6 ms·

Replace philosophers for mathematicians and Douglas Adams was spot on again. Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures, they can certai

by DrBazza 2mo ago

Replace philosophers for mathematicians and Douglas Adams was spot on again. Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures, they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do. I suppose there really are some mathematicians out there today, whose last few years of study, have just been up-ended by this. -- "Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!" "What's the problem?" said Lunkwill. "I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!" "We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!" "You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"

pama 1mo ago
> Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures I disagree. I routinely let LLMs speculate or generate hypotheses along the way of helping with technical research. Sometimes they can prove the correctness of a concrete math idea but other times even an unproven conjecture helps with the numerical algorithm implementation and the result is then simply supported by additional data. I guess that any autoresearch-adjacent application has LLMs intuiting and coming up with hypotheses/conjectures—as do the steps/lemmas along a complex proof. In my opinion the modern LLMs are powerful intuitive thinkers that generate lots of conjectures of varying quality or importance.
evenhash 1mo ago
> Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures People keep saying this. Why? Surely the AI can complete the prompt “Generate new research questions based on these observations”? When I read the reasoning traces of coding models they are constantly asking themselves questions and attempting to answer them.
- claytongulick 1mo ago
  > People keep saying this. Why? For the same reason that you can't draw a 15 of Diamonds from a regular card deck.
  - treis 1mo ago
    Of course you can. Tape a 7 and 8 of diamonds together and boom 15 of diamonds
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
- tuvix 1mo ago
  All arguments like this boil down to semantics at a certain point, but yes large language models can “intuit” because they can generalize between examples. The issue then becomes how you pack new examples into context. Humans can “intuit” based on a much larger, if not unlimited, context. Also I just want to say that human cognition is something so insanely complex and deep that we will not understand it at all in my lifetime. To attribute all, or really any, aspects of human cognition to a machine at this point is silly to me.
  - michaelmrose 1mo ago
    Define insanely complex and deep in a way that isn't illiterate hand waving. Most humans are dumber than a box of rocks. Here in Seattle we had one of many light rail-related fuckups where they had to replace part of the line with buses. People piled into the front of one when it was full. When people got out they never moved back. As the driver struggled to close the door and people struggled to get in the wad of people never moved back to fill the ample space. Chatgpt was smarter than the average person a while ago
    - tuvix 1mo ago
      I’m not talking about the actions we take or how we might perform at certain tasks, I’m talking about how our brains actually work. My point is that we have no idea how I’m able to imagine an apple and see it in my mind’s eye. It’s basically biological magic to us at this point. There are processes at work there that we don’t even have the language to describe.
WarmWash 1mo ago
>Whilst current models can't 'intuit That's how they are finding these solutions though, unless we are just going to label intuition as something only humans can do. Like a submarine being unable to swim or whatever that example is.
- rirze 1mo ago
  > "matrices"
  - fasterik 1mo ago
    Saying that AI is "matrices" is like saying human cognition is "neurons." Maybe true at some level, but it's a low-level implementation detail. The important part of a language model is the function that maps tokens to contextual embeddings. You could compute this function using analog computing, biological neurons, or any other substrate.
    - watutalkinbout 1mo ago
      It isn't an implementation for neurons, unless you believe in a designing god. Matrices are an implementation detail in reconstructing the surface of human knowledge. It's a complex surface, but it's a regurgitation.
      - aswegs8 1mo ago
        What's the argument here? It's not about the implementation method, it is about the behavior that emerges from it. You could calculate the next token by hand on paper if you had enough time.
        watutalkinbout 1mo ago
        Yep, it's a facsimile of a filtered subset of all human behaviour.
        alberto-m 1mo ago
zahlman 1mo ago
> they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do Of course computers can grind in a way that humans can't. But now we have systems that convert the human-comprehensible ideas into a computer's plan of attack, in a way that greatly expands the frontier of ideas thus treatable.
jacquesm 1mo ago
Ahh, but you missed the continuation, where they get to the heart of the matter: money. "Excuse me, We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" DT: Might I make an observation at this point? MT: You keep out of this metal nose. VF: We demand that that machine not be allowed to think about this problem! DT: If I might make an observation… MT: We’ll go on strike! VF: That’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your hands. DT: Who will that inconvenience? MT: Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience you box of black legging binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt! DT: [Booming] If I might make an observation … “All I wanted to say,” bellowed the computer, “is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” He paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone’s attention, before continuing more quietly. “But the program will take me a little while to run.” Fook glanced impatiently at his watch. “How long?” he said. “Seven and a half million years,” said Deep Thought. Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other. “Seven and a half million years!” they cried in chorus. “Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I? And it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole are of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually going to come up with, and who better, to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?” The two philosophers gaped at him. “Bloody hell,” said Majikthise, “now that is what I call thinking. Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?” “Dunno,” said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper; “think our brains must be too highly trained, Majikthise.” So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and into a life-style beyond their wildest dreams.”
MostlyStable 1mo ago
From a mathematician who was intimately familiar with some of these problems [0] >I don’t understand it yet. Maybe it’ll take me an afternoon to check all the calculations, but what would still be missing is why this was an approach that would’ve made sense in the first place. Is there some broader context or theory within which this would’ve been the obvious thing to do? What other results can be proven using these techniques? What is it telling us about quantum information or operator theory? I have no idea. I spent about an hour this morning asking ChatGPT these questions, but it’s somewhat frustrating because it speaks with a mishmash of physicist, operator algebraist, quantum information theorist-lingo, plus the usual LLM breezy lilt that annoys everybody. They certainly seem to have "intuited", in a way that is not immediately obvious to experts in the field, the way to solve at least some of these problems. This was not just simply grinding away at a method that humans already knew would work and just hadn't gotten to yet. [0] https://nitter.poast.org/henryquantum/status/2083623695436623915 https://nitter.poast.org/henryquantum/status/208362369543662...
- andai 1mo ago
  I think it might be like waveform collapse, but very high dimensional.
  - DiscourseFan 1mo ago
    Can you expand on this?
    - alberto-m 1mo ago
      Not OP, but my interpretation is this. Quantum waveform collapse has been proposed as explanation for consciousness, allowing to explain how an entity can have free will and yet obey rigid physical laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse I think OP is suggesting a similar thing happened in the LLM, implying it gained consciousness despite following a well-defined compute process.
      - 1mo ago

