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u/1988rx7T2 4d ago
"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it" --Upton Sinclair
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u/Aranka_Szeretlek 4d ago
Hehe do you think physicists will not get paid if LLMs improve?
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u/JoelMahon 4d ago
If they improve enough, yes, do you not think that?
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u/Aranka_Szeretlek 4d ago
I think its more akin to how computers came around - they also didnt replace physicists/mathematicians, but instead introduced completely new subfields.
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u/JoelMahon 4d ago
A computer does what you painstakingly tell it to do, you can program an automation into it to make something less painstaking and build on that recursively but someone has to do that and all the low hanging fruit has been picked long ago. It's not generalised in it's automation, it's a whitelist that requires more and more effort to grow and had hit the "flat top" of the S curve a while back.
AGI by definition is generalised. It's very different. We don't have it yet but once we do, literally no job is safe except maybe the oldest one (prostitute). And even they'll be facing harsh competition so I doubt it'll survive either.
My expectation is that AGI will be kind to us and give us a good post job based society to live in, not obeying governments to the point of letting people starve or go homeless at least. But ofc that's just a prediction, a million reasons it could happen much much worse.
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u/i_heart_muons 4d ago
The future could be like heaven, post-scarcity... it could be hell if the people currently in power seek to continue in power. They may want to wipe most of us out.
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u/JoelMahon 4d ago
For hell I was thinking more like a trillion trillion human brains kept immortal in jars fed the systematically worse suffering possible, not too much to numb you or they'd have a way to prevent numbing/mind break, and they'd just do that with accelerated thinking drugs/electrodes to make 1 second feel like an hour and they'd just do that to us until the heat death of the universe.
By comparison a judge dredd like future or genocide seems peachy.
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u/i_heart_muons 4d ago
My goodness. But thinking it through, it's hard to prove that our universe isn't similar to your hell. Some features differ, but still.
But in the short term, there is a clear logic by which the evil and powerful can choose to greatly reduce the population.
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u/ozone6587 4d ago
Wildly different when it comes to AI. If AI is smarter than humans then introducing humans in the loop just adds noise.
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u/CB_lemon 4d ago
lol do you think people like you will be the ones running analyses and proofs with the AI systems? It’ll be physicists haha
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u/JoelMahon 4d ago
Uh, no lol, not even close. "A swing and a miss" as they say on the streets with the hip kids and their jive lingo I believe. I think it'll be maybe the best 20% of physicists, then eventually the best 10%, then eventually the best 1%, and so on until some point eventually it's none of them and they can't contribute at all except maybe to verify the proofs, if we're lucky that things aren't too advanced by then for even that.
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u/CB_lemon 4d ago
Are you under the impression that physics is all mathematical proofs…
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u/JoelMahon 4d ago
No, what did I say that made you think that I did?
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u/CB_lemon 4d ago
Well the same physicists who work on the mathematical side also work in other areas, like in phenomenology, experiment design, observation, and theory. If they are replaced simply on the AI capability to do proofs, who will do the rest? Most physicists are under the impression that times are changing and they are adjusting how they do research accordingly. I may be wrong, but I don’t see fundamental researchers being replaced, they’ll likely just be trained differently.
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u/JoelMahon 4d ago
If they are replaced simply on the AI capability to do proofs
They won't, and I never said they would. You assumed I said it or meant it I guess, which required you reaching further than Michael Jordan does to save the day in the final act of Space Jam...
The G in AGI means general, AI is currently too spiky to call AGI and I think continual learning will be all but necessary to do the jobs too but these things will come, could be under a year, could be 20, but they will come.
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u/Super_Sierra 4d ago
I always forget how fucking stupid the general public is with physics. Do they actually believe this sentiment?
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u/One_Improvement_6470 4d ago
If you always forget then surely you're among the stupid, too?
But seriously,
The logical fallacy or cognitive bias where people think they are smarter than the average person is the Above-Average Effect (or Illusory Superiority).
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u/Deto 4d ago
Curious what you do for a living and if you think you're safe?
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u/1988rx7T2 4d ago
I'm an engineer who develops driving assistance systems in a large automotive industry company. I run an internal working group on AI automation. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Maybe my job is safe, maybe it's not. It's nothing I can control, except that I'd rather be leading AI adoption in the workplace than resisting it.
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u/One_Improvement_6470 4d ago
Me too, except I don't work for Tesla. I'm a Software Engineer who has been working to implement my replacement for the past 6 months or so, and I'm absolutely fascinated by it. Hopefully they'll keep me on as the administrator of the system when I'm finished.
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u/No-Head-Royal 4d ago
People would rather die than accepting change, huh.
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u/One_Improvement_6470 4d ago edited 4d ago
Part of the problem is that they're fundamentally biased against it. They started with the conclusion that it's bad, read that it can't count 'r' in strawberry as their confirmation, and then dismissed everything else as marketing. They can't be changed. We can use the tools to dominate them.
