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by 0x1ceb00da 2mo ago
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- antirez 2mo agoSo many mathematicians over the years tried hard and failed, but now Anthropic just for some PR magically did it? And this after LLMs obtaining different math wins? What is your logic here really escapes my understanding.
- glimshe 2mo agoThe parent's absolutely nonsensical post highlights how polarized AI (as everything else) is today. I can understand someone being opposed to AI on moral, cost-benefit or productivity grounds. But we're seeing a lot of extremist "AI is good for nothing" posts out there nowadays.
- pred_ 2mo agoI don't think it is nonsensical at all. The author and his collaborator both appear to be bright people, so there's a good chance they had to offer non-trivial insights to guide the LLM, yet it's clearly in the interest of his employer to downplay whatever personal contribution they provided. Edit: Now the OP is flagged/dead for some reason. You could disagree on their take (calling it a marketing stunt is maybe a bit much), but I think the argument is sound, so flagging seems counterproductive to the discussion.
- glimshe 2mo agoI'm sure they had plenty of time to think about these insights without the LLM, as well as the many other mathematicians who tried to crack it over the years. Wether the LLM was simply an assistant or solved the problem entirely isn't as important as accepting than the LLM was the essential, previously missing piece in the solution.
- minimaxir 2mo ago> I think the argument is sound They got flagged because it is a literal conspiracy theory that assumes bad faith.
- latexr 2mo ago> literal conspiracy theory The strongest words they used were “marketing stunt”. Calling that a conspiracy theory is quite the stretch.
- soerxpso 2mo agoThat doesn't really even diminish the contribution from Fable, if true. Droves of grad students have been provided the same sorts of non-trivial insights and turned up no results.
- zaptheimpaler 2mo agoBelieving that AI played a very small role while we know this problem was open for decades with at least a few people taking serious cracks at it is just not a coherent logical position.
- witx 2mo agoThat's HN. No criticism allowed of llm whatsoever
- abc42 2mo agoIf you can call it polarized when a majority of people are just happily using the technology while a minority keeps spreading delusions and hatred.
- jibal 2mo agoThey gave their "logic", such as it is ... and it's utterly irrational. Note that the "they" who published the counterexample on X is some rando mathematician (Levent Alpöge) working for Anthropic, not Anthropic the organization. He posted the counterexample in a tweet -- reason enough for "not disclosing the LLM chat session". There's no reason to think that it won't provided if asked for, but it hardly seems relevant.
- 0x1ceb00da 2mo ago> some rando mathematician (Levent Alpöge) working for Anthropic, not Anthropic the organization Why do you trust a random stranger so much? Will you hand over your car keys to a random stranger? Sharing the chat will take 30s of their time. > There's no reason to think that it won't provided if asked for But they didn't provide it.
- Liquid_Fire 2mo agoOK, so the two options are: A) Claude really produced this counterexample B) A mathematician working for Anthropic solved a problem mathematicians have been working on for more than a century, and then credited it to Claude for PR purposes If you believe B is more likely, why would you then believe a proof in the form of a chat log, when said chat log could itself have been faked by Anthropic way more easily than solving the mathematical problem in the first place?
- fn-mote 2mo agoThe concern is that there could have been expert knowledge input, whose importance/worth we are unable to evaluate. I don’t believe a mathematician produced the counter example secretly, but how much did they contribute to the result? AI isn’t magic, so to evaluate the value delta, you need to know the value of the input.
- hgoel 2mo agoWhile I agree that we need the inputs to properly evaluate what this means for LLM capabilities, I don't really believe that the amount of knowledge input matters much for the overall significance of the result. These kinds of results are interesting for LLMs because mathematicians have been working on them for decades. If the result doesn't already exist, there's no way it's in the training data, and if mathematicians have been unsuccessfully tackling the problem for decades, it is believable that the use of a new tool made the result possible, even if guided by a great mathematician.
- 0x1ceb00da 2mo ago[flagged]
- j_maffe 2mo agoCheating how? The proof is in the pudding...
- fn-mote 2mo agoOn one hand, yes. The parent wants to be skeptical… nothing wrong with being suspicious of marketing claims, right? I would be a lot less impressed if I found out the session was guided by an expert in the field who already had a good idea of where to look. For example, I don’t believe that the results Terrance Tao gets from an LLM are comparable to what I am going to get. I’m not even saying I’m a skeptic. Just that there’s nothing wrong with keeping your eyes open and asking for details.
- aeon_ai 2mo agoBecause AI is only impressive if the average Taco Bell employee can guide it to address niche domain topics? It seems obvious to me that you’d need someone to point at a thing and say “pay attention to that”, as a baseline, to have any results at all with the current architecture and technology
- ceejayoz 2mo ago> I would be a lot less impressed if I found out the session was guided by an expert in the field who already had a good idea of where to look. Why? The conjecture stood for over a hundred years. Plenty of such experts have tried. "Fable makes experts able to solve things" is still a big story. I don't need to personally be able to do it for it to be a big story.
