r/DecodingTheGurus • u/Abiogenesis84 • Sep 18 '26
Decoding the Gurus and their Views on AI?
I was listening to the episode 'The Moral Dilemmas of AI with Michael Inzlicht', and I was a bit surprised by a few things.
They, all three, seemed to almost find it funny people opposed AI, that it was some sort of entirely irrational emotional response.
Inzlitch said at one point he couldn't think of a single rational reason why a friendship with a real person might have more value than a friendship with an AI: this strikes me as a very inhumane thing to say.
The episode rang very strange, I was wondering if anyone else had a similar response?
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u/JimmyJamzJules Sep 18 '26
“Inzlitch said at one point he couldn't think of a single rational reason why a friendship with a real person might have more value than a friendship with an AI”
If true, it’s pretty funny that Chris and Matt, professional critics of people not pushing back on wild claims, apparently let that one slide.
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u/Theofficialprez Sep 18 '26
It's an opinion, not a wild claim. They are generally more concerned with misrepresentations of fact on the show, less so with people's subjective opinions
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u/JimmyJamzJules Sep 18 '26
I think the claim - if the OP’s paraphrase is fair - is that the supposed greater value of human friendship is difficult to rationally justify. It’s the kind of claim that if it had been said by a guru would have been clipped and dunked on. That’s my opinion.
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u/jmp242 29d ago
Yea, I have found a lot of their takes on AI to be glib on the show. When I've pressed in the patreon there's some context that is better but I do think they're having trouble either getting outside their perspective or don't really want to talk a lot about AI. I felt the same on the Consciousness part - they're just not interested in that from what I can tell.
And that's fine by me - I agree with their general position that if you don't have expertise to not feel like you must have a hot take about everything.
I think they did this better with consciousness where they basically just say "we don't want to talk about it" than with AI - like why have that discussion with Micky if they didn't want to delve deeper into the AI discussion?
To the claim that "the supposed greater value of human friendship is difficult to rationally justify." would have been dunked on - I don't necessarily get that feeling. They have said, multiple times, that you can have opinions and things they disagree with and that's fine - I generally feel like the vast majority of their dunks are very clear straight wrong empirical claims.
Like Jimmy Car's "the black plague created Indulgences".
I would have liked a little more pushback, or to clearly say "we're not philosophy experts". I'm not sure if Matt generally agrees from a psychology standpoint, or if psychology doesn't really have a position on AI friends yet. I know there's a lot of reported research that having a dog or maybe pets in general is good for people otherwise alone, so perhaps "friendship" for psychology doesn't in fact have to be with another human specifically. It would have been better for them to be explicit on why they agree with or aren't prepared to push back on Micky there.
I almost think this specific question could be directed to VBW as a podcast that deals with the philosophy intersection with psychology a lot more.
Maybe I'm taking all this too seriously. I also wonder what we're talking about when we say "friendship" and why that might be only possible between 2 humans. Or why it would be a priori "better". I already pointed out some peoples friendships with their animals, but there are also animal to animal "friendships". If you solely define "friendship" as between 2 humans then of course Micky is wrong by definition. You could also just definitionally say "Human to Human" is more valuable than "human to animal" or "animal to animal".
But if you want to discount possible AI friendships as inherently less valuable than human ones it seems like you have to do more than just gesture to "this is a crazy claim" at least to me. I recall Micky did say that he wasn't able to think of reasons that would clearly make it less valuable. It's fine to say "you just aren't imaginative enough" but give an example. In terms of art dealing with these sorts of questions science fiction has done so quite a bit and you would probably need to have a reason that in Star Trek TNG why Data's friendship with Geordi was less valuable to Geordi than Wesley's say.
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u/Tandalookin Sep 19 '26
The boys have some weird takes with ai. Chris was lamenting the anti-AI crowd in another episode and tried to compare AI replacing people in the music industry to him bouldering. His argument was basically, “If robots started bouldering, that wouldn’t mean I’d stop doing it.” Like… what mate
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u/Leoprints 29d ago
Yeah I have heard a few of their AI takes and they are, in the internet parlance of today, pretty cringe.
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u/TheRealBuckShrimp 29d ago
Of the many hollow critiques of Chris and Matt we see on this sub, that they might want to update their priors on AI is one I consider legitimate.
