I think one day the VCs will have given the monkeys on typewriters enough money that these kinds of comments can be generated without human intervention.
My big question with all these announcements is: How many other people were using the AI on problems like this, and, failing? Given the excitement around AI at the moment I think the answer is: a lot.
Then my second question is how much VC money did all those tokens cost.
I've tried my hand at a few of the Erdos problems and came up short, you didn't hear about them. But if a Mathematician at Harvard solved on, you would probably still hear about it a bit. Just the possibility that a pro subscription for 80 minutes solved an Erdos problem is astounding. Maybe we get some researchers to get a grant and burn a couple data centers worth of tokens for a day/week/month and see what it comes up with?
Capitalism already is a poor allocator of human effort, resources, and energy, why lock in on this specifically? There's entire professions that are essentially worthless to society that exist only to perpetuate the inherent contradictions of this system, why not focus more on all that wasted human effort? Or the fact that everyone has to do some arbitrary sellable labor in order to justify their existence, rather than something they might truly enjoy or might make the world better?
You might enjoy the book "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford, which traces the consequences of this thesis ("Capitalism already is a poor allocator") through the Khrushchev years of the USSR, seen through the eyes of the economists, mathematicians and planners who tried to do better than capitalism.
Of course there are in-between approaches like industrial policy in mixed economies, for example the South Korean shipbuilding industry. But those tend to work with the grain of capitalism, not against it.
Looking around, the evidence doesn't seem to support this conclusion. 50% of food thrown away, yet people go hungry. Every privatized industry diminishes in quality and reach. Selects and optimizes for profit rather than for human need.
We throw away food because we are so good at making it cheaply that the problem has shifted to distribution costs and fair wages. Also high productivity economies need to deal effectively with the Baumol effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect). If they don't then even people in the USA can be food poor despite huge GDP per capita.
> Looking around, the evidence doesn't seem to support this conclusion.
It absolutely does if you look at facts and not "vibes". There are less people starving now than ever now and it's a giant, giant difference. We are tackling more and more diseases thanks to big pharma. Even semi-socialist countries such as China have opened markets. Basically the only countries that do not implement capitalist solutions are the ones you'd never want to live in such as North Korea or Cuba (funny thing - even China urged Cuba to free their markets).
> There are less people starving now than ever now
I see no reason to attribute that to capitalism. Capitalist and non capitalist societies had famines, and capitalist and non capitalist societies industrialized and improved people's material conditions - by raw number of people, non capitalist societies did this for more people.
The PRC indeed has opened their markets, and now has capital allocation issues - their initial chip development programs failed because of market viability issues, and for whatever reason their government didn't put the communism hat on and just nationalize the entire industry like it's done for other ones. More evidence against the supposed increase efficiency and outcomes of privatization and market based R&D and incentives.
North Korea seems to be failing less because of its economic system and more because the entire nation is a cult with a horrifying political system.
It seems quite literally all economic strife in Cuba is due to American sanctions - and in spite of these they still have a lower infant mortality rate than the Americans and make breakthroug medical discoveries.
So again, given the evidence, it seems capitalism is, at best, equally viable to whatever the Soviets and PRC did, in terms of allocating resources and lifting people out of poverty.
Given that we probably all will run out of ways to justify our existence under capitalism through selling our labor within our lifetimes, it seems like a very good time to start considering alternatives. Capitalism has no answer to the question, "what do you do with people when you have an 80% unemployment rate?"
> by raw number of people, non capitalist societies did this for more people.
That's completely false. Please take your time to verify it, I hope that getting your facts straight will make you reconsider your position (and not get mad at facts).
> The PRC indeed has opened their markets, and now has capital allocation issues - their initial chip development programs failed because of market viability issues, and for whatever reason their government didn't put the communism hat on and just nationalize the entire industry like it's done for other ones.
Don't you think that this argument does not make much sense? If the solution is that easy and has been done numerous times, why would they not do it again? Maybe the real answer is that it's just hard problem, and hard problems take time and serendipity.
> It seems quite literally all economic strife in Cuba is due to American sanctions - and in spite of these they still have a lower infant mortality rate than the Americans and make breakthroug medical discoveries.
But why would they need global trade? Isn't that one of inventions and consequences of capitalism? I don't think global trade is possible without free markets at all, so if global trade is necessary for prosperity, then so is capitalism. Also note that Cuba has approximately 25% higher infant mortality rate (I ask you again to look at the data; note that Cuba has higher infant mortality even though it has been criticized for artificially reducing their stats, e.g. by reclassifying part of infant deaths to fetal deaths) and their medical breakthroughs are nowhere near what US (or China, which now beats US because they... made market for pharma more free) is doing.
> So again, given the evidence, it seems capitalism is, at best, equally viable to whatever the Soviets and PRC did, in terms of allocating resources and lifting people out of poverty.
Again, that's completely false and PRC has seen biggest reductions of poverty AFTER implementing market reforms!
There's not much point in us each accusing the other of misrepresenting facts, as I'm about to do you.
So instead, how about trying to answer the question that capitalism can't, within the confines of capitalist incentives - what do you do with people when your unemployment hits 26%? 50%?
Dogmatism towards the current system blinds perspective. One could easily grant that capitalism was the best industrializing mechanism, it still wouldn't presuppose it as the most humane framework for an industrialized world.
> There's not much point in us each accusing the other of misrepresenting facts, as I'm about to do you.
> So instead, how about trying to answer the question that capitalism can't, within the confines of capitalist incentives - what do you do with people when your unemployment hits 26%? 50%?
No, getting our facts straight is more important than construed arguments and imaginary scenarios.
