alt Hacker News> When OpenAI posted about their 10 breakthroughs, I saw lots of career research mathematicians say things mostly along the lines of “I don’t understand any of this it’s way over my head”.
Math is an incredibly broad field. I mean, you don't expect a traffic engineer to understand anything about nuclear reactors, do you? Yet, they are all 'career engineers'.
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lstodd • today at 2:39 PM
I would expect anyone calling themselves an engineer of any field to understand basics of fission power generation. Come on, it's 7th (school) grade material.
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No. Mathematicians who considered themselves experts on exactly those conjectures were bewildered.
>And then -- the kicker -- something that I personally spent a couple years on in grad school, leading to some of my proudest work: quantum parallel repetition theorems
...
>Is there some broader context or theory within which this would've been the obvious thing to do? What other results can be proven using these techniques? What is it telling us about quantum information or operator theory? I have no idea
https://bsky.app/profile/henryyuen.bsky.social/post/3ms2jpch...
That guy has been featured in quantamag too, btw
I saw another expert on Ehrhart express their bafflement (but I can't find that link now)
PP (actually the "broad career mathematicians" themselves) were being slightly disingenuous... But the specific domain experts seem to be understating how much over their head it actually was. We're in totally unknown territory here..
we can however be optimistic, oddly. If you believe Feynman when he says that you can't explain to a child something you don't understand.. then we can see that ChatGPT has no idea of just what it has done!
(Steel Manning:
1. maybe any chatbot would need 1000x more tokens than were used to arrive at the result to understand it to its own satisfaction.
2. It's possible that Einstein did not fully understand General Relativity