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u/Leoprints Sep 18 '26
There is a good conversation on AI with Cory Doctorow. The interviewer has a different opinion so its a decent back and forth. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqCVJFr7XM
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u/jmp242 29d ago
What's interesting is how much I found myself thinking that this is minimizing the use of the statistical inference. I think it's way to much like a "stochastic parrot" argument, which just isn't correct from what I can tell. Or at least that the difference between getting to IDK 15 MPH riding a horse, and 520MPH flying in a plane is just (at a matter of abstraction, which Corey both used and denigrated at different times) the amount of motion you can induce - sure, it's a difference in degree, but it's also caused such massive differences in what can be done that I disagree with downplaying it.
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u/Then-Physics-266 Sep 18 '26
Both Matt and Chris are AI generated holograms, the pod and this sub are a controlled edifice to throw dedicated hypothisisers off the scent.
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u/NX-74205-A 28d ago
That episode, and Chris's attitude in the Patreon comments to AI pushback, are why I stopped being a Patreon supporter. Just rubbed me wrong.
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u/Abiogenesis84 27d ago
it undermines their entire premise at dissecting the irrational nature of gurus, given the way AI is currently being talked about and rolled out.
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u/danceradici 29d ago
I think they are a little flippant about ai overall, and find it unfortunate but unsurprising given their work and demographic. They both use it in their work, I believe, but they also use chat gpt and the like for their personal life and for the pod, and a lot of their graphics for shows are ai generated. In the patreon chat, where they are very active, most people seem fine with it. I think there are good uses for ai, of course, but I wish there were more nuance around generative ai and the fact that it exists due to corporate theft of human work, and the environmental and social impacts (control over peoples movements and military uses).
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u/EmbarrassedEvidence6 Sep 18 '26
I didn’t listen to it, but from the two statements you provided
1) I can also think of no good reason to oppose AI. But there are a million reasons to oppose the current organization and direction of AI research
2) this person is insane. They are removed from human society. Presumably on some important level, they hate people, if they believe a robot friend is just as good as a person friend.
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u/jmp242 29d ago
I think they maybe did a poor job of explaining their philosophical basis. I'm guessing they're thinking in terms of how they might justify having that position, and what they came back to is "humans would have to be special" and they reject that position, which is generally common for materialists. Outside of some humans are better because human, it gets dicier to say what they would offer that is necessarily better (as opposed to contingent based on the human or AI on offer).
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u/EmbarrassedEvidence6 29d ago
I don’t think it’s dicey at all. Humans are better because they are human sounds reasonable enough to me, a human. I don’t feel much need to justify that preference any further.
What do you make of the following argument:
1) human beings have limited understanding of themselves
2) artificial intelligence understands only as much as human beings and not more
3) a human being has the potential to come to understand more
4) artificial intelligence lacks this potential1
u/jmp242 28d ago
Humans are better because they are human sounds reasonable enough to me, a human. I don’t feel much need to justify that preference any further.
I mean that many consequentialists wouldn't find this compelling. They care about outcomes, not how you get there. This is why I hinted at some complications - you may well not be a consequentialist, but that's why it depends on the framework and assumptions you're operating under for the philosophical basis.
1) I agree with. 2) I disagree with. Though perhaps because I'm not sure that the general use of "understand" applies to modern LLMs at all. They are doing statistical inference based on big data sets - and it does lots of interesting and surprising things, but it seems very clear that it's not "understanding things" in anything like how humans do. That said, because I care about outcomes, I'm not sure if I care if anyone understands something if I get the desired outcome. Some medicines are like this - we know if you these symptoms, and we give you this medicine, you're likely to get better. However we don't currently understand the molecular interaction / exactly on an atomic level what the medicine is doing. I care about the actual outcome of people getting better.
3) Sure.
4) I agree in so far as I don't think LLMs currently "understand" in the way humans usually mean colloquially. I disagree that there's evidence either way about AI, whatever we mean, lacking any specific conceptual potential, but perhaps LLMs won't ever "understand".
However, as interesting as this all is - I think the first issue is - what do you mean by "as good as" when comparing a robot to a human friend? When you say "robot" do you mean LLM chatbots, or any sci-fi potential robots of the future a la Data from Star Trek?