I think we should at least ask the latter, if it turned out it cost $100,000 to generate this solution, I would question the value of it. Erdős problems are usually pure math curiosities AFAIK. They often have no meaningful practical applications.
Also, it's one thing if the AI age means we all have to adopt to using AI as a tool, another thing entirely if it means the only people who can do useful research are the ones with huge budgets.
Getting off-topic, but as a successful high-school dropout I am compelled to remind anyone reading this that [the American] college [system] is a scam.
That's not to say that there aren't benefits to tertiary education, for many people in different contexts. It's just not the golden path that it's made out to be.
Many people currently in college are just wasting their money and should enroll in trades programs instead.
Meanwhile, nothing about being in or out of school is mutually exclusive to using LLMs as a force multiplier for learning - or solving math problems, apparently.
These are absolutely worth studying, but being what they are, nobody should be dumping massive amounts of money on them. I would not find it persuasive if researchers used LLMs to solve the Collatz conjecture or finally decode Etruscan. These are extremely valuable, but it is unlikely to be worth it for an LLM just grinding tokens like crazy to do it.
If solving even the biggest problems in pure maths is not worth it for you, then I guess we should stop all the pure maths research - researchers are getting paid much more than potential token spend, frequently for decades and they frequently work on much less important and easier problems.
Maybe... but I would love if 1% of the investment in AI were redirected to the mathematics education and professional research that would allow progress on any of these problems...
No meaningful, practical applications? You realize that sounds incredibly naive in the history of mathematics, right? People thought this way about number theory in general, and many other things that turned out to have quite important practical applications. Your statement is also a bit odd in that researchers are already paid throughout their whole careers to solve such problems. I don't know.
> You realize that sounds incredibly naive in the history of mathematics, right?
This is after the fact justification. You are arguing that because a thing (number theory) showed practical applications we should have dumped a lot more effort into it. There is no basis for this argument whatsoever; it also seems to involve inventing a time machine. Number theory had no practical applications until the development of public-key cryptography, but you cannot make funding decisions based on the future since it’s unknowable.
Once we get something working, sure, you can justify more aggressive investment. This is not to say that we should not invest in pie-in-the-sky ideas. We absolutely should and need to. Moonshot research or even somewhat esoteric research is vital, but the current investment in AI is so far out of the ballpark of rational. There’s an energy of a fait accompli here, except it’s still very plausible this is all unsustainable and the market implodes instead.
> Number theory had no practical applications until the development of public-key cryptography, but you cannot make funding decisions based on the future since it’s unknowable.
You are completely missing the point. The point is that we should invest in pure maths because it has always been an investment with very good ROI. The funding should be focused on what experts believe will advance pure maths more (not whether we believe that in 100 years this specific area will find some application) and that's pretty much what we are doing right now. I think it's just your anti-AI sentiment that's clouding your judgement and since AI succeeded in proving pure maths results, you are inclined to downplay it by saying that well, pure maths is worthless anyway.
>> Number theory had no practical applications until the development of public-key cryptography
This is so wrong I don't even know where to begin. Modular arithmetic, numerical integration, pseudorandom number generation, error-correcting codes, predicting planetary orbits (!), etc.
There's some troll making a dozen accounts on here to spew alt-right/MAGA nonsense, then deleting their comments (editing them to ".") once their account is burned.
I love how at the beginning of this boom people were talking about how heuristics applied to AI outputs were short-term gains disguised as real progress. Now it seems like almost every new tool is a series of heuristics applied to AI outputs.
One of the books that influenced my thinking the most was The Accidental Guerilla by David Kilcullen where he posits that economic disadvantage drove a lot of people to insurgency. This article supports that. Worth a read!
Unless I'm mistaken reading this, it looks like they never set a date and this this is the prior conversation to him trying to invite himself over and being told no. I don't see any plans in this article, just Epstein saying he'll send a heli and then never setting a date or making actual plans. I feel like if there's no evidence he went, Elon denies it, and Elon was a big supporter of releasing the files then it would probably be premature to suggest he went.
> In a December 2013 email, Musk again wrote to Epstein saying, “Christmas and New Year’s, will be in the BVI /St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?”
> “I will send heli for you,” Epstein responded, with Musk writing back, “Thanks.”
> In a follow-up email on Dec. 25, Musk said, “Actually, I could fly back early on the 3rd. We will be in St Bart’s.” He asked if he and Riley should head to the island the day before.
> CNBC hasn’t confirmed whether Musk ever visited the Island, though Musk has denied ever traveling there.
> Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
To me “I will send heli for you” does not mean "being told no".
Who knows who did what on this island, and I hope we'll figure it out. But in the meantime, going to this island or/and being friend with Epstein doesn't automatically make someone a pedo or rapist.
No, but they all knew he was a pedo/rapist, and were still friends with him and went to the island of a pedo/rapist, and introduced the pedo/rapist to their friends...
We don't know how many were pedo/rapists, but we know all of them liked to socialize with one and trade favours and spread his influence.
Neither does your wife divorcing you at about the same time things started to go through legal process...
Oops... yeah, in retrospect it was even worse... no... you can and should be judged by the friends you keep and hang-out with... The same ones who seem to be circling the wagons with innocuous statements or attempts to find other scapegoats (DARVO)... hmm, what was that quote again:
"We must all hang together or we will all hang separately"
Elon Musk has his own planes, he would not have needed a ride had Epstein invited him. Recently released emails also show people (like commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who asserted at great length last year that he hadn't had any contact with Epstein since meeting him in 2005) arranging to visit Epstein at his island and taking their own yacht over there.
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