| ▲ | mindwok an hour ago |
| It is mind blowing that these long-standing conjectures and open questions are just falling by the dozen every other week. What a time to be alive. |
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| ▲ | __MatrixMan__ an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Chasing open questions, it seems to me, is worthwhile for the things learned along the way. Do you expect these results will be helpful, or is it just a sign that we need a new way to navigate uncharted spaces now that longstanding problems don't stand long enough for us to organize around? It feels a bit like having "visited" a place because you had a layover there. |
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| ▲ | cman1444 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I hope it's more like discovering islands of information which we can use as footholds to connect the dots between them. | |
| ▲ | brap 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | If knowing the answer is not valuable then asking the question wasn’t valuable to begin with. We should remember that math exists primarily to serve a purpose and that purpose is not being a fun puzzle hobby for a select few mathematicians. Imagine a programmer telling their boss it’s not about working software it’s about the journey of writing the code. Good luck getting hired. I think if pro mathematicians don’t change their tune quickly they will soon see their funding approach zero. | | |
| ▲ | Kotlopou 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't understand this dialogue, which seems to repeat with every result of this sort. Of course this is interesting! And of course the answer tells us something! And of course we also want to understand where it came from! None of this is in contradiction! | |
| ▲ | unknownian 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you were a math grad student, would you rather your advisor be telling you to LLM maxx your ideas or working with you and giving you ideas on your thesis personally? I know my answer. |
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| ▲ | ChemSpider an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| How long until we see similar announcements for (wet lab) chemistry, medicine or material science? Months? Years? Never? (Never would mean AI will be used in future labs like a fancy calculator, but not much more changes) |
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| ▲ | Routine8502 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I'll give you an example from my field (nuclear fusion). I have a small team working on an idea which I think would really advance the field. Our initial concept paper was published in 2019. Progress on it has been slow because we don't have enough manufacturing capabilities, budget, or time on the facility. Will AI solve that? Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty bullish on AI, and it's been phenomenally useful so far (I definitely feel like a 10x physicist in the last 6 months), but I don't see a swarm of agents putting fusion energy on the grid tomorrow. Also, fwiw I have a personal test problem I give to every frontier model on release, which is to ask it to final a realatively obvious solution (in hindsight) to a minorly important open problem in my field. I know the answer, but havent gotten around to writing it up yet (it's really not that important). Every frontier model (so far) just regurgitates existing solutions. | | |
| ▲ | szvsw 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | How much effort do you put into prompting it? Are you asking it one shot with a simple prompt? Are you giving it to multiple agents and giving them a workspace to collaborate in? You might give it to a trusted colleague who does not know the solution along with an agreement to jointly publish, ask them to go through the process of solving it with agentic support, and then compare your solutions. Edit: to be clear, I completely believe your experience - just pointing out that it might be interesting for you to actually “try” to solve it thoroughly with the tools, though it is obviously hard to do that in a fair way when you know the solution. | |
| ▲ | marshray 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Definitely. It will let some smooth-talker with a vibe-coded website raise billions for "Nuclear Fusion AI". Then they can use AI to squeeze your team with lawsuits until you agree to sell cheap, and maybe keep you on as an employee to build it. |
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| ▲ | dannykwells 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well you can’t verify a prediction about human biology without a phase 3 clinical trial so… |
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