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A year of work by two Spanish mathematicians versus 88 hours and €15 million by OpenAI: ‘Without our idea, AI wouldn’t have solved it’ (english.elpais.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 89 points 1 week ago (9 children)

The LLM didn’t ‘solve’ anything, it regurgitated a guess.

Stop attributing comprehension and agency to something which is intrinsically incapable of possessing it.

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  • [–] 43 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Producing a correct answer doesn't imply comprehension, using the word "solve" doesn't imply comprehension. Computers have been "solving" math problems for decades.

    There is no attribution of comprehension implied in that phrase.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    Yeah there wasn’t a pre written or rewritten guess, it’s combining other ideas (processes) to get to a desired point. It’s novel, but it’s not conscious and derived from creativity on its own. And that’s fine. It’s a tool. It’s the most complex computational tool developed outside of quantum computing, and that’s pretty neat. It might also turn out to be really useful. The problem is the tech bros won’t use it long term for good, because good isn’t as profitable as using it for war, for mass surveillance, for oppression.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

    Stop attributing comprehension and agency

    That's not what this is doing. At all. It's saying it produced a solution.

    Edit: Y'all, mathematicians literally use deterministic algorithms called SAT solvers that solve the Boolean satisfiability problem. Saying an algorithm "solved" a math problem is not ascribing it comprehension or agency.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (2 children)

    It's the age of AI, words don't mean anything anymore. They only point to other words. The word "solve" may have a "definition" but that's irrelevant compared to how the word makes me feel.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago

    That's literally always been true. Humans are emotional speakers and use language that feels right more than we use language that factually accurate.

    The spicies have been trying to tell you this for decades.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    Search bots that have ingested speech patterns. Psycholinguistics is traceable down to codons, sure, but the meaning and nuance is lost. Lewis Carroll is probably LLM kryptonite, for example.

    AI is a PR pick for a name. A name to lure in investors. It attributes so much more to the bots and invokes curiosity in everyone around it. Versus language bot or some other not so sexy name.

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