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Readit NewsComplexSystems commented on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI stratechery.com/2025/goog... · Posted by u/tambourine_man
ComplexSystems commented on AI just proved Erdos Problem #124 erdosproblems.com/forum/t... · Posted by u/nl
This is me being snarky and ignorant, but if it solved one problem and it is automated what’s stopping it from solving all the others? That’s what’s ultimately being sold by the tweet right.
Ultimately the main thing that will stop it from solving literally "all the others" are things like the impossibility of solving the halting problem, considerations like P ≠ NP, etc. But as we have just seen, despite these impossibility theorems, AI systems are still able to make substantive progress on solving important open real-world problems.
ComplexSystems commented on AI just proved Erdos Problem #124 erdosproblems.com/forum/t... · Posted by u/nl
I think it is way too far to say that!
We've had automated theorem proving since the 60s. What we need is automated theorem discovery. Erdős discovered these theorems even if he wasn't really able to prove them. Euler and Gauss discovered a ton of stuff they couldn't prove. It is weird that nobody considers this to be intelligence. Instead intelligence is a little game AI plays with Lean.
AI researchers keep trying to reduce intelligence into something tiny and approachable, like automated theorem proving. It's easy: you write the theorem you want proven and hope you get a proof. It works or it doesn't. Nice and benchmarkable.
Automated axiom creation seems a lot harder. How is an LLM supposed to know that "between any two points there is a line" formalizes an important property of physical space? Or how to suggest an alternative to Turing machines / lambda calculus that expresses the same underlying idea?
> We've had automated theorem proving since the 60s.
By that logic, we've had LLMs since the 60s!
> What we need is automated theorem discovery.
I don't see any reason you couldn't train a model to do this. You'd have to focus it on generating follow-up questions to ask after reading a corpus of literature, playing around with some toy examples in Python and making a conjecture out of it. This seems much easier than training it to actually complete an entire proof.
> Erdős discovered these theorems even if he wasn't really able to prove them. Euler and Gauss discovered a ton of stuff they couldn't prove. It is weird that nobody considers this to be intelligence.
Who says they don't? I wouldn't be surprised if HarmonicMath, DeepMind, etc have also thought about this kind of thing.
> Automated axiom creation seems a lot harder. How is an LLM supposed to know that "between any two points there is a line" formalizes an important property of physical space?
That's a good question! It would be interesting to see if this is an emergent property of multimodal LLMs trained specifically on this kind of thing. You would need mathematical reasoning, visual information and language encoded into some shared embedding space where similar things are mapped right next to each other geometrically.
ComplexSystems commented on AI just proved Erdos Problem #124 erdosproblems.com/forum/t... · Posted by u/nl
Are you kidding? This is an incredible result. Stuff like this is the most important stuff happening in AI right now. Automated theorem proving? It's not too far to say the entire singular point of the technology was to get us to this.
ComplexSystems commented on Every mathematician has only a few tricks (2020) mathoverflow.net/question... · Posted by u/nill0
The most brilliant software developer (an EE PhD) that I have ever worked with has been using the singular value decomposition (SVD) to solve an enormous number of linear algebra and numerical computing problems in engineering software. The SVD seems to be useful for many engineering computations if you know how to apply it.
What are some interesting things he has used the SVD to solve?
ComplexSystems commented on A trillion dollars (potentially) wasted on gen-AI garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/flail
> The author, for whatever reason, views it as a foregone conclusion that every dollar spent in this way is a waste of time and resources
This is a strawman, the author at no point says that “every dollar is a waste.”
He quite literally says that the dollars spent on scaling LLMs in the past few years are a waste.
Do you think that corporate erosion of (or outright hostility to) privacy is somehow a compelling reason to deny rights to those of us who make different choices in an attempt to protect them? Just because some people decided to buy a smartphone on wheels, do I have to suffer and have my freedom of movement narrowed and protection from arbitrary inspection by government agents denied?
Of course not - it makes no sense to gather that from my post. Were you trying to respond to someone else?
ComplexSystems commented on A trillion dollars (potentially) wasted on gen-AI garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/flail
That’s not what he’s saying, the investors are the ones who have put trillions of dollars into this technology on the premise that it will achieve AGI. People like Sam Altman and Marc Andreesen have been going into podcasts saying AGI is imminent and they’re going to automate every job.
The author did not say every dollar was wasted, he said that LLMs will never meet the current investment returns.
It’s very frustrating to see comments like this attacking strawmans and setting up Motte and Bailey arguments every time there’s AI criticism. “Oh but LLMs are still useful” and “Even if LLMs can’t achieve AGI we’ll figure out something that will eventually.” Yes but that isn’t what Sam and Andreesen and all these VCs have been saying, and now the entire US economy is a big gamble on a technology that doesn’t deliver what they said it would and because the admin is so cozy with VCs we’re probably all going to suffer for the mistakes of a handful of investors who got blinded by dollar signs in their eyes.
The author quite literally says that the last few years were a "detour" that has wasted a trillion dollars. He explicitly lists building new LLMs, building larger LLMs and scaling LLMs as the problem and source of the waste. So I don't think I am strawmanning his position at all.
It is one thing to say that OpenAI has overpromised on revenues in the short term and another to say that the entire experiment was a waste of time because it hasn't led to AGI, which is quite literally the stance that Marcus has taken in this article.
ComplexSystems commented on A trillion dollars (potentially) wasted on gen-AI garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/flail
It's not about "every dollar spent" being a waste of time, it's about acknowledging the reality of opportunity cost. Of course, no one in any movement is likely to listen to their detractors, but in this case the pioneers seem to agree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtePicx_kFY https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7e7mj0jmro
I think there is broad agreement that new models and architectures are needed, but I don't see it as a waste to also scale the stack that we currently have. That's what Silicon Valley has been doing for the past 50 years - scaling things out while inventing the next set of things - and I don't see this as any different. Maybe current architectures will go the way of the floppy disk, but it wasn't a waste to scale up production of floppy disk drives while they were relevant. And ChatGPT was still released only 3 years ago!
This commercial sucked because nobody wants to hear "it's the most terrible time of year." I don't really care if they used AI.