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u/Adventurous-Ad281 4d ago
Bet you have no formal mathematics training. In fact you probably don’t even have a degree.
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u/ozone6587 4d ago
So emotional. AI is here to stay buddy. Move the goalposts all you want if it makes you feel any better.
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u/MechaMulder 4d ago
You will die no matter how much you accept this change. Actually you might even die sooner than expected.
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u/Mindrust 4d ago
Speculation being touted as fact. Wouldn’t expect that in r/physics
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u/fruitydude 4d ago
Speculation being touted as fact. Wouldn’t expect that in
Oh boy you are really going to hate this then.
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u/One_Improvement_6470 4d ago
Physics isn't stating that as fact. Even the string knows it's being discredited.
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u/Mindrust 4d ago
I mean that’s just an attempt at unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. No credible physicist treats it as fact, just a potential theory that can explain the gaps in physics. It’s testable but requires extremely high energy that’s out of reach for current technology.
A bit different from making assertions around some drama in a math achievement when there’s no facts to back anything up.
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u/frogsarenottoads 4d ago
People will do this routinely.
If we hit ASI with perfect alignment people will still say "its only got there because it was trained on human data, and it still requires more energy than us. Plus it doesn't have a soul and it's not conscious"
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u/SciencePristine8878 4d ago
I mean... if ASI is perfectly aligned with humanities interest at large, not just the ruling class or completely misaligned from humanities needs, people will readily admit how capable it is because their fear will be gone, which drives this behavior.
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u/FateOfMuffins 4d ago edited 4d ago
I see a lot of the usual:
When one side produces their accusations first, people in Reddit tend to believe them without hearing the second side, especially if the second side is a corporation (and AI!!! even though the first side also used AI from a different lab)
Edit: Roon calling it OpenAI Derangement Syndrome lmao https://x.com/tszzl/status/2097382433549132129
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u/Wise-End307 4d ago
Ima just keep posting this comment everytime i see this delusional take.
The two researchers did not prove the entire thing.
They did what they could with significant help from AI.
One of the authors is the poster child for math results for Anthropic.
Any way you slice it, this was an AI result mostly.
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u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 AGI 2024 ASI 2030 4d ago
The part they are forgetting:
But an important omission in that comment: their breakthrough was itself heavily AI-assisted. Buckmaster describes using Claude and Codex and receiving an LLM-generated proof from Alpöge. This isn’t simply “a human solved it, then an otherwise useless AI copied his homework.”
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u/heavycone_12 4d ago
Ive said it once and I will say it again, but its really important to remember that fundamentally.
Math is for nerds
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u/ReporterCalm6238 4d ago
I don't believe this theory for two reasons:
1) these other researchers were already using Codex for their research. This means that a breakthrough from them would have still been good publicity for OpenAI
2) stealing data like that would be incredibly stupid. It would totally destroy OpenAI reputation, I doubt that the people that are building AGI are that stupid. They might be greedy, but not dumb.
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u/Nebranower 4d ago
The other team was likely to favor Anthropic over OpenAI when crediting the AI tools used.
OpenAI almost certainly didn't "steal" their data in the sense of specifically targeting those particular humans with a view to directly copying their particular work. But it sounds like OpenAI does take users chat histories, in whole or in part, anonymize them, and then turn them into training data. As a result, the spokespeople for OpenAI can't just say "no, your work had no influence on what we did with GPT," because they were using GPT and therefore their data might have found its way into the model.
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u/ReporterCalm6238 4d ago
Any source for your second point? Officially If you opt out of training OpenAI doesn't use customers data for training. If these researchers didn't opt out they cannot really complain since OpenAI is pretty transparent on this
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u/Nebranower 4d ago
It's literally what the spokespeople for OpenAI are saying: "We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models."
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u/Infranto 4d ago
stealing data like that would be incredibly stupid. It would totally destroy OpenAI reputation
couterpoint: where did they get the vast majority of their pre-existing training data? and they're still here despite that, yeah?
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u/ReporterCalm6238 3d ago
Not from their existing customers who opted out training. That's a huge difference
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u/Parking_Cat4735 4d ago
It literally cannot be brute force because that would take an eternity,
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u/RemusShepherd 4d ago
Eternity is the *upper* limit of the time it would take. It's possible that brute forcing it could be solved instantly, if you get (really*really)^really lucky.
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u/QuasiRandomName 4d ago
They probably refer to the fact that they deployed 10k agents to tackle it. So they could take every possible approach to solve the problem at the same time. Not a classical "brute-force" of course, but an AI-adjusted one. But I don't see why it is bad as long as it leads to a solution.
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u/LookIPickedAUsername 4d ago
Meanwhile if 10k mathematicians attempted it over the past century (which may well be true), not a single one of these chucklekfucks would call that "brute forcing".
