I have a strong sense that almost none of the commenters and blog post authors ranting here about mathematics have any clue about mathematics or its culture. I do not recognise any of these descriptions of mathematicians at all, and can only imagine they’re based entirely on experiences of other, almost entirely unrelated, parts of academia. This is not the first time I’ve seen it online, but recent events seem to have exacerbated it.
Not sure quite what animates the absurd hatred of one of the least greedy groups of people on the planet, but it certainly isn’t experience. To anyone with any, it just looks like absurd derangement.
Has and will. Are you going to back that assertion up at all, or just repeat it like that other viral thought-terminating cliche: ‘this is the worst the models will ever be’?
No it isn't. Best and worst and ill-defined anyway but the chess ELO score of various LLMs has fluctuated up and down, it's not been montonically increasing. What is the best answer to "how do I make cocaine"? The models are getting larger, with more compute and RAM backing them, but that doesn't automatically make them better if you don't define how you're measuring better-ness.
None of the frontier labs care about Chess as it's already a solved problem. If they did, the models would be much better. It's really not that hard. Google has a paper on grandmaster level chess without search from transformers.
Better obviously means better, like how they became better than they were 6 months and a year ago.
"Better" is not one dimensional across all use cases even if model capabilities are improving in aggregate.
e.g. If someone said "this is the worst they'll ever be" in response to some writing with obvious LLM cliches in 2024, I'm not convinced that prediction was actually correct.
The focus of OpenAI/Anthropic pivoted aggressively to the agentic performance arms race instead of making a more human sounding chatbot so regressions in writing ability aren't really a concern anymore if agentic benchmarks improve.
The first time I heard a recommendation to use Claude was specifically because it sounded much more "human" and natural than ChatGPT. Fast forward to now and idiosyncratic Claude-isms repeated every other sentence and its convoluted verbosity has become a widely mocked meme.
Right but we're talking about a single subject here - mathematics that labs are incentivized to keep improving for some time.
>e.g. If someone said "this is the worst they'll ever be" in response to some writing with obvious LLM cliches in 2024, I'm not convinced that prediction was actually correct.
2024 creative writing prose was...the last few versions have stalled, but I think they're still better than 2024.
I would describe better as how much of my work I can delegate to the agent. Right now I'm delegating much more to Astra high than 6 months ago to Opus 4.6. Every dev has this feeling, it's weird to even argue what a better model/harness means.
Chess is not solved in any meaningful sense of the term. Computers have been better than humans since the 90s, but better chess programs are released all the time.
It's solved in that we have had grossly superhuman capabilities for some time. It's not interesting for frontier labs. I suspect you understand this and the greater point so why be needlessly pedantic ?
There are a number of studies that show that Grit is either not a thing or there are better measures of success. It has been a long time since I have thought about it so I don't remember which papers in particular.
It’s ill-defined in the sense that it doesn’t uniquely define the set. There are at least two different sets that D could be (one containing it and one not containing it), hence the expression doesn’t denote a well-defined set. (*)
The axioms of ZF do not allow to form that expression, so the set doesn’t exist in ZF.
(*) This is from a universist view. In a pluralist view, one wouldn’t say that the fact of the matter of whether D contains itself or not is independent from naive set theory, and that there are set universes where it is the case and others where it isn’t. But I would hold that naive set theory starts from a universist view.
I think "Foundation" axiom F forbids your recursive set, and there are models of both core set theory satisfying either F or ¬F, so F is independent of core set theory (core -> not including F or ¬F). F is normally assumed in set theory, but Aczel has worked with "ill" founded (¬F) set theory models. Just as with the axiom of choice. No religion wars, just people pushed to be explicit with assumptions.
Not sure quite what animates the absurd hatred of one of the least greedy groups of people on the planet, but it certainly isn’t experience. To anyone with any, it just looks like absurd derangement.
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