If it were commonplace, there wouldn't be a post and discussion about it. Cheap? Arguable - while it didn't cost thousands, it wasn't free. Cheap is in the eye of the beholder. Efficient...How do we even measure that? The massive infrastructure and training to take a product to the point where someone could do this is massive. Ignoring everything behind the scenes and acting like one session and result is the whole picture of efficiency doesn't seem right. And no, nothing produced by AI makes skills irrelevant. That is the whole ongoing argument of whether people are losing cognitive ability by moving their thinking to AI.

Overall, this is an impressive proof of capability. But I wouldn't take that proof as anything more than what it is.

It's still clear that LLMs lack spatial reasoning, either in the concrete or abstract, and while that sort of reasoning has been downplayed by academia for at least a century it is fundamental to technology and industry. (And many would say for science and mathematics too).

They will, however, get there as well either directly or as interfaces to models that do, and your core point stands.

Everybody can be an armchair mathematician now. Just fling some thoughts in the direction of your AI setup and let it do breadth first search with AI based pruning heuristics.

Intelligence on its own is not very useful though. We put it on a pedestal because it creates huge potential when paired with other things, wisdom, discipline, empathy, but on its own?

Ever heard of the infinite monkey theorem?

This is basically what LLMs do on really hard tasks. Prompt it a million times on a really hard problem and it might output the correct answer once.

Intelligence was always relatively cheap. You can pick up a phone and get answers for free in most academic settings.

Oh brother

AI hasn’t even taken the class of jobs associated with customer service lmao

yeah...right. Go touch some grass

Once we figure out the pesky problem of how we're going to pay for housing, food, and healthcare.

Mathematics is a human-designed game that involves rearranging symbols.