Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
so openai is claimed to be doing great on the FrontierMath dataset. I've already seen the usual sort of dipshits using this to pump ai on reddit, and here's a post that went to the frontpage on HN:
https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/22/can-ai-do-maths-yet-thoughts-from-a-mathematician/
(tl;dr only a few problems from the dataset are public but if representative the problems are about 25% survivable by an undergrad; coincidentally this is the % openai says their models are completing.)
this post is by kevin buzzard. he has a let's say not easily beloved personality, but I don't think of him as credulous or grifty, and people in his area regard him as an excellent mathematician.
he points out but I think does not focus enough on how discrediting the secretive nature of the dataset is. the fact that you can't make it public is necessary to run such experiments in a scientifically reasonable way, but also makes it totally impossible to run the experiment in a scientifically reasonable way. an experiment which cannot be examined or reproduced is actually the opposite of science. it's pure grift fuel
The ARC scores don't matter too much to me at 3k a problem. Like the original goal of the prize had a compute limit. You can't break that rule and then claim victory ( I mean I guess you can, but like not everyone is gonna be as wowed as xitter randos, ensemble methods were already hitting 80% + acc to francois )
And unfortunately, with Frontier math, the lack of transparency w.r.t. which problems were solved and how they were solved makes it frustrating as hell to me, as someone who actually would like to see a super math robot. According to the senior math advisor to the people who created the data set, iirc 40% solved problems were in the easiest category / 50% in the second tier category and 10% were in the "hard" tier, but he said that he looked at the solutions and that they looked like mostly being solved 'heuristically' instead of plopping out any 'new' insights.
Again, none of this is good science, just pure shock and awe. I've heard rumors that OAI is hiring strong competition style mathematicians to supervise the reinforcement learning for these types of problems and if they are letting O3 take the test, then how the hell does that not leak the problem set? Like now the whole test is compromised now right? Since this behemoth uses enough electricity to power a city block, theres no way they would be able to run it locally. Now OAI can literally pay their peeps to solve the rest and surprise surprise O3++ will hit 80%
OTOH, with code forces scores and math scores this high, I can now put on my LW cap and say this model has 2 trillion IQ, so why hasn't it exterminated me and my family yet like big Yud promised? It's almost as if there is no little creature inside trying to take over the world or something.