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p-e-w | on: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
Unless you’re claiming that AIs will suddenly (and very soon) stop improving, they are obviously a threat to everyone’s job.

Calling notable conjectures that have been open for decades “low-hanging fruit” is an act of desperation. Most professional mathematicians couldn’t have proved those conjectures if their lives depended on it.

skybrian | parent | next
I wouldn’t call it “low hanging fruit” but it’s easy to think of problems that seem harder. Apparently solving notable math conjectures is easier than building a practical robot to deliver a package to someone’s porch?

So, yes, AI is a big deal and we don’t know what it’s going to affect, but the goal of replacing everyone’s job is extremely ambitious and there’s a long way to go.

This has to be assessed separately for each kind of job.

pfdietz | root | parent
Moravec's Paradox strikes again!

Moravec must be at some level gratified things are arriving close to his predicted timeline.

xorcist | parent | next
The thought that anything could improve without bounds would be absurd. We are living in the physical world after all. The (open, interesting) question is how close we are to the limit.
p-e-w | root | parent | next
It’s safe to assume that after less than a decade of LLM development, we’re nowhere close to the limit yet. In fact, progress still seems to be accelerating at the moment.
xorcist | root | parent
If anything, it should be safe to assume by now that capabilities don't scale linearly with model size.
onraglanroad | root | parent
Types of technology - of which we can include intelligence - move along S curves, but it's more absurd to think that humans are near the top of that curve rather than right at the bottom.

There might be a thing beyond intelligence that we can't even conceive of.

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pydry | parent | next
>Unless you’re claiming that AIs will suddenly (and very soon) stop improving

Most technologies level off sharply after bouts of boundless improvements.

In 1968 they thought we'd be flying to the moon by now but instead we're flying across the ocean in planes not that different from the 747 that existed back then.

pfdietz | root | parent | next
They sometimes start improving again. In the context of your comment, look how the cost/kg to LEO has suddenly dropped radically. This was mostly due to institutional change that allowed previous non-technological barriers to improvement to be bypassed.
skekke | root | parent
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sandspar | root | parent
Even if AI stops merely at solving Erdos problems (merely...), metabolizing it would take decades.
samatman | parent
> COUNTEREXAMPLE TO EULER'S CONJECTURE ON SUMS OF LIKE POWERS

> BY L. J. LANDER AND T. R. PARKIN

> A direct search on the CDC 6600 yielded:

    27⁵ + 84⁵ + 110⁵ + 133⁵ = 144⁵
> as the smallest instance in which four fifth powers sum to a fifth power. This is a counterexample to a conjecture by Euler that at least n nth powers are required to sum to an nth power, n>2.

https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1966-72-06/S0002-9904-1966...

It is a conjecture whether grinding it out on Lean is a difference in kind, rather than degree. I say degree. But it remains to be seen.