[HN Gopher] The QMA Singularity
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The QMA Singularity
Author : frozenseven
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-09-28 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scottaaronson.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (scottaaronson.blog)
| findingMeaning wrote:
| What does it mean for us? Where are we headed?
|
| There is somewhere between 3 to 5 years of time left. This is
| maximum we can think of.
| bananaflag wrote:
| Spend time with your loved ones.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Most likely nothing. No one knows.
|
| As someone that was very gung ho on autonomous vehicles a
| decade ago, the chances of completely replacing people with AI
| in next ten years is small.
| daxfohl wrote:
| There still needs to be someone to ask the questions. And even
| if it can proactively ask its own questions and independently
| answer and report on them to parties it thinks will be
| interested, then cost comes into play. It's a finite resource,
| so there will be a market for computation time. Then, whoever
| owns the purse strings will be in charge of prioritizing what
| it independently decides to work on. If that person decides
| pure math is meaningful, then it'll eventually start cranking
| out questions and results faster than mathematicians can
| process them, and so we'll stop spending money on that until
| humans have caught up.
|
| After that, as it's variously hopping between solving math
| problems, finding cures for cancer, etc., someone will
| eventually get the bright idea to use it to take over the world
| economy so that they have exclusive access to all money and
| thus all AIs. After that, who knows. Depends on the whims of
| that individual. The rest of the world would probably go back
| to a barter system and doing math by hand, and once the "king"
| dies, probably start right back over again and fall right back
| into the same calamity. One would think we'd eventually learn
| from this, but the urge to be king is simply too great. The
| cycle would continue forever until something causes humans to
| go fully extinct.
|
| After that, AI, by design, doesn't have its own goals, so it'd
| likely go silent.
| joak wrote:
| Excerpt: But here's a reason why other people might care. This is
| the first paper I've ever put out for which a key technical step
| in the proof of the main result came from AI--specifically, from
| GPT5-Thinking.
| HPMOR wrote:
| This is insane.
| fluorinerocket wrote:
| What?
| fHtqhF wrote:
| Aaronson worked for OpenAI and should disclose if he has any
| stock or options.
|
| Anyway, it took multiple tries and, as the article itself states,
| GPT might have seen a similar function in the training data.
|
| I don't find this trial and error pattern matching with human
| arbitration very impressive.
| HPMOR wrote:
| Scott Aaronson worked on watermarking text from GPT to catch
| plagiarizing. This is the most commercially naive project ever,
| given, at the time, most of ChatGPT's paid usage was from
| students using ChatGPT's output to cheat on assignments. If
| anything this should serve to disprove his impure motives in
| reporting these results.
|
| I think you are missing the forest in the trees. This is one of
| the world's leading experts in Quantum Computing, receiving
| ground breaking technical help, in his field of expertise from
| a commercially available AI.
| crowd_pleaser wrote:
| What he worked on is irrelevant. If you are a contractor for
| an American startup, it is highly likely that you received an
| options package, especially if you are high profile.
|
| The help is not ground breaking. There are decades old
| theorem prover tactics that are far more impressive, all
| without AI.
| frozenseven wrote:
| Two new accounts suddenly show up. This one named after a
| phrase that was mentioned just minutes ago ("crowd
| pleaser"). Huh?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45408531
| HPMOR wrote:
| Actually, this is wrong. The point of being a contractor is
| to __not__ give somebody an options package, or full-time
| employee benefits. My friends who are resident researchers
| at OAI do not get any option packages.
|
| Regardless, his financial considerations are secondary to
| the fact, AI has rapidly saturated most if not all
| benchmarks associated with high human intelligence, and are
| now on the precipice of making significant advances in
| scientific fields. This post comes after a sequence of the
| ICPC and IMO both falling to AI.
|
| You are hoping to minimize these advancements because it
| gives solace to you (us) as humans. If these are "trivial"
| advancements then perhaps everything will be alright. But
| frankly, we must be intellectually honest here. AI is soon
| to be, significantly smarter than even the smartest humans.
| And we must grapple with those consequences.
| HappyPanacea wrote:
| The help is not ground breaking as an argument, however
| being able to come up with it is and is something which
| decades old theorem prover tactics can't do at all (unless
| you fix N).
| anothermathbozo wrote:
| It's always a crowd pleaser to be skeptical of ai development.
| Not sure what people feel like they are achieving for
| continually announcing they aren't buying it when someone
| claims they've made effective use of these tools.
| derektank wrote:
| >I don't find this trial and error pattern matching with human
| arbitration very impressive.
|
| It might not be very impressive, but if it allows experts in
| mathematics and physics to reduce the amount of time it takes
| them to produce new proofs from 1-2 weeks to 1-2 hours, that's
| a very meaningful improvement in their productivity.
| burkaman wrote:
| > maybe GPT5 had seen this or a similar construction somewhere in
| its training data
|
| I'm disappointed that he didn't spend a little time checking if
| this was the case before publishing the blog post. Without GPT,
| would it really have taken "a week or two to try out ideas and
| search the literature", or would it just have taken an hour or so
| to find a paper that used this function? Just saying "I spent
| some time searching and couldn't find this exact function
| published anywhere" would have added a lot to the post.
|
| Sharing the conversation would be cool too, I'm curious if Scott
| just said "no that won't work" 10 times until it did, or if he
| was constructively working with the LLM to get to an answer.
| vzaliva wrote:
| He could have asked GPT to find prior mentions or inspirations
| for this idea...
| HappyPanacea wrote:
| > or would it just have taken an hour or so to find a paper
| that used this function?
|
| It is pretty hard to find something like this perhaps if you
| had math aware search engine enhanced with AI and access to all
| math papers you could find if this was used in the past. I
| tried using approach0 (math aware search engine) but it isn't
| good enough and I didn't found anything.
| SmartestUnknown wrote:
| The expression f(z) = \sum_i 1/(z-\lambda_i) is called
| Stieltjes transform and is heavily used in random matrix theory
| and similar expressions are used in other works such as Batson,
| Spielman and Srivastava. This is all to analyze the behavior of
| eigenvalues which is exactly what they were trying to
| understand. I'd be very surprised if Aaronson doesn't know
| about this.
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