by DrBazza 2mo ago

pama 1mo ago

> Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures I disagree. I routinely let LLMs speculate or generate hypotheses along the way of helping with technical research. Sometimes they can prove the correctness of a concrete math idea but other times even an unproven conjecture helps with the numerical algorithm implementation and the result is then simply supported by additional data. I guess that any autoresearch-adjacent application has LLMs intuiting and coming up with hypotheses/conjectures—as do the steps/lemmas along a complex proof. In my opinion the modern LLMs are powerful intuitive thinkers that generate lots of conjectures of varying quality or importance.

evenhash 1mo ago

> Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures People keep saying this. Why? Surely the AI can complete the prompt “Generate new research questions based on these observations”? When I read the reasoning traces of coding models they are constantly asking themselves questions and attempting to answer them.

claytongulick 1mo ago
> People keep saying this. Why? For the same reason that you can't draw a 15 of Diamonds from a regular card deck.
- treis 1mo ago
  Of course you can. Tape a 7 and 8 of diamonds together and boom 15 of diamonds
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
tuvix 1mo ago
All arguments like this boil down to semantics at a certain point, but yes large language models can “intuit” because they can generalize between examples. The issue then becomes how you pack new examples into context. Humans can “intuit” based on a much larger, if not unlimited, context. Also I just want to say that human cognition is something so insanely complex and deep that we will not understand it at all in my lifetime. To attribute all, or really any, aspects of human cognition to a machine at this point is silly to me.
- michaelmrose 1mo ago
  Define insanely complex and deep in a way that isn't illiterate hand waving. Most humans are dumber than a box of rocks. Here in Seattle we had one of many light rail-related fuckups where they had to replace part of the line with buses. People piled into the front of one when it was full. When people got out they never moved back. As the driver struggled to close the door and people struggled to get in the wad of people never moved back to fill the ample space. Chatgpt was smarter than the average person a while ago
  - tuvix 1mo ago
    I’m not talking about the actions we take or how we might perform at certain tasks, I’m talking about how our brains actually work. My point is that we have no idea how I’m able to imagine an apple and see it in my mind’s eye. It’s basically biological magic to us at this point. There are processes at work there that we don’t even have the language to describe.

