| ▲ | ComplexSystems 6 hours ago |
| It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working. |
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| ▲ | bze12 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| AI has sitzfleisch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#:~:text=... |
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| ▲ | password4321 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My browser doesn't do the fancy URL text selection... sitzfleisch: the ability to endure or carry on with an activity Something Oppenheimer did not have, apparently. | | |
| ▲ | wongarsu 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | loaned from German, where it's originally a way to say buttocks, literally "sitting flesh". If you have more Sitzfleisch you can sit for longer. Both in the literal sense (a bigger butt makes sitting more comfortable) and in the figurative sense (having the mental ability to sit for longer, get more desk work done) | | |
| ▲ | bryanrasmussen 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think there is an IT bit of humor from about 1 decade+ back where the people who's proposals won out in meeting were the ones that could keep from needing to go to the bathroom longer. | |
| ▲ | glenstein 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fascinating crossover from literal to figurative that you find so often when you trace language back far enough. |
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| ▲ | RGS1811 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is fantastic. Now I have a sophisticated-sounding german word for my attention deficit. | | |
| ▲ | spankibalt 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's also a less flattering reading of the word, where Sitzfleisch means having a "flat ass" (from sitting too much, e. g. Sitzfleischparade describing a group of flat-arsed people, or something like Sitzfleischmaxxer, and so on). | | |
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| ▲ | zenNeko 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This was such an interesting thing to learn | |
| ▲ | nobodyandproud 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We Americans call it grit. | | |
| ▲ | alex43578 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The connotation of grit to me feels different. Grit is pushing through adversity, rather than just tedium. |
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| ▲ | ashleyn 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wow, what a great comparison. LLMs are great at reasoning but absolute dogshit at simple arithmetic. If there's a raw calculation involved I always tell it to use python to add it all up. |
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| ▲ | grebc 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ever heard of string theory. People go whole lives without being able to make it pan out. |
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| ▲ | tengbretson 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier. | | |
| ▲ | aurareturn 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | When people make these comments about string theory, are they at the forefront of quantum physics theory and have spent years on modern string theory? Or did they just watch a YouTube video and then keep parroting this? | | |
| ▲ | the__alchemist 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You could reductio ad-absurdum this logic quite broadly. We all form beliefs about the world and its aspects, and almost always through fallible sources. Should one be confident about ones of questionable provenance? I say no. But forming beliefs from the information we have is a useful skill. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | In the age of infinite bullshit generators, the even more useful skill is being able to say "I don't know." Or "I'm not qualified to have a useful opinion on this so I'm just not going to say anything." I could write a bunch of stuff about my personal opinions on string theory and waste everyone's time, or I could just shut up and not be a human stoichastic parrot. |
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| ▲ | nullbio 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This isn't a great argument. Researchers who do not think string theory is good are not going to spend years on it. There are plenty of experts that dismiss string theory. I have no skin in the game, and don't care either way, fwiw. | |
| ▲ | OroPla 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I also just keep parroting that the Earth is not flat and a bunch of other things I've been told and then never questioned, since it seems to make sense. When the flath-earth craze started I've been trying to at least get that bit actually personally verified. Haven't managed to do it to this day, though. So I'll just keep parroting various things without properly understanding them. C'est la vie. | | |
| ▲ | bhaak 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your drive to verify must be very low then. There are hundreds of small logic reasonings or even experiments with which you can easily prove that a flat earth model is at least very complicated or even impossible. Explaining Moon phases gets very complicated in any flat earth model. With binoculars you can see the shadows of craters on the moon's terminator. Or the phases of Venus whereas Mars doesn't have any. Timezones are ridiculously hard to explain on a flat earth. A proper theory must explain all of them and no flat earth model can do that. A round Earth OTOH easily does. |
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| ▲ | lokar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Or the just read Woit, uh, 20 years ago now, “not even wrong”. | |
| ▲ | tcp_handshaker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sabine has been at the forefront and has the goods: https://youtu.be/1mgxuVVUz40 And for the inevitable critics of Sabine...maybe Leonard Susskind is good enough for you: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok | | |
| ▲ | cauch 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The error with this approach is that every single physics theory gets exactly the same criticisms. You can take any of the theories that Hossenfelder would spend time on instead of the ones she does not like, and you would find (basically) a similar percentage of physicists saying it's a mistake to continue in this direction. In other terms: for each physics theory, on 100 physicists, you have 5 physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it (number made up for illustration, and there is probably some variations, but you get the gist). You took one theory and found few physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it. You conclude, incorrectly, that it means this theory is fundamentally differently treated as any other theories. (on top of that, it is unfortunate that Hossenfelder later screw up her image by doing way too much mistakes that someone reliable would not do) |
