[HN Gopher] Two announcements: AI for Math resources, and erdosp...
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Two announcements: AI for Math resources, and erdosproblems.com
Author : nabla9
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-06-15 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (terrytao.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (terrytao.wordpress.com)
| upmind wrote:
| What does AI for Math mean? People doing Math research that want
| to transition to AI research?
| cvoss wrote:
| Broadly, as you'll see in the Google doc linked from the
| announcement, they are referring to the use of computer systems
| to assist mathematical research, which falls into a two step
| process: 1) Identify a suitable language for use by both humans
| and computers for communication and manipulation of
| mathematical theorems and their proofs. 2) Employ both
| mathematicians and machine learning algorithms to generate
| interesting sentences in that language.
| upmind wrote:
| That makes a lot more sense, thanks.
| benreesman wrote:
| I'm generally a bit of an LLM skeptic, at least as concerns
| extravagant claims around "AGI" or self-improvement of any of
| that nonsense.
|
| But there are activities where an inherently high-temperature
| assistant (e.g. some Instruct-inspired tune) are a great fit,
| and those are almost definitionally at the boundary of
| "objectively faithful" and "a bit stochastic".
|
| I've never done any work in novel mathematics myself, but I'm a
| big fan of those who do, and any study of those who do paints a
| picture of roughly that boundary: those who are proficient can
| easily spot a falsehood but only with difficulty generate
| inspiration for a new idea.
|
| Of all the highly optimistic applications for 2024 LLMs,
| mathematics sounds pretty plausible?
| kevinventullo wrote:
| FWIW as a former mathematician, I believe that if LLM's can
| crack mathematics in the sense of say, solving the Riemann
| Hypothesis through chains of logical reasoning, then we'd be
| in the back half of reaching "AGI" in the sense of solving
| broad classes of general problems like drug discovery, or
| getting fusion to work, or even improving itself.
| benreesman wrote:
| Oh sure, I think that's pretty uncontroversial. An LLM that
| can with any consistency start at "prove or disprove P =
| NP" and arrive at a proof is in some sense super-
| intelligence.
|
| Even the best funded boosters are making no such claims
| AFAIK, I think a much more reasonable and sober assertion
| might be like "they are useful to doing real mathematics".
| adroniser wrote:
| The curious thing is if you can ever hit a snowball type
| point, because by proving theorems you are generating
| training data, and maybe you can get to a point where you
| effectively have limitless data.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _I'm generally a bit of an LLM skeptic, at least as concerns
| extravagant claims around "AGI" or self-improvement of any of
| that nonsense._
|
| _Of all the highly optimistic applications for 2024 LLMs,
| mathematics sounds pretty plausible?_
|
| You probably already know this, but I think it bears pointing
| out explicitly: in this context we're not talking (only)
| about LLM's. There's a LOT more to AI than just Large
| Language Models, and the list of resources linked reflects
| that.
| iamcreasy wrote:
| The article or the linked Google doc doesn't mention how AI for
| Math resources is different than other resources list out there?
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