- Redoubts 2mo agoDude what?
- William_BB 2mo agoThere's a big difference between one shotting a counterexample using AI and using AI to find a counter-example by brute-force. Both are impressive, of course, but they're hardly comparable.
- eru 2mo agoI'm not so sure. People had been trying to use brute force to find counterexamples before.
- William_BB 2mo agoAI is great at reducing the search space and using human-like reasoning (in a brute-force way) to carry out the brute-force search. I'm not surprised by this result. This is exactly what AI should excel at, with human guidance.
- igravious 2mo ago"using human-like reasoning (in a brute-force way)" that's self-contradictory -- what brute force means is doing an exhaustive search of a search space (brute forcing it) using human-like(?) reasoning means cutting down the search space by having some sort of insight or intuition which allows you to prune branches from the entire tree
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo agoLLMs don't search trees. They generate plausible proofs and a human has to check it's true. Repeat until.
- astrange 2mo agoAgents can generate formal proofs that are checked with an oracle like Lean and can run in a loop.
- 2mo ago
- raxxorraxor 2mo agoThose silly advertisers do everything for exposure and if that means digging yourself into a niche alleged mathematical theorem to refute it, it is what needs to be done! Of course it would be really interesting how Claude approached this. Probably with some constraints regarding the input. And it would be interesting what these constraints were.
- dist-epoch 2mo agoAuthor probably doesn't want to show the prompt because they are now trying to find a bunch of other counter-examples with the same prompt
- regularfry 2mo agoThe reasoning trace would be far more interesting, and that's not exposed.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo agoI mean we have no idea what happened exactly, how Fable was used, how many times it was run, whether earlier models were also tried, what was the prompt, how long it run for, etc etc. All we have to go by is a tweet. Why not be skeptical about that?
- CamperBob2 2mo agoWhat you're asking for is exactly the sort of thing that belongs in, and will appear in, a journal article. There will likely be a preprint on arxiv, so you might keep an eye out for that. In any case, the fact that it was found by a commercial model means that the unfiltered reasoning trace isn't available even to the original author. So there are aspects of the problem-solving process we'll never see. Even if we did get access to the reasoning trace it wouldn't necessarily be definitive, given how these things work. Hopefully it'll be possible to get the same solution from an open-weight model like one of the 3T heavyweights that are said to be coming up for release. If so, the chain of thought can be scrutinized in-depth.
- eru 2mo agoThe original author works for Anthropic. And even without that, Anthropic might find this important enough to dig up the trace?
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo agoNo, I think it works the opposite way. Until there is an article somewhere that describes what happened, if there is one, all we have to go by is that some guy posted a counter-example for the Jacobian on X, with a vague allusion to using Fable and without any further information. Assuming and guessing anything about e.g. the method used at this point is just raising the noise level.
- CamperBob2 2mo agoNo one can figure out where you're coming from here. If the human solved a significant open problem without relying on AI, don't you think they'd have claimed the credit for themselves? The suggestion that a human, working at Anthropic or elsewhere, did the hard work needed to disprove the Jacobian Conjecture yet chose to claim falsely that their AI did it, amounts to an extraordinary accusation that requires extraordinary proof.
- greyw 2mo ago[flagged]
- 0x1ceb00da 2mo agoWhy?
- minimaxir 2mo agoThere will be more and more mathematical proofs provided by LLMs as they improve. If you assume every one is just a marketing tactic, you'll drive yourself insane.
- anxoo 2mo agoyou can believe a small, irrelevant lie and still go on happy. a very big lie sucks in more and more of your reality until you have to disbelieve your own eyes and ears.
- gonzalohm 2mo agoIf we don't ask for proof when someone claims something, the next few years are going to be rough for everyone. We can't trust anything nowadays
- mcosta 2mo agoThey have provided a literal mathematical proof.
- anxoo 2mo agoif you ask the chatbots for "list of top unsolved math problems", the JC comes in at a ranking of around #10 - #20. what, a problem that's been unsolved since 1939 was cracked because anthropic has an underground sweatshop of math Phds cranking out research, just so that they can slap "made by AI" on it? hell, maybe lizard people did it.
- abc42 2mo agoThis anti-AI sentiment is getting borderline insane.
- oska 2mo ago1. There is no such thing as "Artificial Intelligence" (but yes, machine learning and LLMs are real and powerful things) 2. Calling LLMs 'AI' is part of the grifting hype that has been wildly prevalent in the US corporate space. It's very natural and also very good that there is now backlash to and scepticism around all of the hype that is has been generated over the last 5 or so years
- UltraSane 2mo agoFinding a counterexample that humans have failed to find for 85 years is a marketing stunt?