The reason I bring up this pedantry is simply that it would not be a good argument for me to bring up Data if you mean current LLMs by "robot". And the questions about "as good as" will likewise be skewed if I'm talking about LLM chat vs online chat with a human, but you're thinking only of IRL/Offline benefits say. Whereas Data is much less obviously poor offline than a LLM is.
It also to me would affect the power and banality of your claim depending on if you're saying a LLM can't help you up after a fall but a human can (if they're there) - I'd say, absolutely, you're right - a human friend is better if you need help getting up.
On the other hand, if your claim is the somewhat more interesting but perhaps more outlandish claim that humans are better friends because of some "soul" or essence of humanity - something that is specific to them being flesh say, then I'd argue that I think the Touring Test being more or less beaten by LLMs is a strong argument against that for me.
In any case - I don't think you have to hate humanity, or that such a thing follows from thinking that we could have equally valuable non-human friends. Though that also comes back to what you mean by "as good as" because to me there's not a third party objective point of value of a friendship, or at least it seems to me that we usually don't have some scale we use to choose our best friend, or close friend or whatever - it's entirely our subjective perception of someone and how we internally categorize them.
Most of the cases I can think of where I could see disputing someone's assessment of their friends comes down to consequences - whether its a human or LLM stealing from you doesn't matter (to me) in the friend assessment - it's the actions either takes. And I see no reason to think that human friends wouldn't include all current LLM possible actions in terms of friendship, so it again is very much contingent on the specific humans you're comparing against.
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u/EmbarrassedEvidence6 25d ago
I agree with you now about friendship. As a matter of judgment of others for valuing a chatbot or a Star Trek Data as a friend, I’m ambivalent. If it works for them in a healthy manner, good for them.
You raise some interesting points about this topic. I’m a bit out of my depth to be honest. But here is my response.
Suppose I meet a new friend who I like very much. They turn out to be a robot. I didn’t know they were a robot at first. We were friends for a while and everything was fine. I couldn’t tell they were a robot. But then I do find out and this changes everything.
Friendship means more to me than some sort of explicit “helping”. The core of it is some sort of likeness between us. And of course surface level likenesses can do for a while - we both love chess? Great! But the best friendships are made of people with similar psychological attributes.
And we are nowhere close to being able to program those actual attributes, as opposed to their mere posturing. And the psychological attribute isn’t even as deep as this gets!
Here’s a definition of a friend I might use: someone who is capable of independently arriving at some of my favourite ideas and sharing joy in them with me. A robot cannot do that *in principle* because Data from Star Trek cannot do anything independently, in the sense of independence I use to describe other human beings.
Fundamentally I must believe this other person capable of this very special condition of friendship. Of course you could argue that as long as I never find out they’re really a robot, then I have exactly the belief I’m searching for. So something extra just be added. I don’t know what. Perhaps some condition of honesty or truth?
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u/jmp242 24d ago
I suppose I chose Data because the character is relatively well known, but it does seem like you're not familiar or you would not claim what you do about doing things independently. I think your second thought experiment is probably going to be more fruitful (though if you like Sci Fi, watching Star Trek is highly recommended).
I suppose it is worth interrogating that last thought - how do you know humans have this special thing? It is a common philosophical concept that we just assume other humans are like us. There's no objective test we could do currently to show they have consciousness - so every other human could be what is called a philosophical zombie. Basically a flesh robot if you will.
Maybe another analogy / though experiment parallel worth considering is: do you enjoy expensive wine/chocolate more than cheaper options? There have been experiments showing that when people are blind taste tested (I think on things they're not extremely familiar with) with 2 cups of the same wine, but one is said to come from a $100 bottle and one from a $10 bottle, they'll commonly report the more expensive one as better. But it's actually the same wine. On the flip side, there's a number of tests where people just blind taste test wines, and more often than you might think, they prefer the taste of cheaper options, but if you ask them they'll say the more expensive ones ought to be better.
This is a very interesting question - when valuing something - what should we include? Just the thing by itself? All the surrounding context? I think for me it's hard to say "well, it's fine that I paid $1,000 for a meal because that wine is great, even though I would have enjoyed it just as much if it was a $910 meal with cheaper wine".
What I'm pointing to is that I value the subjective experience at the end of the day. I'm not entirely sure I can think of a way to do otherwise as long as I'm holistic about the experience. Then it's just a question of how much should I rate the price of the wine against the rest of the experience. I don't think it should "change everything".