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| ▲ | hilariously 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ok Sabina, everyone is string theory is all just a bunch of egotistical morons. | | |
| ▲ | chongli 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now. | | |
| ▲ | cauch 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think it's a good argument. String theory is just "one application" of advanced mathematical physics. It's like saying that software developers specialised in ReactJS would lose their career if ReactJS is suddenly abandoned. | | |
| ▲ | grebc an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not a fair comparison because one is exposed to real life market forces vs. academic inertia. ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere. |
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| ▲ | smallmancontrov 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | As opposed to having built a career complaining about string theory on youtube? | | |
| ▲ | chongli 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | And that's the reason she's wrong? | | |
| ▲ | cauch 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You were the one introducing the argument "they are getting advantages out of it so we should be careful to not take what they say as an impartial view". Same can be told of Hossenfelder (personally, I would say that Hossenfelder has shown more clues that indeed she is not very reliable and would prefer caricatural sensationalistic descriptions, which is not what the typical string theory physicist does). | | |
| ▲ | chongli 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, my point was only to refute the idea that people need to be egotistical or moronic (the only two options) to cling to an idea past its expiry date. People could also be “pot-committed” career-wise. Or they could have myriad other reasons (identity, sunk-cost fallacy, etc). Nowhere did I suggest that “the reason for discrediting string theorists is that they have financial stakes in the idea.” Please try to be more charitable than that. | | |
| ▲ | cauch 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You said > No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now. This is not presented as "yet another option that may or may not be the reality", this is presented as your conclusion of why we observe what we observe. Maybe it is not what you are thinking, but you cannot blame people for interpreting your message the way you have written it. I agree with you that there are several options, one of the most probable, that you did not mention, is that the situation of the string theory is just "normal" and some idiots are not able to understand that. |
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| ▲ | Arainach 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Spending your life's work on a theory that is widely agreed to be untestable is certainly a form of ego, or at least is more philosophy than science. | | |
| ▲ | devmor 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is a pretty silly belief to hold about science. Plenty of strong, well held standards of the modern era were considered ridiculous fringe beliefs a century ago. | | |
| ▲ | nobodyandproud 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | They were testable, no? | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, we can test it, but you'll need to give me a ton of money in order for me to test it. | |
| ▲ | Nextgrid 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either? (thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them) |
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| ▲ | 8note 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | even if its not particularly relevant to the physical world around us, it still explored cool math |
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| ▲ | andai 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Also out-speeding them, and that was before high speed inference. Out-ralphing them, you might say! https://ghuntley.com/ralph/ AGI ≈ artificial stupidity × infinite persistence |
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| ▲ | jstummbillig 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > It's also "out-brute forcing them." That is also approximately what people have always done to succeed. |
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| ▲ | fooker 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Mathematicians routinely spend years on a problem without getting anywhere. |
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| ▲ | EA-3167 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The key here is that it’s depending on the human inability to connect the sum of relevant knowledge, but said knowledge comes from humans. Theres going to be this field day of low-hanging fruit that ML can round up, but after that I suspect it will be in fits and starts as a “connection maker” rather than some proof producer. |
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| ▲ | akiselev 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think we're underestimating just how much low hanging fruit there is. I've been trying to apply this LLM research process to physics (QM and solid state) and there is so much missing in Physlib and the rest of the Lean ecosystem that most of my work has been trying to formalize the theories and validating them against the specification problem (and mostly failing badly). | |
| ▲ | putlake 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not only going to be "connection maker". If and when robotics advance to a point where the LLMs are embodied, they can run experiments in the physical world and find new knowledge. | | |
| ▲ | combobyte 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Being embodied is not the important barrier to running experiments. It's having access to a body of resources (i.e. funding and infrastructure). | | |
| ▲ | rowanG077 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For some research funding is mostly the salaries of the people doing the research. | | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | What research works that way? | | |
| ▲ | rowanG077 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | large parts of Computer science, mathematics, theoretical physics, economics, some humanities research and I'm probably missing a ton. | | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | So applied math, math, applied math, applied math, and maybe some others. That makes sense, although I'd argue that at least in the realm of HEP theoretical physics has extraordinarily expensive kit compared to what scientists make. See: The LHC. | | |
