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>The speed with which we were able to produce this proof demonstrates that it is now possible to formalize large swaths of mathematics, which may both catch err
by sigmar 12d ago
>The speed with which we were able to produce this proof demonstrates that it is now possible to formalize large swaths of mathematics, which may both catch errors in the common body of mathematical proofs and reduce the burden of refereeing new work.
^ this section should have been in the first few paragraphs imho. Explaining why this is relevant shouldn't be so far down.
- t_gamer_kle 12d agoForgive the authors of the article for assuming readers would complete it.
- finjo 6d agoHave you written text for humans? You’re lucky if you can get people to read more than the title. You’re very lucky if they read past the first paragraph.
- salomonk_mur 12d agoFor any body of text (or in general, any exposition of any kind), the responsibility to explain the value of the article is very much in the author's side. Explaining the value of what you are showing should always go towards the start. Else, why would anyone bother with the rest?
- HappyPanacea 12d agoBuzzard is writing for his blog audience - mostly mathematicians and not the casual visiting HN user.
- jibal 12d agoEh? The quote is from Anthropic, not Buzzard.
- beepbooptheory 12d agoFeel very grateful I was never taught this... Would have missed out on quite a lot of good bodies of text in my life I think! Pushing through any initial friction or ignorance I might have as a reader, having the patience and charity to bear with an author until you get it, was instead what I was always taught. Giving such a blanket "responsibility" to the author at all is just such a bummer! I say let them do whatever they want, there is always more than one way to express oneself. Someone who was never taught to write a clear thesis in the first paragraph for whatever reason doesn't inherently have less to say.
- SoMomentary 12d agoUnfortunately I don't see this particular view paying off in the age of AI, as many prove they have nothing at all to say but say it anyways. Which isn't to say people shouldn't write if they enjoy writing, but I for one will stay a discerning reader.
- Geof25 12d ago> Feel very grateful I was never taught this... Never heard of Abstract section? First semester on a college or last year on high school.
- beng-nl 12d agoI think this is a Fermat joke :-)
- dahart 11d agoIsn’t deciding what responsibilities there are in any text very much in the author’s side and not yours? Haven’t you dramatically overstated your case? Many expositions do not contain an explanation of their value at all. Works of fiction are a good example, and there are many many others. Often it’s the responsibility of the readers & reviewers to decide on questions like value.
- make3 11d agoyou would never assume this if you've spoken to any human being, ever
- paxys 12d agoNah they should have released it in a 14-part tweet instead.
- doctoboggan 12d agoIsn't it the cost we care about, rather than the speed? All we know know is that a frontier AI lab was able to do it in 11 days, we have no idea how much compute they threw at it.
- SoMomentary 12d agoThey said 6 billion tokens, which isn't as much as I thought it might be.
- trostaft 12d agoAm I doing my napkin math correct? The post says it's using a model comparable to Fable 5.1, which is $50 per million output tokens. So this is ~$300K? Surely an over-estimate due to caching.
- FartyMcFarter 11d agoSurely input tokens are also involved, and not necessarily only for the initial prompt if there are feedback loops or agent interactions.
- robotpepi 12d ago> reduce the burden of refereeing new work. As a professional mathematician, I rarely need to worry about the correctness of a paper. The main difficulty of writing a review is instead understanding what the results of the paper mean in its context, how the results are presented, etc.