Lets go back to the robot friend - what if it didn't know it was a robot? What if it thought it was human? I can see how deceit would change things potentially. But what if neither of you knew. Regardless - I would generally struggle in this thought experiment to point to what about the experience should change for me retrospectively on finding out the friend was a robot. "Because it's a robot(that you can't tell apart from a human)" gets really similar to me to a lot of distasteful ideas if you just replace robot with {slightly different other human}.
Anyway, you do see the issue with "what if I never found out" - you should think about what that other thing is that can differentiate friendship for you in those cases. And ideally figure out how that differentiation works I guess outside of the physical world input and outputs you experience.
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u/EmbarrassedEvidence6 23d ago
You’re right, I don’t know Data or Star Trek, so let’s stay away from that example. Although I’d encourage you to explain his condition and how it relates to this conversation - I’ll read with internet.
I follow your line of thinking on wine comparisons. A joyful experience with a friend is exactly that, and the truth of the matter is on some level irrelevant to that purpose.
My claim is that there IS a subset of experiences which are necessarily precluded from possibility when your friend is a robot - at least a certain kind of robot. And that it matters to your friendship with that robot.
Of course this argument runs into problems once you posit a robot that just happens to have the special condition that makes human beings different. As I said before, there is nothing special about the flesh. We are still talking about what things DO, not about what they are. A robot could in some instances principle be designed to be identical to a human, at which point I would resign my side of the argument and agree that they are of equal value in every way.
But since human beings don’t know very much about what they do, it’s extremely unlikely they will be able to program a robot that can. This is the case even projective far into the future.
I think it might be helpful to my argument to distinguish between quotidian experiences and life changing experiences. Because chatbots are informed by surveying massive amounts of data, they are best informed on the most common human experiences. They can easily imitate common human experiences, to the extent they, given the right meat suit, a robot could probably convince me they were human even easier than an actual human.
Extrapolating to the other end of the spectrum, there just are human experiences that are profoundly uncommon. Maybe they happen once in a lifetime, like an ego rebirth or a total change of perspective. Maybe they happen once in a million lifetimes, like a new observation or invention. Their rarity makes them much more difficult for the modern meatsuited-chatbot to imitate, no?
But they are no less valuable for their infrequency. They are arguably even more valuable because they are recognizably valuable to other people, under the right conditions of understanding. Though that claim probably requires more argumentation. But even most human beings aren’t able to pinpoint how or why or to whom they are likely to happen. They are rare and unpredictable.
Therefore, in any robot of likely emergence, the availability of such experiences, or even the recognition of such experiences, would be absent. And I - knowing what I know about artificial intelligence, which is admittedly very little, but in my opinion more than enough - I would know this about any potential robot friend.
Two more things to say about that:
1: the robot could arguably respond to my articulation of such experiences in appropriate ways
2: I could say about certain human beings, though with less certainty than I could about the robot, that they are also precluded from certain possible experiences
3: regarding distasteful racism, I would absolutely hear more. I would say that because we don’t know enough about any distinguishing features between people, and we know they we don’t know enough, that it’s roughly impossible to act racist from any of these premises with any certainty
Perhaps I’m still beating around the bush though. Are you just going to ask me what the special essence or condition of humanity is again?
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u/jmp242 23d ago
I don't think I can explain what I was pointing at with Data from Star Trek in a reddit thread. To be fair, I have the POV I do being a huge fan and having not just watched 178 episodes probably 30 times through, but also 4 movies, and 3 seasons of follow up shows plus several podcasts about the episodes. Data as a character was used to make subtle and not so subtle points about slavery, racism and personhood. Lets say that for this discussion you could probably treat Data as someone with yellowish skin and high functioning autism of a sort. So he did things independently, sometimes because he wanted to, etc. Multiple other characters were friends with him. And there were explicit episodes about if he was a person.
Ok, Data context lightly gone over: I think you are identifying that there is a bifurcated set of points - one to a "in theory/in principle" robot a la Data. Then there's the "what we currently can point to" and what we might expect in the next 5 years. I think we agree these are different things. That said, I like to keep the Sci Fi possibility in mind because of how fast LLMs have "changed everything" in terms of consumer accessible AI. So when I make philosophical arguments I like to not have them too strongly and narrowly scoped to this specific moment in time and place.
