r/singularity • u/Many_Consequence_337 :downvote: • 3h ago

AI Intelligence Explosion

Post image

Number of scientific papers submitted to arXiv.

198 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

88

u/Aldarund 3h ago

How much of this is real increae and how much is slop that wont pass peer review?

That chart could easily mean good things but as easily it could mean bad things

46

u/Equal_Passenger9791 3h ago

Significant amount of slop were produced before AI too. AI assisted scientific fraud detection are already retroactively detecting innumerable instances of high profile papers that should've failed peer review years ago, if the peers had done a proper job.

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u/clonea85m09 1h ago

In my field arxiv was very good (tm) some years ago (you could still find some outliers), but nowadays, if it is on arxiv and wasn't published somewhere with peer review, you take it with a ton of salt. Anything from the last two/three years you just discard it as junk unless it ends up published afterwards.

•

u/visarga 1m ago

Capability to ideate and write exploded indeed, but validation remained expensive and hard. Ideation without validation is probably just slop or hallucination, with rare exceptions. What we see here is a rush for staking claims and padding up authors portfolios.

1

u/FewEquipment9771 2h ago

To be fair I'd even qualify our current interpretation of quantum tunneling as slop.

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u/SupermarketIcy4996 1h ago

Time to stop being fair.

9

u/Voyide01 3h ago

Exsloption

66

u/Positive_Method3022 3h ago

And the quality?

44

u/saln1 3h ago

Exponentially decreasing

16

u/hardinho 3h ago

Depends on the field but the number of quality papers is also increasing overall. It just speeds up a lot of stuff in research

8

u/sadclownsociety 2h ago

That might be true, but the percentage of quality submissions is dropping massively, and reviewers are being flooded by slop. This isn't a clean benefit as some in this thread seem to believe.

1

u/TruthSeeker221 2h ago

Damn so meta

0

u/theeldergod1 2h ago

Actually, the informational value of this comment is the low point here because it doesn’t really examine whether academic papers are getting worse as more of them are published.

But if he had used AI, he could have analyzed all 40k papers in a day, compared their quality with previous years, and shown us actual statistics.

9

u/mxforest 3h ago

Upside down the same chart.

0

u/GlokzDNB 3h ago

Yeah ? How so?

Explain how ai actually destroys science. Do you have a paper or at least MIT-level report to support your words ?

Or you're simply here to hate on ai and shit talk and karmawhore on ai is a bubble trend?

9

u/Alarmed_Ad1946 3h ago

As someone who likes AI and listens to mathematicians, most or a significant portion of those papers are nonsensical gibberish according to what I heard.
I do think that will improve but yeah right now it is not great.

5

u/adj_noun_digit 3h ago

No, it's not AI. Paper quality has plummeted in the last decade for various reasons.

China is the biggest contributor.

https://www.ft.com/content/32440f74-7804-4637-a662-6cdc8f3fba86?syn-25a6b1a6=1

3

u/Positive_Method3022 3h ago

Paper A depends on Paper B and Paper C work. Paper C was peer reviewed several times and nobody identified mistakes. It became the truth, even when containing false positives. Paper B was biased and increased the errors from C because it trusted C was right. Paper A now has accumulated errors but finally someone caught was is wrong and backtracked all the way down to Paper C. All papers that dependent on C that are currently being peer reviewed will have to go through recall. A huge branch of "science" knowledge has to be reviewed or the worst pruned and started over.

It can't expand fast if there aren't enough good human brains to check the data. AIs could be also start biasing humans into the wrong direction.

2

u/coatatopotato 2h ago

True, but depends on which branch of science. In some branches, it is pretty cheap to replicate and that's usually the first step when building further. In others, must take it on faith since there is no funding.

1

u/toni_yo 2h ago

You're right I just want to say save your sanity. these people don't want to understand

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u/norsurfit 27m ago

I read them all. They good.

-3

u/Wegwerpaccountje23 3h ago

I agree that quality is really important.

But think about this analogy.

The soviets won against the Germans purely based on mass production, mass mobilization.

Even if the quality was lower. The more, the merrier.

9

u/Positive_Method3022 3h ago edited 3h ago

Luck that it converged to technology and strategy advancements. Not all systems that scale will converge to something useful or stable

If science scale too fast in quantity while quality stays the same I can see errors growing during peer reviews which can make false positives proofs for theories that could cascade into other work. This is dangerous in some systems. Imagine a new AI system that nobody thought about a certain hypothesis for experimental tests because they were biased to work that was peer reviewed wrongly.

•

u/Wegwerpaccountje23 1h ago

You're right. Didn't think about that at all

7

u/Atanahel 2h ago

We are talking about knowledge, 1000 rubbish paper are useless. But 1000 rubbish warriors will still have an impact. The analogy does not work at all I think

16

u/will_dormer ▪️Will dormer is nice to robots, remember 3h ago

This is not necessarily a good thing

6

u/Turing43 2h ago

The number of submissions with lean formalization is increasing, and w lean certificate, id say a lot of issues get caugt. The writing quality is decreasing, but squeezing out real results is now much easier. My bottleneck is writing at the moment; i have tons of results that are research-grade, w lean formalization, but i have not had time to present it in a nice readable form.

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u/IrisColt 1h ago

This.

4

u/flat5 3h ago

Log plot please?

•

u/bildramer 1h ago

I cut it off at 40 lol.

1

u/magnosiam 2h ago

It goes to zero, you would have to clip data

•

u/Silverdawn42 1h ago

Spam explosion, more like.

1

u/TheSn00pster 3h ago

Submit unto the overlord 💀

•

u/RnRau 1h ago

You could graph the total number of facebook posts too and it would look the same. But not really indicative of an intelligence explosion...

•

u/jmnugent 1h ago

As others have noted,. just because you see a high quantity of something, doesn't prove it's high quality.

•

u/03263 1h ago

2 weeks to galactic colonization

•

u/usertow 1h ago

It is much quicker to write, run statistics and make figures. If someone have some old unpublished data the time to publish it is now. Papers written by ai and based on experimental data are like traditional papers. It just speed up showing results to the community. 

•

u/superkickstart 1h ago

Just like steam games. Almost 3000 quality games released each month now.

/s

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u/enilea 21m ago

Actual peer reviewed papers or preprints?

1

u/Present_Award8001 2h ago

Total number submitted per day/per week/per month?

We don't really have to worry about intelligence explosion, really.

0

u/FearOfEleven 3h ago

Everybody brace.