| ▲ | rowanG077 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Reducing all these fields to mathematics is incredibly reductive. I don't think it's in good faith. | | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think it's telling that "Researchers cost more than any other aspect of research" seems to involve primarily math as inputs and outputs. Like I said the obvious outlier is theoretical physics because that tends to involve significant resources both to explore (supercomputers) and verify (colliders, telescopes, interferometers, etc). Most people involved in research in any number of fields do not find that their collective salaries are the majority of the cost required; math is an outlier in many cases. |
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| ▲ | ForHackernews 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | yeah but LLMs might be even cheaper than grad students |
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| ▲ | EA-3167 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Robots in labs already exist, but mercifully they're not hooked up to anything as unpredictable as an LLM. Robots tend to work best as specialists doing high-throughput, extremely repetitive tasks which nonetheless require a degree of precision. Giving a robot a "human" body makes very little sense if we're talking about the needs and productivity of a non-human; humanoid robots are marketing for humans. | | |
| ▲ | AustinDev 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Humanoid robots are obviously more than marketing. The entirety of human civilization is human shaped. Making robots that are human shaped is easier and more efficient than redesigning and rebuilding everything that exists. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The entirety of human civilization is human shaped. That's the marketing pitch. A plumbing robot doesn't need to be humanoid, an octopus shape may well be better for all the awkward corners. A robot police officer could be the municipality itself for sensory nodes (essentially the sales pitch of Flock etc.), plus some drones or robot dogs to perform arrests*. The robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers we already have are nothing like a human. A robot taxi driver can be just the car. Robot dogs are already used for maintenance and security sweeps. If you've got wheelchair access, you've got wheeled robot access. If you've got guide dog access, you've got access for Boston Dynamics' Spot. * this may be a bad idea with current robotics, but I aver it's not improved by making those robotics humanoid. | | |
| ▲ | rowanG077 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are not understanding what humanoid robots are about. Those are specialist robots you are describing. The promise is of course one robot that can do the plumbing, clean your house, do the dishes, build a house, and basically every physical job a human can do. It's extreme lly likely that at least a somewhat humanoid shape is required for that. | | |
| ▲ | whythismatters 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My octopus will outperform your humanoid by doing the dishes, fixing the plumbing, and preparing a Caesar salad, all at the same time! | | | |
| ▲ | techpression 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Humans are really bad at everything we do compared to the specialized creatures in nature, it’s just that we can do many things that sets us apart.
A humanoid robot is incredibly dumb for that reason. At least add a set of arms and legs and 360 vision. And obviously dislocated joints than can move freely and hands should have two thumbs and more fingers. It’s not hard to come up with a bunch of improvements for humans, it’s just that making robots in our image is a lot more trivial because you only have to solve for those same averages attributes that we have. | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Things you need to take into account that you've almost certainly glossed over: Safety. Human-robot interactions are generally dangerous and avoided, unless the robot is specifically designed to interact with people. In those cases you often sacrifice speed, strength, and flexibility for safety and softness. Having someone come in with a specialized plumbing robot makes sense, you owning one probably doesn't, and you owning a generalize android capable of plumbing makes less sense still. Cost. The more compact, complex, and interactive your robot is the more it costs. Make a strong, compact, complex robot safe for interactions with people in the wild is non-trivial and adds costs. The software required to do all of this is hypothetical, but obviously also costly. Need. I understand the dream of a robot to do whatever you want is very much part of our culture, but when you consider the downsides do you really need it? I don't need a plumber living in my house any more than I need a carpenter or a landscaper to live on premises. At most these are services I would need occasionally or on a schedule. I also doubt my need for them will overlap much, unless we're talking about building a new dwelling. So why do I need a generalist in my life that's going to cost more than you can imagine, when the means to hire existing human generalists is cheap, quick, and frankly less likely to accidentally punch a hole in you. |
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| ▲ | tsimionescu 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Making robots that are human shaped is easier and more efficient than redesigning and rebuilding everything that exists. In the last 100-200 years, that has been proven wrong at every single step. | |
| ▲ | OroPla 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Historically this has never been correct. Turns out you get more efficient systems when designing them without how a human would accomplish a task in mind. | |
| ▲ | vulcan01 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Counterpoint: cars. It takes sustained effort to prevent civilization from being modified to accommodate new technology, e.g. Stop Kindermoord. | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Outside of sci-fi, marketing proposals, and niches like "Elder care in Japan" there are very few humanoid robots. By contrast non-humanoid robots have been mass produced and used in industry for decades. Arms. Carts. Trollies. No people. If you want something with fine motor control and dexterity, it's easier to make that the robot and then have another robot bring the workpiece to the arm than it is to build a single robot that can walk around and do it. There are compromises in human features because we're generalists. |