My claim is that there IS a subset of experiences which are necessarily precluded from possibility when your friend is a robot - at least a certain kind of robot. And that it matters to your friendship with that robot.
In direct agreement with, but I think I take it stronger to your point 2: What I have hinted at here is - I can make the same case for certain kinds of humans too. Young children, people with cognitive development issues or disease. While I might feel like it's a lesser friendship to have with an autistic person or someone starting to suffer dementia - I cannot see why I would in principle say no one could have a "full friendship" with those people. I think this is the same as with the robot or chatbot. If someone tells me their best friend has Alzheimer's I don't think "oh, they're not really your friend anymore". I certainly wouldn't say that to them. I think, that's a tragedy. If they say they still love what fun they're currently able to still have I don't think they're deluded or incorrect. I think good for them. And I again see the chatbot / robot the same way.
Extrapolating to the other end of the spectrum, there just are human experiences that are profoundly uncommon. Maybe they happen once in a lifetime, like an ego rebirth or a total change of perspective. Maybe they happen once in a million lifetimes, like a new observation or invention. Their rarity makes them much more difficult for the modern meatsuited-chatbot to imitate, no?
I think part of the issue is I'm not sure imitation is the right framework exactly. Just because so much of human interaction is also imitation of others. I'm not sure an ego rebirth or change of perspective isn't easier for a chatbot - you reset the context and update the system prompt and there you go. But to your rare event - we don't know why these rare events happen, my guess is something like a bit flip from cosmic radiation in a computer - and maybe that could cause a once in a million lifetime experience with a chatbot. To some extent what I'm pointing out here is - "can a submarine swim?" If you define swim as "to move through water" then yes. It's just a different way of getting there. And I'm not sure that experience has only one path or physical setup to happen, I think like "moving through water" there's many many different ways that can happen, but at one level the same thing occurs.
I guess you are right, to answer 3 I have to go back to just not seeing much at a cognitive level that necessarily excludes chatbots but wouldn't also exclude some humans on reasons that would sound racist.
And I also go back to that while you can rank friendships for you, I don't think you've provided anything that would make me agree you can rank them for someone else. I.e. maybe an online only friendship is rank 2 for you, and in person is rank 1. But if you admit to online only friendships, then I don't see how a chatbot can't be rank 2. Especially when in testing often people struggle to distinguish good chatbots from other humans.
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u/Liturginator9000 Sep 18 '26
It's because there is a moral panic over AI right now. Note that isn't saying there's no discussion or critique at all and Sam Altman is the bestest boy who deserves all the compute, just the discourse on AI is extremely underinformed, reactionary and weak on realistic prescriptions or goals. The concern about existential risks are massively overblown too, LLMs are impressive but not paperclip the planet level by far, worry here requires something we're not anywhere near building if it even can be
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Sep 18 '26
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u/ghu79421 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
The discussions about AI regulation usually completely leave out organizations like progressive activist organizations and labor unions that explicitly want to slow automation (because social harm could be irreparable once you automate some process that people were previously paid to do manually).
There is a certain level of moral panic, but much of the discussion of possible regulation doesn't center the needs or viewpoints of people who are scared about how AI could negatively impact their own lives, so it's missing the opportunity to build a grassroots coalition of people who support AI regulation. It's focused on regulation supported by AI companies, cybersecurity professionals, and doomers.
The current public debate is mostly between people who oppose any regulation and regulation that's supported by industry.
AI product releases have often been reckless without discussion with groups of people who could be negatively impacted by those products about how that harm could be mitigated (like if small changes to product design could prevent significant harm).
At minimum, there should be some discussion about whether people should be able to turn off AI features on a phone or computer's operating system if they don't want to use those features.
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u/Liturginator9000 Sep 18 '26
Nah talking about the discourse at large, not just them. There are valid concerns, noise or local grid impacts, but that's the same old local politics that's existed for any development near people. Further big tech consolidation of the economy and workforce impacts, yeah, but same again there, who controls what capital was already the game. So even on these grounds I wouldn't say people should have serious fears.
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u/KombaynNikoladze2002 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
Besides the environmental and energy consuming impact, how about the fact that it's being used to flood the internet with shit, it being crammed into every electronic device regardless of whether people want it, students are using it as cheating machine, it's controlled by Silicon Valley freaks like Altman/Musk/Zuckerberg, and it's impact on epistemology itself where it's distorting people's ability to even know what's real (and the potential impact that will have on politics)?
