alt Hacker NewsAI Boosters: AIs are just getting better at everything and so their broad capacity can be defined as "intelligence".
Also AI Boosters: These entities are too intelligent to explain what they are doing to people...
I mean, Terry Tao actually used ChatGPT to explain one of the earlier OpenAI results. Humans working with AI can explain this stuff. If nothing else, OpenAI could be releasing things at the rate that it can get human mathematicians to explain the results. Which is to say, "yes, I can blame them", I don't expect them to behave differently but I can certainly blame them.
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To Archetypal Aunt Tillie, perhaps programmers already looked like some sort of priest trying to rationalize and convey the ineffable decisions of the fickle computer spirit... but I really hope that the job doesn't start looking like that from the inside too.
It'd be some sort of... epistemic step backwards by civilization.
If humans with the background to understand the proof can get the AI to satisfactorily explain itself, then OpenAI doesn't need to publish explanations or release things at a rate that a human can explain. They have an interactive explainer that you can just ask!
It's still of course useful to have some of this distilled understanding be written down, just like I had it generate high level descriptions of our code at work so it doesn't have to rediscover everything every time, but that's more of a cache/optimization.