Agreed, it's stronger "horizontally". But I also think that we're not far away from it being stronger vertically; i.e. superior to Tao, in that such turn-by-turn guidance by him in solving sophisticated and difficult problems will not be necessary for long.
What was most remarkable to me from this transcript, was how strong of an equal the AI agent comes across compared to the user (Tao). And Tao is one of the top mathematicians of modern times.
Yes, Tao is guiding it to where he wants to go. But also, Tao is actively learning from it and relying on its explaining, analysis, and inference abilities. You can easily imagine this conversation having taken place between Tao and a PhD thesis student, or even another professor, explaining their results.
What can we imagine and predict about the future anymore? Maybe a year - or two model releases - from now, the AI assistant will be undeniably stronger than Tao, and not an equal anymore.
Of note: the author had AI help synthesizing the actual 10-page prompt that resulted in the proof! A powerful tool when you know what you're doing.
> Did you have first an AI help designing the prompt?
>> yes, I did! I basically had 5.6 Sol synthesize existing closely related work and their approaches, the past ideas I had, with OpenAI's prompt that had a lot of the presumably important mechanisms for how exactly the agent should act. Especially from the "results that do not count" section onwards is a lot of input from Sol.
> ... And the United States, through budget chaos and institutional drift, is degrading the pipeline that produces humans capable of understanding what the machines are
doing
On top of government/political impact on this weakening, there's also a fundamental weakening from the mere existence of AI, both at its current level and its future incarnates. A comment I saw here [0] from a PhD student after the Erdos problem result came out, describes the problem well:
> ... I am also a little worried about what it means for your training as a junior PhD. Often you would try and solve a problem your advisor thinks is doable that they assign to you as a learning exercise. It may be more and more difficult to find problems that a junior PhD can solve but that AI can not.
So the pipeline to produce Math PhDs is now in jeopardy just from that aspect alone, and the difficulty of evaluating what counts as original research anymore.
Hmm I see. I only use "old" reddit and it does require login there to resolve to a real address. In any case, it is a special link that enables tracking (unnecessary, to say the least).
No it's not the same as your grandma. The point is that it's now more expensive to find the correct information to learn from. You don't know it's an LLM ahead of time, and you may spend hours until you figure out something is off. Hence why reputable sources will become more valuable.
> If you develop the skill of judging information by its merit rather than source..
Did you read example #1? I'm not talking about some piece of code from an LLM that you can verify or some political opinion that you can take with a grain of salt, but information that you can only gain and/or judge through expertise:
If you're not a physicist yourself, you can't judge "information by its merit" on specific physics topics, because you don't have a solid baseline.
Similarly, in growing plants, each plant has its own peculiarities, and only people experienced in growing it can tell you anything useful - it's knowledge accumulated by trial and error. Not knowledge that your "great discerning mind" can assess on its own. Even a botanist can't tell you the ideal growing conditions of a plant that they've never studied before.
It's becoming much harder to determine on a daily basis what content is original, thought-out by a person, and trustworthy. Ironically, verifiably-old content is easier to trust now. Examples from recent personal experience:
1) Some time ago I was searching for growing information about a specific and uncommonly-grown plant, and was led to a top-ranked website with long pages containing everything about it, including other plants. Surprised at how prolific the writing was, I spent more than an hour on the website, taking notes, etc. Every few paragraphs it would include an amazon affiliate link to something topical, which I thought was fair. Until I realized that the links near the bottom of the page were looking more random. Then it hit me, the website is all AI-generated, and the affiliate links themselves are also AI-chosen. And everything new I "learned" from that site was now useless because I had no way to know what was grounded in actual agricultural experience and what was hallucinated.
2) Recently I did a youtube search for a book I had just finished reading, looking for some reviews. Came across a channel that was reading the book as new audio (i.e. not the original published audiobook). I thought it was a fan making it. The voice was beautiful, soothing, and natural with all kinds of relevant emotions correctly included. I started listening to the book again, until I noticed a consistent error in word ordering being made every few lines. Then it hit me! The channel even included one upload with a video recording of a seemingly-real person reading with that voice. Both the audio and video are AI-generated, but very hard to tell.
3) Next to those videos, YT recommended many strange/new channels. One had the photo and the exact voice of a famous (and now very old) physicist, with tens of clickbaity titles about controversial topics in the domain. The only tell was that the voice was too vigorous and consistently energetic, while if you've listened to that physicist before, you know his cadence is slower. At first I thought maybe the channel is reading one of his books; no, the content itself was AI-generated, maybe based on his books. There was a lot of engagement, with many comments like "mind blown" and "learned so much today".
Both #1 and #3 are harmful, because you think you're learning from a reliable source but you end up learning hallucinated nothings. #2 I didn't mind much, still enjoyed the new voice, and even preferred it over my original audible version.
> "We know that richer communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models," Winthrop says, "and we know those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that this is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources."
What's up with the TeamYouTube account advising him to delete his X post for security reasons because the post contains a channel ID? Like channel ID is not public information and some secret private key or something?
In a discussion of an article about encouraging fact-checking in writing, I wish you would have made your quotes informative by replacing "many wise people" with the actual names of who said them.
For everyone else: the first paragraph appears to be a quote of C.S. Lewis around 1945 [0], and the second, of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 [1].
> Its landing module, which weighs 495 kilograms (1,091 lb), is highly likely to reach the surface of Earth in one piece as it was designed to withstand 300 G's of acceleration and 100 atmospheres of pressure.
Awesome! I don't know how you can design for 300 G's of acceleration!