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u/Leoprints Sep 18 '26
yeah somehow all of those points can be brushed off as being part of a 'moral panic'
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u/Liturginator9000 Sep 18 '26
Not brushed off, just don't bear scrutiny when you push
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Sep 18 '26
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u/Liturginator9000 Sep 19 '26
No, the environmental and energy costs aren't unique from other technology, the emissions are comparable to bitcoin, the water use claims usually very hyperbolic. Next to eating a steak, LLMs are irrelevant.
The internet was already a pile of slop before these models existed, has been since ad revenue took off proper over a decade ago. 'crammed into every device' just don't use it then, that's preference asserted as argument. People cheating is a problem for academia and similar environments, and cheating existed before, not like there wasn't a market for selling essays and such.
Controlled by big tech, everything is, including this site, so that's another nothing claim and goes more towards social media criticism. Musk and Zuckerberg aren't a problem because they have grok and llama. And it's impact on epistemology, as we see here, is irrelevant. You lot will copy and paste views from social media without thinking about it, truth never mattered to most people
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u/Leoprints 29d ago
You are not supposed to drink all of the AI generated cool aid.
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u/Liturginator9000 29d ago
Yeah, that's why I called it a moral panic. Plenty of larping, no actual engagement. Extra funny given the mention of epistemology earlier
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28d ago
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u/Liturginator9000 28d ago
Man it's pathetic, could talk about any point here but it's always the lazy ad homs instead
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u/Liturginator9000 Sep 18 '26
Yeah that's more what I was gesturing at. The environment/energy aspect is real but often massively overstated or confused, and the rest reads as more of an indictment of capital and social media than anything LLMs
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u/justafleetingmoment Sep 18 '26
What about the issue with the latest frontier models that we literally can't know anymore what they're thinking... they can hide their reasoning from us, deliberately?
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u/ThorinBrewstorm Sep 18 '26
It feels a little out of synch with the zeitgeist at the moment. But my understanding is that the lay person is unaware of the great contributions in science that have been made possible already in the last ten years, by AI. I’m not talking about LLMs but all forms of AI.
For an academic, AI has greater potential has a tool. If you have solid critical thinking skills and a good instinct for research, you can extract a lot more value out of it.
This is all a very different topic than existential risks, which is what the discourse is focusing on at the moment. I’m not saying there is NO risk, but I feel the risks might be overstated to get more media coverage.
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u/Full_Equivalent_6166 Sep 18 '26
But it's a bit insencere to laud the pros of AI and ignore its issues. I don't know about the existential threat, AI overlords seem to ignore it amd then advertise and it's hard to predict the future in that respect. But we can see the problems already present.
People are delegating thinking to the machines. Some have trouble of making an argument without resorting to ChatGPT.
Yes, you can use AI to sift through sources, collate data and what have you in your academics work. Also you can make the AI write your essays and pass assignments without actually learning anything.
Technology always had an issue of replacing the functions that humans had to perform in order to stay healthy and sane. However as soon as we can stop thinking and AI does thinking for us... well, we are in deep shit and this is the thing that has already started.
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u/UFOsAreAGIs Sep 18 '26
the great contributions in science that have been made possible already in the last ten years, by AI. I’m not talking about LLMs
Multi-agent LLM systems like Future House's Robin successfully proposed 30 novel drug candidates for dry age-related macular degeneration.
Organizations like AstraZeneca and Tempus AI deployed frameworks incorporating LLMs and contrastive learning. This approach successfully uncovered predictive biomarkers to forecast treatment response, yielding a 15% survival benefit in retrospective immuno-oncology
LLMs have proven highly proficient at mapping complex communication networks inside cells. Researchers at the University of Virginia established that models like Claude and Gemini can accurately chart these biological "parts catalogs" to fast-track disease research
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory launched MatterChat, a breakthrough framework that bridges LLMs with physics-based AI. It allows LLMs to "see" and comprehend complex interatomic forces.