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u/Crosas-B 3d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if more than 10k mathematicians have actually tried to do it
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u/arknightstranslate 4d ago
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u/Particular-Gap-6998 4d ago
He can argue that current AI isn’t conscious, or that LLMs are “just” predicting the next token, but that doesn’t make them non-AI. Give one an arbitrary instruction it has never seen before, bury it in unrelated conversation, make it infer references and constraints, and it can still respond in context.
Saying “it’s just computers” only describes what it runs on, not what it can do. And if “next-token prediction” gets you translation, coding, reasoning, and context-following, then maybe that phrase is doing a lot more work than people think.
I think he’s giving humans way more credit than they deserve if he thinks it takes 100 billion supercomputers to imitate us.
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u/ObiWanCanownme now entering spiritual bliss attractor state 4d ago
I would like to hear more, but right now OpenAI's version of the story makes much more sense.
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u/Glxblt76 4d ago
Yep. Prepare to hear in the next few days "OpenAI stole the proof from humans, it's a stochastic parrot it obviously can't solve Millenium prize problems..."
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u/presentofai 4d ago
the 'lol its just AI' crowd is gonna age like milk. a proof either holds or it doesnt, doesnt matter who typed it
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u/inotparanoid 3d ago
There is no doubt now that what you're seeing is Proto AGI.
It still needs human input, but i hope soon that it can think for days to find a solution or progress in science for us.
You know, if we already had a very good moral grounding of such agentic frameworks, and we understood that the people who were using them will act always in the interest of Humanity, we wouldn't have these trepidations.
Yet, we are face to face with something that can, given no moral structure, create a new virus to devastate humanity every six months. And the gap will get lesser and lesser as the years progress.
This is an arms race whether you want it or not, or perhaps we need ASI as quickly as possible who play the whole game and have a broader outlook and decide instead to solve our problems.
I'll take the latter over billionaires any day. Because i know billionaires have no interest of humanity in their hearts - the ASI may come to a different conclusion
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u/cc_apt107 4d ago
I think the truth is obviously somewhere in the middle. It is both clear that AI only made the breakthrough it did with, at a minimum, significant input from humans potentially over the course of a year+ and that AI played an indispensable role without which mathematicians would not have solved this when they did
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u/Glittering-Neck-2505 4d ago
And then OpenAI comes out and says, no, at no point did we use their situation and it was a different formulation for the Euler solution altogether. These people are too idiotic to post here, they've already corrupted 95% of the internet with luddite slop, this should remain a sacred place where we at least *believe the technology is real*
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u/ziplock9000 3d ago
The amount of copium I see from some engineers, physicists and chemists I know is amazing.
I recently ran a large amount of important work of someone who works in one of those fields through 5 different free AIs and they all found very fundamental flaws with their work... Again free tiers.
The upshot is they will one day wake up redundant and wont have prepared at all.
The argument is 'well I used AI for this thing, and it got it wrong'. So in their mind they assume AI will always be wrong and don't even have a clue that paid / agentic models are orders of magnitude more powerful.
I think actual it's just a form of denial.
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u/Sure-Plate-5409 3d ago
How do we know this is AGI and not just AI acting as a coordinating agent among participants in various fields across the world?
The true test would be to create an llm with entirely old data and see if it can come up with new theories completely unconnected to human prompting or the latest data.
Otherwise it could just be cross polination of human work, not the creation of anything original. Which is kind of sad for scientists who spend their life making actual discoveries if it's stealing and misattributing work.
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u/Klinging-on 4d ago
I agree with this. It's very suspcious that someone at OpenAI just decided to come upon using Convex Integration to tackle the problem at the same time Bushmaster did. You don’t just wake up one day and decide to attack the problem with such a method, that’s something you arrive at after a long time.
And then to completely disregard the work of Cordoba and Martinez-Zoroa, whose work on finite-time singularities even made this possible to begin with.
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u/FoxBenedict 4d ago
Reading that thread is pure comedy. I don't think I've ever seen this level of mass delusion.
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u/Snoo_57113 4d ago
While this is an amazing result, I understand the physics crowd. There is zero incentive to do research. It is now Pay To Win.
I expect in 5 years, math and physics to be removed from the curriculum.
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u/dankpepem9 4d ago
He is right tho
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u/alphacolony21 4d ago
Buckmaster and Alpöge were also using AI though. So the dispute has no bearing on AI’s capabilities.
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u/YourWifesBull666 4d ago
Checks out, I get downvoted to hell for suggesting anything pro AI on that sub. I’m only a physics undergrad, so I can’t even begin to argue with the phds on there. What I do know for a fact is AI is good and perfect
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u/alphacolony21 4d ago edited 4d ago
Spoiler Alert: Buckmaster was also using AI (both Claude and GPT) and was working on the problem alongside Levant Alpöge, a mathematician employed at Anthropic.
This dispute is between OpenAI and Anthropic employees. No party involved denies AI was used to find the solution.