- excerpt from the textbook "A History of the United States of America in the 21st Century", Hyper-Collins (Near Earth Orbit, New New York), copyright 2132.
The Cerebras hardware is not locked to specific models / model families. Taalas is the company that's etching models into their silicon, locking it to that model forever.
An LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week. It seems very likely that in 6 months they will solve 100 top tier math problems, maybe 1 millenium math problem, maybe 10 top tier physics problems, etc.
Math is verifiable. LLMs will continue to make strides in such search spaces where all they need to do is try->verify->repeat. You can't train an LLM on how to end the war in Iran or Ukraine, nor how to solve hunger, nor climate change, etc. Real issues.
Three years ago, people were saying "LLMs just generate plausible-sounding text, they don't understand the notion of truth so they can't do verifiable work like math proofs."
They still can't. But very smart humans constructed ways to use the monkeys with typewriters (with a statistical advantage) to find correct answers to problems where they already knew how to verify the answer.
You need a problem where you both know what the solution looks like or can otherwise very quickly and efficiently determine that a solution is correct, but at the same time can't work out a correct solution with a similar amount of effort/time/cost as it took to determine how to verify a solution.
Most problems don't match that criteria. You usually either have a problem with a known method of solving, or you have a problem with no clear way of verifying the solution besides the act of finding the solution itself which would involve in some way proving it is correct, or you have a problem where verifying a solution takes a very long time or has a high cost or even can't be done more than once, so you need to try to determine the best solution without being able to actually test or verify.
Basically all problems just don't fit the "hard to solve but easy to verify" criteria to a degree that makes llms a good fit. On the other hand, there are so many problems that even a tiny fraction is a relatively large number.
No, he says it's a different category of problem, and ability to solve one doesn't carry over to the other and it doesn't imply intelligent understanding.
Right, which was true at the time. So hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into making LLMs better at these tasks via pretraining, RL, RLHF, post training, etc. again all with something verifiable in the loop. In order to improve the thing in the loop, the loop itself needs to be verifiable.
There have only been a few thousand wars, and they’re all different and all different in the world in which they occurred. The dimensionality is absurd, which is not a problem for LLMs if there’s enough data, but in this case there isn’t.
Yeah but... Both things are true. LLMs are doing things we would have considered absolute AGI god tier magic 5 years ago. They also still can't count to 100 yet.
If you think all they need to do is "just that" (try, verify, repeat as you say) then I think you're very, very mistaken.
There is no way for the LLM to bruteforce the search space any better than a human. What it can do better, tho, is to make connections between seemingly (for us) unconnected notions and join them, then verify if that's right.
Your view is not only wrong but also condescending in this day and age.
That’s literally how AlphaEvolve works. And presumably how OpenAI’s research loop works if they’d ever publish it.
They put an LLM in a loop, with a reward function, and keep trying to get a higher score. The reward function for AlphaEvolve is “did this code get a better score or faster”, for math research it’s “did it write a LEAN proof”.
I’m open to hearing that I’m wrong but I don’t think I am. I agree that LLMs make connections that humans wouldn’t, but eventually you need to verify those because otherwise the connection it made may as well be a lie unless proven otherwise.
Claude had some pretty good ideas about how to end the war in Iran when I asked it a while ago (The US should
sue for peace, I believe was the conclusion).
>An LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week
and 30 years ago a computer beat Gary Kasparov, if you'd listened to Hans Moravec you wouldn't be surprised that the first thing that gets automated is intellectual domain expertise.
Things are going to get crazy when it can figure out how to walk into a random house a and brew a cup of coffee, not do math
Suppose LLM solved all math problems. So what? It’s not like diplomacy and war will end. Are humanity’s problems really constrained on our intellectual ability? If anything most evidence points to cultural failing and all AI will do is enable unprecedented oppression due to said skills at intellectual tasks.
As you read this some poor person is starving. Humanity already possesses the ability to identify said person and send them aid. How is AI going to help here?
The ultimate fallacy is that all technological progress will benefit mankind. That will be true until it is not.
It's an interesting time when the bar has moved to "It’s not like diplomacy and war will end". But that is on the table. Nuclear weapons caused the end of wars as we know them. Great powers no longer directly attack each other. And AI is much more powerful than nuclear weapons, with an equal capacity for damage and a much greater capacity for good.
By the way, I donate monthly to GiveWell and the shrimp welfare project. Do you donate monthly to starving people? Most people don't, and the reason is simple: at the end of the day, most people just don't care that much about helping a starving person far away. They also don't care much about things like that, animals in factory farms, or earthquakes that kill hundreds of thousands. But ideally, we could find a way to empower people such that the minority who do care can make a big difference.
How is AI "more powerful than nuclear weapons" etc when they're two completely different things? Please explain to me how AI can glass the planet via mutually assured destruction.
Someone who would not otherwise be able to asks AI for simple instructions for how to make a deadly virus, which then spreads rapidly and kills most of those it infects
this comment will be killed, i find it an apt response to the idea that enabling those who believe themselves to be good is more important than reducing wanton suffering
i read your article you posted here. in that article you state that you support live and let live. most people who support live and let live either havent been raped by life yet, or have chosen to double down post-rape. the latter is respectable, still im not currently interested in a discussion involving the influence of such a perspective. out of good faith i highlight that i responded to:
> ideally, we could find a way to empower people such that the minority who do care can make a big difference
is it a coincidence, that in your ideal world, you would be empowered, because you care, as evidenced by your testimony of things you do that make you think you care? in my ideal world, wanton suffering would be minimized, regardless as to the path it took to get there; requiring 1 specific path involving people who think they are good, demarcates our ideals.
> Suppose LLM solved all math problems. So what? It’s not like diplomacy and war will end.
These are two vastly different statements, and the the war and diplomacy end is almost trivial by comparison, it would absolutely be solved before we solve all math in even the most steelmanned version.
Not OP but it implies all efforts are not intentional but at best by chance. For instance, the state of freely available LLM chatbots still makes me cry by the amount of crap they spew out confidently, which is not intentional. (tiny bit of sarcasm, but only a tiny bit)
If they actually think that, then.. stop working on AI? Being the first person to end the world doesn't exactly gain you anything. I guess there's a bleak humor to Altman and Musk and Amodei being forced to live out the rest of their days in their bunkers I guess.
Like seriously, to the people that think this is a doomsday thing, if you're serious about that line of thought then STOP DOING IT. It's like the people that are arguing that AI is conscious. IF you truly believe that, then we've just reinvented slavery, and again, STOP!
I 100% do not accept the "it's inevitable anyway so morality is out the window". We also have nuclear weapons but we don't need to rush into World War 3. Also nothing inevitable requires trillions of dollars a year to advance because it's so deeply unprofitable.
Narrator: "They had the ability to be that incompetent."