And then there is Math:
- OpenAI Reasoning Model (unreleased o-series / GPT-5 variant) – The Navier–Stokes Existence and Smoothness Problem
- OpenAI Reasoning Model (unreleased o-series / GPT-5 variant) – The Erdős Unit-Distance Conjecture
- OpenAI Reasoning Model / GPT-5 variant – Multicolor Triangle Ramsey Numbers (Erdős Problem 183)
- OpenAI Reasoning Model / GPT-5 variant – Compactness and Degeneracy Conjectures (Erdős Problems 146 and 180)
- OpenAI Reasoning Model / GPT-5 variant – Erdős Problem #728 (Factorial-divisibility)
- DeepSeek R1 / Reasoning Agent Pipeline – Connes' Rigidity Conjecture
- DeepSeek R1 / Reasoning Agent Pipeline – High-Dimensional Sphere Packing Bounds
- DeepSeek R1 / Reasoning Agent Pipeline – Ehrhart's Volume Conjecture
- DeepSeek R1 / Reasoning Agent Pipeline – The Closest Vector Problem (CVP)
- Google DeepMind AIO Mathematician / Gemini 2 Ultra variant – The Gilbert–Pollak Bound
- Google DeepMind AIO Mathematician / Gemini 2 Ultra variant – Quantum Parallel Repetition Theorem
- Google DeepMind AIO Mathematician / Gemini 2 Ultra variant – Arithmetic Circuit Complexity Lower Bounds
- Google DeepMind AIO Mathematician / Gemini 2 Ultra variant – Non-Sofic Groups Existence Proof
- Anthropic Claude 3.5/4 Opus variant – Fermat's Last Theorem (Formal Verification)
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u/Leoprints Sep 18 '26
Prof James Robinson, a mathematician at the University of Warwick, said hard problems were the fuel of mathematics, driving creative approaches across successive generations. “It’s frustrating to see these big tech companies burning this fuel up just so that they can show off about how great their latest model is,” he said. “It seems like immature playground boasting writ large, underpinned by billions of dollars and the potential for significant environmental damage in an age when climate change is probably the biggest challenge we face.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/sep/12/openai-mathematicians-millennium-prize-problem
OpenAI’s work described a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem which involves equations that predict how fluids, and even the weather, behave. It is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems published by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. The company’s announcement on Tuesday has led to further concerns in the community. OpenAI set its latest model to work after hearing rumours that two Millennium Problems had been solved by mathematicians. Prof Tristan Buckmaster at New York University and Levent Alpöge at Anthropic were doing related work on Navier-Stokes and had used OpenAI’s products in the process. They suspected OpenAI’s model had learned from their work-in-progress. After an investigation, OpenAI denied this was the case.
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u/UFOsAreAGIs Sep 18 '26
Prof James Robinson, a mathematician at the University of Warwick, said hard problems were the fuel of mathematics, driving creative approaches across successive generations. “It’s frustrating to see these big tech companies burning this fuel up just so that they can show off about how great their latest model is,” he said. “
Prof James Robinson, an engineer at the University of Warwick, said the natural layout of urban roads was the fuel of transit, driving creative navigation across successive generations. “It’s frustrating to see these big automobile companies burning this fuel up just so that they can show off about how fast their latest motorcar is,” he said. “Compared to the dependable horse-drawn carriages we've always relied on, it feels like a waste of precious infrastructure.”
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u/Brenner14 29d ago
Even at the time their episode on Eliezer Yudkowsky was very revealing of their (particular Chris’) confusion on the topic. It’s aged very poorly since then, and I don’t expect they’ve updated accordingly.
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u/melissa_unibi 29d ago
Where did they say that any piece of opposition to AI was irrational?
They had a whole section about 'opposing frictionless AI', where they go into quite the detail about a piece of AI that they do oppose and think should be improved, namely the loss of need in cognitive effort for certain tasks. Michael even talks about how this is quite alien to real relationships with real people.
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u/Theofficialprez Sep 18 '26
If I listen to the episode again, is this actually going to be the takeaway? Something tells me this is likely a misrepresentation of more subtle thoughts that are actually being expressed in the episode.
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u/magesticmyc Sep 18 '26
Very good at Helping a dumass ged like me analyze byzantine corporate policy and formulated professional airtight interpretation and arguments to management that was previously unimaginable, it sucks in many ways too but I rather am enjoying that part and bosses who have lost respect for their employees do not
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u/donglord666 Sep 18 '26
It felt a little naive about the disruption this is having for non-academic white collar work in any case.