant.
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoThat right and In fact it’s the core purpose of the tool. This is complex automation which by definition compresses the solution into a computable process that works more efficiently than the non-automated process That, in fact, is the revolutionary part - you’re changing how energy is used to solve the problem.
- codr7 1y agoFaster, yes; more efficiently...I guess that's why they're funding nuclear plants then?
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoYes. Electrical power generation, transmission and transformation into work is more efficient, per labor unit, than using a human.
- UltraSane 1y agoGPUs are VASTLY more energy efficient than humans!
- pms 1y agoI don't know what you mean exactly, but it seems false. The human brain uses about 20 watts of power. A GPU uses more.
- empath75 1y agoThis is exactly why I think the concerns about AI taking people's jobs are overblown. There is not a limited amount of knowledge work to do or things that can be invented or discovered. There's just work that isn't worth the effort, time or money to do right now, it doesn't mean it's not valuable, it's just not cost effective. If you reduce effort, time and money, then suddenly you can do it. Like even just for programming. I just had an AI instrument my app for tracing, something I wanted to do for a while, but I didn't know how to do and didn't feel like figuring out how to do it. That's not work we were likely to hire someone to do or that would ever get done if the AI wasn't there. It's a small thing, but small things add up.
- geodel 1y agoIt is not some very explicit threshold beyond which AI will take job but before it won't. What's already happening is long drawn attrition where tools at different level of code, low code , no code will keep creeping up. And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop existing altogether. In a way it is nothing new but natural progression of technology. It is increasing pace of change that is different. Can a person learn some skills by their 20s and apply productively throughout their lifetime? Now at this point it is so thoroughly untrue that I'd be laughed out if I asked for such thing. We are told to up skill few times in career to up-skilling continuously. As changes are getting faster and faster more people are gonna fall wayside and of course they can blame themselves for their predicament.
- czl 1y ago> And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop existing altogether. Automation changed farming for the worse? Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work? Farmers were replaced with low skilled labor? Do you think the job of a farmer (aka "food grower") will stop existing? I do not predict future only look at what happened in the past and my answer to each question above about farming is the opposite what your comment would imply if it was applied to farming.
- SideQuark 1y agoThis advance likely uses more compute than the authors in 2009 could have imagined. It most certainly is not drastically reduced effort.
- cman1444 1y agoThat assumes that compute = effort, which is not how most people would interpret it I think.
- SideQuark 1y agoAnyone in computing, especially things related to deep learning, do. If you prefer to think of human effort, there was also immense human effort building the models, the needed infra, assembling the data to train on, etc. There's usually 1000+ specialists on projects like this (see the last chat gpt paper author list, which took pages and pages as an appendix). There is no way I can think any of this result was anything more than a massive effort, costing 10s to 100+ millions of dollars. Go ahead and explain how this was low effort.
- luckydata 1y agonot worth the time for a human, but if you can throw AI at all of those "opportunities" it adds up substantially because all the chores can be automated.
- baq 1y agoIf this is not the beginning of the take off I don’t know what is.
- runsWphotons 1y agoYeah for the kissing number stuff people can find slight improvements if they want. It usually isn't worth it because it provides no insight. But maybe when you generate a lot of them one or some family will turn out to be interesting.