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| ▲ | bellowsgulch 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Counterpoint: something has happened in frontier models, and yes they now get discouraged and will sometimes prefer to not continue working on a problem unless you tell them to anyway. I don't know how or why this would be trained on behavior, but no, it isn't true anymore that models don't say things like, "Ugh," or "this is going to take hours and maybe we should stop here." |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. Your timelines are a bit unambitious. There's nobody expecting to make significant progress with a week of work. |
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| ▲ | bananaflag 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > There's nobody expecting to make significant progress with a week of work. You underestimate my ADHD. Source: I am mathematician. | | | |
| ▲ | nmstoker 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They were just illustrating their point, I wouldn't take that literally. |
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| ▲ | ralusek 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We're just going to slowly deconstruct every element that could be a factor of intelligence. It's not out-thinking, it's just out-remembering It's not out-thinking, it's just out-working It's not out-thinking, it's just able to consider more things simultaneously It's not creative, it's just randomly generating things and then selecting viable ones |
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| ▲ | legulere 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A new technology being able to do something better than humans does not mean it’s intelligent though. A calculation program is not intelligent just because it can remember more digits than me, work more than me | |
| ▲ | gniv 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's insightful. AI is teaching us things about our own intelligence by simply evolving under our eyes. | |
| ▲ | Zigurd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you make that list comprehensive, there's probably a Nobel prize in it for you. | |
| ▲ | hn_throwaway_99 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But the difference really does matter and is not just a case of "whittling down" what intelligence really is. We have known for a very long time that computers and machines are much faster than humans, more accurate, are scalable in certain ways that humans aren't, and they don't tire. I think most people who are not in the "AI cult" would agree that LLMs and modern generative AI are really just an extension of those faster/more accurate/more scalable and never tiring traits. But there does seem to be (and I'm sure folks much smarter than I have quantified this or described it better than I can) a fundamental difference in how humans think, especially as it applies to what true "understanding" really entails, and for the ability to think up truly novel and unique things that are not just a rejiggering/recombination of training data. I believe those skills really are at the heart of human cognition, and as impressive as LLMs are in replicating what this looks like, there are plenty of "LLM failure modes" where it's clear that LLMs lack a true understanding of concepts or the ability to generate useful, completely novel ideas. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's definitely a lot missing from the current state of the art in machine learning that all brains manage to beat, and we can observe this just because an animal that needs as many examples as an AI to learn motor functions would starve to death before learning to eat. However I can only guess that this is important, I'm not absolutely certain. They're at risk of being an economic disruptor just by being extremely stupid (by how much they need to study) faster than us to the same ratio we jog faster than continental drift. | |
| ▲ | jryle70 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nobody knows what true "understanding" really entails, or what are "truly novel and unique things that are not just a rejiggering/recombination of training data". For the latter, you'd at least have to find an example in history of someone who came up with some idea that has been widely considered "truly novel" by experts, who didn't have any education or training, so no "rejiggering/recombination". |
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| ▲ | B-Con 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's almost as if we're building something that... mimics intelligence. | | | |
| ▲ | awesome_dude 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >that could be a factor of intelligence Could is carrying a lot of weight here. Because, what's really happening is we're saying "Oh these things are what defines intelligence" then implementing them and /discovering/ "oh wait, there's more to this than we knew". We've known, for decades, for example that an IQ test is not a measure of Intelligence, even though people still refer to it as though it is. A computer passing an IQ test, therefore, would have been thought of as possessing intelligence way back when, but would not now. Oh, on the point of "creativity" - is a RNG "creative"? It creates a value unbounded by human intervention (in theory, yes Pseudo RNGs have limitations) - therefore it must be creative... right? |
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| ▲ | runarberg 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| In other words: Thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231974 |
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| ▲ | scarmig 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Take something like (1+x*y)^3*z+y^2*(1+x*y)*(4+3*x*y);y+3*x*(1+x*y)^2*z+3*x*y^2*(4+3*x*y);2*x-3*x^2*y-x^3*z|0,0,-1/4|1,-3/2,13/2
If a thousand monkeys typed at a character per second, on a keyboard with the 23 relevant characters, it would take roughly 10^136 years for them to come up with this counterexample. Though, to be fair to monkey scenario, there's a large family of them known now, so it's not quite this bad: suppose there are a trillion permutations and similar examples that fit in this string. Then we are down to 10^124 years.If LLMs are monkeys, somehow trained LLM weights allow them to model and prune massive numbers of universes in parallel. | | |
| ▲ | awesome_dude 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Just FTR - 1 character per second is glacially slow - it's 12 wpm - fine for (slow) transcription, but the monkey typing exercise doesn't require them to know what they are typing out |
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