WarmWash 1mo ago

>Whilst current models can't 'intuit That's how they are finding these solutions though, unless we are just going to label intuition as something only humans can do. Like a submarine being unable to swim or whatever that example is.

rirze 1mo ago
> "matrices"
- fasterik 1mo ago
  Saying that AI is "matrices" is like saying human cognition is "neurons." Maybe true at some level, but it's a low-level implementation detail. The important part of a language model is the function that maps tokens to contextual embeddings. You could compute this function using analog computing, biological neurons, or any other substrate.
  - watutalkinbout 1mo ago
    It isn't an implementation for neurons, unless you believe in a designing god. Matrices are an implementation detail in reconstructing the surface of human knowledge. It's a complex surface, but it's a regurgitation.
    - aswegs8 1mo ago
      What's the argument here? It's not about the implementation method, it is about the behavior that emerges from it. You could calculate the next token by hand on paper if you had enough time.
      - watutalkinbout 1mo ago
        Yep, it's a facsimile of a filtered subset of all human behaviour.
      - alberto-m 1mo ago

zahlman 1mo ago

> they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do Of course computers can grind in a way that humans can't. But now we have systems that convert the human-comprehensible ideas into a computer's plan of attack, in a way that greatly expands the frontier of ideas thus treatable.

jacquesm 1mo ago

Ahh, but you missed the continuation, where they get to the heart of the matter: money. "Excuse me, We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" DT: Might I make an observation at this point? MT: You keep out of this metal nose. VF: We demand that that machine not be allowed to think about this problem! DT: If I might make an observation… MT: We’ll go on strike! VF: That’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your hands. DT: Who will that inconvenience? MT: Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience you box of black legging binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt! DT: [Booming] If I might make an observation … “All I wanted to say,” bellowed the computer, “is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” He paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone’s attention, before continuing more quietly. “But the program will take me a little while to run.” Fook glanced impatiently at his watch. “How long?” he said. “Seven and a half million years,” said Deep Thought. Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other. “Seven and a half million years!” they cried in chorus. “Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I? And it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole are of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually going to come up with, and who better, to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?” The two philosophers gaped at him. “Bloody hell,” said Majikthise, “now that is what I call thinking. Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?” “Dunno,” said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper; “think our brains must be too highly trained, Majikthise.” So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and into a life-style beyond their wildest dreams.”

MostlyStable 1mo ago

From a mathematician who was intimately familiar with some of these problems [0] >I don’t understand it yet. Maybe it’ll take me an afternoon to check all the calculations, but what would still be missing is why this was an approach that would’ve made sense in the first place. Is there some broader context or theory within which this would’ve been the obvious thing to do? What other results can be proven using these techniques? What is it telling us about quantum information or operator theory? I have no idea. I spent about an hour this morning asking ChatGPT these questions, but it’s somewhat frustrating because it speaks with a mishmash of physicist, operator algebraist, quantum information theorist-lingo, plus the usual LLM breezy lilt that annoys everybody. They certainly seem to have "intuited", in a way that is not immediately obvious to experts in the field, the way to solve at least some of these problems. This was not just simply grinding away at a method that humans already knew would work and just hadn't gotten to yet. [0] https://nitter.poast.org/henryquantum/status/2083623695436623915 https://nitter.poast.org/henryquantum/status/208362369543662...

andai 1mo ago
I think it might be like waveform collapse, but very high dimensional.
- DiscourseFan 1mo ago
  Can you expand on this?
  - alberto-m 1mo ago
    Not OP, but my interpretation is this. Quantum waveform collapse has been proposed as explanation for consciousness, allowing to explain how an entity can have free will and yet obey rigid physical laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse I think OP is suggesting a similar thing happened in the LLM, implying it gained consciousness despite following a well-defined compute process.
    - 1mo ago